Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

them in Berlin. He had evidently by this time heard of the Gestapo directive. ‘The Fuhrer has ordered,’ he noted, ‘that 20–30,000 Jews are immediately to be arrested.’ In fact, it had been a Gestapo order with no reference in it to a directive of the Fuhrer. Clearly, however, though he had instigated the pogrom, Goebbels took it that the key decisions came from Hitler.⁶⁵ Goebbels went on: ‘That will go down (Das wird ziehen). They should see that our patience is exhausted.’ He went with Julius Schaub, Hitler’s general factotum, into the Artists’ Club to wait for further news. Schaub was in fine form. ‘His old Sto?trupp past has been revived,’ commented Goebbels. He went back to his hotel. He could hear the noise of shattering glass from smashed shop windows. ‘Bravo, bravo,’ he wrote. After a few hours snatched sleep, he added: ‘The dear Jews will think about it in future before they shoot down German diplomats like that. And that was the meaning of the exercise.’⁶⁶

All morning new reports of the destruction poured in. Goebbels assessed the situation with Hitler. ‘I weigh up our current measures with the Fuhrer. Allow to strike further or stop. That’s now the question.’⁶⁷ In the light of the mounting criticism of the ‘action’, also — though naturally not for humanitarian reasons — from within the top ranks of the Nazi leadership, the decision was taken to halt it.⁶⁸ Goebbels prepared a decree to end the destruction, cynically commenting that if it were allowed to continue there was the danger ‘that the mob would start to appear’.⁶⁹ He reported to Hitler, who was, Goebbels claimed, ‘in agreement with everything. His opinions are very radical and aggressive.’ ‘With minor alterations, the Fuhrer approves my edict on the end of the actions… The Fuhrer wants to move to very severe measures against the Jews. They must get their businesses in order themselves. Insurance will pay them nothing. Then the Fuhrer wants gradually to expropriate the Jewish businesses.’⁷⁰

By that time, the night of horror for Germany’s Jews had brought the demolition of around 100 synagogues, the burning of several hundred others, the destruction of at least 8,000 Jews’ shops and vandalizing of countless apartments. The pavements of the big cities were strewn with shards of glass from the display windows of Jewish- owned stores; merchandise, if not looted, had been hurled on to the streets. Private apartments were wrecked, furniture demolished, mirrors and pictures smashed, clothing shredded, treasured possessions wantonly trashed. ⁷¹ The material damage was estimated soon afterwards by Heydrich at several hundred million Marks.⁷²

The human misery of the victims was incalculable. Beatings and bestial maltreatment, even of women, children, and the elderly, were commonplace. A hundred or so Jews were murdered. One woman in Innsbruck told despairingly on 10 November of how a troop of young men had broken into the apartment she shared with her husband and four-year-old daughter. They knew none of their assailants. ‘What do you want of me?’ her husband had asked. He received no answer. Ten minutes later she found him stabbed to death. The Jewish Community was allowed only to enter, as cause of death, ‘wound in the chest’ (Brustverletzung).⁷³ It was little wonder that suicide was commonplace that terrible night. Some tried, but did not manage, to kill themselves. One Jewish doctor in Vienna, held back from throwing himself from a third-storey window, slit his wrists and throat, but could still not end his own life, and was hauled off to a psychiatric clinic.⁷⁴ Many more succumbed to brutalities in the weeks following the pogrom in the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where the 30,000 male Jews rounded up by the police had been sent as a means of forcing their emigration.⁷⁵ Hans Berger, a forty-year-old from Wiesbaden, was one of those taken into custody by the Gestapo on 10 November. Like those arrested with him, he was subjected to indescribable sadism and torture by the camp-guards in Buchenwald, where he was interned. To maximize the humiliation, the prisoners — many suffering from chronic diarrhoea — were left to stand in their own excrement. It was as if the dirt and stench were to emphasize the separation of the Jews from the ‘healthy’, ‘clean’, and ‘wholesome’ German ‘national community’.⁷⁶ Three weeks of hell on earth were finally over for Herr Berger when he was eventually released to emigrate to Brussels, and from there to southern France. He, his wife, and two sons, were presumed to be among those later deported to the death camps.⁷⁷

