Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

II

Grynszpan had meant to kill the Ambassador. Vom Rath just happened to be the first official he saw. The shooting was an act of despair and revenge for his own miserable existence and for the deportation of his family at the end of October from Hanover — simply deposited, along with a further 18,000 Polish Jews, over the borders with Poland.⁴² Two and a half years earlier, when the Jewish medical student David Frankfurter had killed the Nazi leader in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff, in Davos, circumstances had demanded that the lid be kept firmly on any wild response by Party fanatics in Germany. In the menacing climate of autumn 1938, the situation could scarcely have been more different. Now, the Nazi hordes were to be positively encouraged to turn their wrath on the Jews. The death of vom Rath — he succumbed to his wounds on the afternoon of 9 November — happened, moreover, to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s attempted putsch of 1923. All over Germany, Party members were meeting to celebrate one of the legendary events of the ‘time of struggle’. The annual commemoration marked a high point in the Nazi calendar. In Munich, as usual, the Party bigwigs were gathering.

On the morning following the fateful shooting, the Nazi press, under Goebbels’s orchestration, had been awash with torrents of vicious attacks on the Jews, guaranteed to incite violence.⁴³ Sure enough, that evening, 8 November, pogroms — involving the burning of synagogues, destruction of Jewish property, plundering of goods, and maltreatment of individual Jews — were instigated in a number of parts of the country through the agitation of local Party leaders without any directives from on high. Usually, the local leaders involved were radical antisemites in areas, such as Hessen, with lengthy traditions of antisemitism.⁴⁴ Goebbels noted the disturbances with satisfaction in his diary: ‘In Hessen big antisemitic demonstrations. The synagogues are burnt down. If only the anger of the people could now be let loose!’⁴⁵ The following day, he referred to the ‘demonstrations’, burning of synagogues, and demolition of shops in Kassel and Dessau.⁴⁶ During the afternoon, news of vom Rath’s death came through. ‘Now that’s done it (Nun aber ist es g[ar]),’ remarked Goebbels.⁴⁷

The party’s ‘old guard’ were meeting that evening in the Old Town Hall in Munich. Hitler, too, was present. On the way there, with Goebbels, he had been told of disturbances against Jews in Munich, but favoured the police taking a lenient line.⁴⁸ He could scarcely have avoided being well aware of the anti-Jewish actions in Hessen and elsewhere, as well as the incitements of the press. It was impossible to ignore the fact that, among Party radicals, antisemitic tension was running high. But Hitler had given no indication, despite vom Rath’s perilous condition at the time and the menacing antisemitic climate, of any intended action when he had spoken to the ‘old guard’ of the Party in his traditional speech at the Burgerbraukeller the previous evening.⁴⁹ By the time the Party leaders gathered for the reception on the 9th, Hitler was aware of vom Rath’s death. With his own doctor, Karl Brandt, dispatched to the bedside, Hitler had doubtless been kept well informed of the Legation Secretary’s deteriorating condition and had heard of his demise at the latest by 7 o’clock that evening — in all probability by telephone some hours earlier.⁵⁰ According to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, he had already been given the news — which he had received without overt reaction — that afternoon while he was engaged in discussions on military matters in his Munich apartment.⁵¹

Goebbels and Hitler were seen to confer in agitated fashion during the reception, though their conversation could not be overheard. Hitler left shortly afterwards, earlier than usual and without his customary exchanges with those present, to return to his Munich apartment. Around 10p.m. Goebbels delivered a brief but highly inflammatory speech, reporting the death of vom Rath, pointing out that there had already been ‘retaliatory’ action against the Jews in Kurhessen and Magdeburg-Anhalt. He made it abundantly plain without explicitly saying so that the Party should organize and carry out ‘demonstrations’ against the Jews throughout the country, though make it appear that they were expressions of spontaneous popular anger.⁵²

Goebbels’s diary entry leaves no doubt of the content of his discussion with Hitler. ‘I go to the party reception in the Old Town Hall. Huge amount going on (Riesenbetrieb). I explain the matter to the Fuhrer. He decides: let the demonstrations continue. Pull back the police. The Jews should for once get to feel the anger of the people. That’s right. I immediately give corresponding directives to police and party. Then I speak for a short time in that vein to the party leadership. Storms of applause. All tear straight off to the telephone. Now the people will act.’⁵³

