Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Jews, still continued. ‘And the struggle against the Jews is the hardest,’ he noted. ‘It is to be hoped that the difficulty of this struggle is apparent everywhere.’¹⁰⁵

‘Crystal Night’ marked the final fling within Germany of ‘pogrom antisemitism’. Willing though he was to make use of the method, Hitler had emphasized as early as 1919 that it could provide no solution to the ‘Jewish Question’.¹⁰⁶ The massive material damage caused, the public relations disaster reflected in the almost universal condemnation in the international press, and to a lesser extent the criticism levelled at the ‘excesses’ (though not at the draconian anti-Jewish legislation that followed them) by broad sections of the German population ensured that the ploy of open violence had had its day. Its place was taken by something which turned out to be even more sinister: the handing-over of practical responsibility for a coordinated anti-Jewish policy to the ‘rational’ antisemites in the SS. On 24 January 1939, Goring established — based on the model which had functioned effectively in Vienna — a Central Office for Jewish Emigration under the aegis of the Chief of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich.¹⁰⁷ The policy was still forced emigration, now transformed into an all-out, accelerated drive to expel the Jews from Germany. But the transfer of overall responsibility to the SS nevertheless began a new phase of anti-Jewish policy. For the victims, it marked a decisive step on the way that was to end in the gas-chambers of the extermination camps. Heydrich was to refer back to this commission from Going when opening the Wannsee Conference, to coordinate extermination measures, in January 1942.¹⁰⁸

Hitler was directly involved in the shaping of anti-Jewish policy in the weeks following ‘Crystal Night’. On 5 December, Goring transmitted to the Gauleiter on his behalf directives on a variety of discriminatory measures relating, for instance, to the banning of Jewish access to hotels and restaurants, but allowing them to shop in ‘German’ stores. At the end of December, Goring again sought Hitler’s views on the restrictions to be placed on Jews, which he passed on to all Party and state offices. These were left as open to interpretation as possible, and were characteristically ill-defined. The radical suggestions put forward by Goebbels and Heydrich at the meeting on 12 November were neither taken up in full, nor completely rejected. Jews were to be banned from railway sleeping — and restaurant-cars, for example, but no special compartments for them were to be erected; they were still to be allowed to use public transport. Or, another example, rent protection for Jews was not to be abolished; but it was nonetheless desirable that they be concentrated in specific apartment blocks. Pensions were not to be taken away from dismissed Jewish civil servants. And a number of exceptions were also made for Mischlinge — those deemed to be of mixed Jewish and ‘Aryan’ descent. These were not signs of any ‘moderation’ or lack of radicalism on Hitler’s part. An indication of his own hard line was his communication to Reich Minister of the Interior Frick in December 1938 that he would no longer make use of the rights he had to exempt individuals from the provisions of the Nuremberg Laws. For the rest, he was prepared, as he had been following previous antisemitic waves in 1933 and 1935, to let the radicalization of anti-Jewish policy develop organically.¹⁰⁹

IV

The open brutality of the November Pogrom, the round-up and incarceration of some 30,000 Jews that followed it, and the draconian measures to force Jews out of the economy had, Goebbels’s diary entries make plain, all been explicitly approved by Hitler even if the initiatives had come from others, above all from the Propaganda Minister himself.

To those who saw him late on the evening of 9 November, Hitler had appeared to be shocked and angry at the reports reaching him of what was happening.¹¹⁰ Himmler, highly critical of Goebbels, was given the impression that Hitler was surprised by what he was hearing when Himmler’s chief adjutant Karl Wolff informed them of the burning of the Munich synagogue just before 11.30 that evening.¹¹¹ Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, who saw him immediately on his return to his apartment from the ‘Old Town Hall’, was convinced that there was no dissembling in his apparent anger and condemnation of the destruction.¹¹² Speer was told by a seemingly regretful and somewhat embarrassed Hitler that he had not wanted the ‘excesses’. Speer thought Goebbels had probably pushed him into it.¹¹³ Rosenberg, a few weeks after the events, was convinced that Goebbels, whom he utterly detested, had ‘on the basis of a general decree (Anordnung) of the Fuhrer ordered the action as it were in his name’.¹¹⁴ Military leaders, equally ready to pin the blame on ‘that swine Goebbels’, heard from Hitler that the ‘action’ had taken place without his knowledge and that one of his Gauleiter had run out of control.¹¹⁵