The scale and nature of the savagery, and the apparent aim of maximizing degradation and humiliation, reflected the success of propaganda in demonizing the figure of the Jew — certainly within the organizations of the Party itself — and massively enhanced the process, under way since Hitler’s takeover of power, of dehumanizing Jews and excluding them from German society — a vital step on the way to genocide.⁷⁸

The propaganda line of a spontaneous expression of anger by the people was, however, believed by no one. ‘The public knows to the last man,’ the Party’s own court later admitted, ‘that political actions like that of 9 November are organized and carried out by the party, whether this is admitted or not. If all the synagogues burn down in a single night, that has somehow to be organized, and can only be organized by the party.’⁷⁹

Ordinary citizens, affected by the climate of hatred and propaganda appealing to base instincts, motivated too by sheer material envy and greed, nevertheless followed the Party’s lead in many places and joined in the destruction and looting of Jewish property. Sometimes individuals regarded as the pillars of their communities were involved. In Dusseldorf, for example, doctors from a local hospital were said to have taken part in the violence; in the Lower Franconian village of Gaukonigshofen, well-respected farmers smashed the Torah shrine, hurled the Torah Rolls and other sacred objects into the flames enveloping the synagogue, and came with wash-baskets to carry away wine and foodstuffs from Jewish homes.⁸⁰ Schoolchildren and adolescents were frequently ready next day to add their taunts, jibes, and insults to Jews being rounded up by the police, who were often subjected to baying, howling mobs hurling stones at them as they were taken into custody.⁸¹ Many young Germans had been fanaticized and inured to the brutality by their years of indoctrination in the Hitler Youth. The BDM functionary Melita Maschmann, for instance, told herself that the Jews were the enemies of the new Germany and had now learnt what that meant. World Jewry had to see what had happened as a warning. If they sowed hatred against Germany, they had to realize ‘that hostages of their people found themselves in our hands’.⁸²

At the same time, there is no doubt that many ordinary people were appalled at what met them when they emerged on the morning of 10 November. ‘All reports agree,’ summarized the Sopade — the exiled Social Democratic Party’s leadership — in its verdict on the events of ‘Crystal Night’, ‘that the outrages are strongly condemned by the great majority of the German people.’⁸³ A mixture of motives operated. Some, certainly, felt human revulsion at the behaviour of the Nazi hordes and sympathy for the Jews, even to the extent of offering them material help and comfort. Jews who managed to flee to safety told in later months of how ‘Christian neighbours’ in Schweinfurt had brought them milk and bedding. In Burgsinn, also in Lower Franconia, Jews were given money, fresh clothing, bread, and other foodstuffs by local inhabitants. Jews from other neighbourhoods had similar stories to tell.⁸⁴ Not all motives for the condemnation were as noble. Often, it was the shame inflicted by ‘hooligans’ on Germany’s standing as a ‘nation of culture’ which rankled. ‘One could weep, one must be ashamed to be a German, part of an aryan noble people (Edelvolk), a civilized nation guilty of such a cultural disgrace,’ wrote one Nazi sympathizer in an anonymous letter to Goebbels.⁸⁵ Most commonly of all, there was enormous resentment at the unrestrained destruction of material goods at a time when people were told that every little that was saved contributed to the efforts of the Four-Year Plan. ‘On the one hand we have to collect silver paper and empty toothpaste tubes, and on the other hand millions of Marks’ worth of damage is caused deliberately,’ ran one such bitter complaint.⁸⁶

III

By the morning of 10 November, anger was also rising among leading Nazis responsible for the economy about the material damage which had taken place. Walther Funk, who had replaced Schacht as Economics Minister early in the year, complained directly to Goebbels, but was told, to placate him, that Hitler would soon give Goring an order to exclude the Jews from the economy.⁸⁷ Goring himself, who had been in a sleeping- compartment of a train heading from Munich to Berlin as the night of violence had unfolded, was furious when he found out what had happened. His own credibility as economics supremo was at stake. He had exhorted the people, so he told Hitler, to collect discarded toothpaste tubes, rusty nails, and every bit of cast-out material. And now, valuable property had been recklessly destroyed.⁸⁸