Goebbels certainly did his best to make sure ‘the people’ acted. He put out detailed instructions of what had and had not to be done. He fired up the mood where there was hesitancy.⁵⁴ Immediately after he had spoken, the Sto?trupp Hitler, an ‘assault squad’ whose traditions reached back to the heady days of pre-putsch beerhouse brawls and bore the Fuhrer’s name, was launched to wreak havoc on the streets of Munich. Almost immediately they demolished the old synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Stra?e, left standing after the main synagogue had been destroyed in the summer. Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria (who as Bavarian Minister of Interior was supposedly responsible for order in the province), himself no moderate in the ‘Jewish Question’, got cold feet. But Goebbels pushed him into line. The ‘capital city of the Movement’ of all places was not going to be spared what was happening already all over Germany. Goebbels then gave direct telephone instructions to Berlin to demolish the synagogue in Fasanenstra?e, off the Kurfurstendamm.⁵⁵

The top leadership of the police and SS, also gathered in Munich but not present when Goebbels had given his speech, learnt of the ‘action’ only once it had started. Heydrich, at the time in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, was informed by the Munich Gestapo Office around 11.20p.m., after the first orders had already gone out to the Party and SA. He immediately sought Himmler’s directives on how the police should respond. The Reichsfuhrer-SS was contacted in Hitler’s Munich apartment.⁵⁶ He asked what orders Hitler had for him. Hitler replied — most likely at Himmler’s prompting — that he wanted the SS to keep out of the ‘action’.⁵⁷ Disorder and uncontrolled violence and destruction were not the SS’s style. Himmler and Heydrich preferred the ‘rational’, systematic approach to the ‘Jewish Question’. Soon after midnight orders went out that any SS men participating in the ‘demonstrations’ were to do so only in civilian clothing.⁵⁸ At 1.20a.m. Heydrich telexed all police chiefs instructing the police not to obstruct the destruction of the synagogues and to arrest as many male Jews, especially wealthy ones, as available prison accommodation could take.⁵⁹ The figure of 20–30,000 Jews had already been mentioned in a Gestapo directive sent out before midnight.⁶⁰

Meanwhile, across the Reich, Party activists — especially SA men — were suddenly summoned by their local leaders and told to burn down synagogues or were turned loose on other Jewish property.⁶¹ Many of those involved had been celebrating at their own commemoration of the Beerhall Putsch, and some were the worse for wear from drink. The ‘action’ was usually improvised on the spot. The dozen or so men from the SA-Reserve in Marburg, still drinking solidly when they were told, to their surprise, by their Standartenfuhrer that they were to burn down the synagogue that night, could not find anything with which to set the building alight until someone had the idea that there were four large canisters of oil in the nearby theatre.⁶² In Tubingen, three Party members making their unsteady way home in the early hours were picked up en route by a car containing the District Leader. He told them that he had received a telegram from the Gauleiter in Stuttgart that all the synagogues in the Reich were to be set on fire. They returned with him to their Party headquarters to look for incendiary material. When they arrived at the synagogue, they found it already vandalized. A group of eight SA and SS men had broken in around midnight, smashing the windows and door, and had carried off some of the contents and hurled them in the river Neckar. Only with difficulty, and with the help of a rotting wreath of oak- leaves and some floor-polish, could the Party members get the synagogue to catch fire. Eventually they managed it. The fire-brigade saw to it that the nearby houses were protected. By morning, the synagogue was a burnt-out shell.⁶³ The pattern, more or less, repeated itself all over Germany.

At midnight, at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich where the attempted putsch in 1923 had met its end, Goebbels had witnessed the swearing-in of the SS to Hitler. The Propaganda Minister was ready to return to his hotel when he saw the sky red from the fire of the burning synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Stra?e.⁶⁴ Back he went to Gau headquarters. Instructions were given out that the fire brigade should extinguish only what was necessary to protect nearby buildings. Otherwise they were to let the synagogue burn down. ‘The Sto?trupp is doing dreadful damage,’ he commented. Reports came in to him of seventy-five synagogues on fire throughout the Reich, fifteen of