Was Hitler genuinely taken aback by the scale of the ‘action’, for which he had himself given the green light that very evening? The agitated discussion with Goebbels in the Old Town Hall, like many other instances of blanket verbal authorization given in the unstructured and non-formalized style of reaching decisions in the Third Reich, probably left precise intentions open to interpretation. And certainly, in the course of the night, the welter of criticism from Goring, Himmler, and other leading Nazis made it evident that the ‘action’ had got out of hand, become counter-productive, and had to be stopped — mainly on account of the material damage it had caused.

But when he consented to Goebbels’s suggestion to ‘let the demonstrations continue’, Hitler knew full well from the accounts from Hessen what the ‘demonstrations’ amounted to.¹¹⁶ It took no imagination at all to foresee what would happen if active encouragement were given for a free-for-all against the Jews throughout the Reich. If Hitler had not intended the ‘demonstrations’ he had approved to take such a course, what, exactly, had he intended? Even on the way to the Old Town Hall, it seems, he had spoken against tough police action against anti-Jewish vandals in Munich.¹¹⁷ The traditional Sto?trupp Hitler, bearing his own name, had been unleashed on Jewish property in Munich as soon as Goebbels had finished speaking. One of his closest underlings, Julius Schaub, had been in the thick of things with Goebbels, behaving like the Sto?trupp fighter of old. During the days that followed, Hitler took care to remain equivocal. He did not praise Goebbels, or what had happened. But nor did he openly, even to his close circle, let alone in public, condemn him outright or categorically dissociate himself from the unpopular Propaganda Minister. Indeed, within a week Hitler was seen again in Goebbels’s presence at a performance of Kabale und Liebe (‘Intrigue and Love’) at the opening of the Schiller Theatre, and stayed that night at the Goebbels’ villa at Schwanenwerder. On that occasion, too, he ‘spoke harshly about the Jews’. Goebbels had the feeling that his own policy against the Jews met with Hitler’s full approval.¹¹⁸

None of this has the ring of actions being taken against Hitler’s will, or in opposition to his intentions.¹¹⁹ Rather, it seems to point, as Speer presumed, to Hitler’s embarrassment when it became clear to him that the action he had approved was meeting with little but condemnation even in the highest circles of the regime. If Goebbels himself could feign anger at the burning of synagogues whose destruction he had himself directly incited, and even ordered, Hitler was certainly capable of such cynicism.¹²⁰ What anger Hitler harboured was purely at an ‘action’ that threatened to engulf him in the unpopularity he had failed to predict. Disbelieving that the Fuhrer could have been responsible, his subordinate leaders were all happy to be deceived. They preferred the easier target of Goebbels, who had played the more visible role. From that night on, it was as if Hitler wanted to draw a veil over the whole business. At his speech in Munich to press representatives on the following evening, 10 November, he made not the slightest mention of the onslaught against the Jews.¹²¹ Even in his ‘inner circle’, he never referred to ‘Reichskristallnacht’ during the rest of his days.¹²² But although he had publicly distanced himself from what had taken place, Hitler had in fact favoured the most extreme steps at every juncture.

The signs are that ‘Crystal Night’ had a profound impact upon Hitler. For at least two decades, probably longer, he had harboured feelings which fused fear and loathing into a pathological view of Jews as the incarnation of evil threatening German survival. Alongside the pragmatic reasons why Hitler agreed with Goebbels that the time was opportune to unleash the fury of the Nazi Movement against Jews ran the deeply embedded ideological urge to destroy what he saw as Germany’s most implacable enemy, responsible in his mind for the war and its most tragic and damaging consequence for the Reich, the November Revolution. This demonization of the Jew and fear of the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ was part of a world-view that saw the random and despairing act of Herschel Grynszpan as part of a plot to destroy the mighty German Reich. Hitler had by that time spent months at the epicentre of an international crisis that had brought Europe to the very brink of a new war. In the context of continuing crisis in