Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (11 page)

Austrians separated themselves from their fellow citizens and the disappearing state not only by their behavior and by their expressions, but also by their lapel pins—like the pavement propaganda, another example of Austrian political culture. Not only Nazis but also people who had been Social Democrats or Christian Socials before March 11 began to wear Nazi lapel pins. Standing by during the “scrubbing parties” was thus by no means a neutral position or a simple act of observation. The very act of spectating communicated the new group boundaries and assigned blame for the past. We watch, they perform. The Jews were responsible for Austria, for that old order, not us. Their punishment now is proof of their complicity then. Our separation is proof of our innocence. Thus responsibility was perfectly excised, in perfect bad faith. In an instant, violence organized by race replaced two decades of political experience.

The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus had written in 1922 that Austria was a laboratory for the end of the world. It now became a realm of experimentation for the Germans, with some surprising lessons. One Viennese Jew recalled that “Austrians became antisemites all of a sudden and taught the Germans how to treat Jews.” There had been no Austrian Nuremberg Laws, no restrictions of Jews in public life, no exclusion of Jews from society. Until the day of Schuschnigg’s address, Jews had been equal citizens. Jews had an important role in the economy, and some had performed important functions in the regime. The end of the Austrian state brought violence against Austrian Jews in five weeks that was comparable to the suffering that German Jews had endured under Hitler over the course of five years. The organizers in Austria were usually Nazis, but they were operating in conditions of state collapse that allowed their revolution to proceed further and faster. Ironically, the SA, which had been humiliated in Germany in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, did make something like the “second revolution” its murdered leaders had wanted—only in Austria rather than Germany.

What Austrian Nazis managed to achieve in a matter of hours and days was indeed an unexpected inspiration for German Nazis. Hitler himself was pleased and surprised by the immediate support for annexation. On the
Heldenplatz
, the grand square beneath the royal castle in Vienna, Hitler proclaimed the
Anschluss
. This was on March 15, four days after Schuschnigg’s capitulation. Along with Hitler came the Nazi leaders who exploited the anarchy created by the SA and turned it to their own purposes. On March 28, Hermann Göring required an orderly redistribution of stolen Jewish property. Some four-fifths of Jewish businesses in Austria were aryanized by the end of 1938, far surpassing the pace in Germany itself. In August, Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish section of Reinhard Heydrich’s SD, established in Vienna a Central Office for Jewish Emigration.

In 1938, some sixty thousand Jews left Austria, as compared to some forty thousand who left Germany. And most of those German Jews emigrated after Nazis applied the lessons that had been learned in Vienna.

In 1935, German Jews had been reduced to second-class citizens. In 1938, some Nazis discovered that the most effective way to separate Jews from the protection of the state was to destroy the state. Any legal discrimination would be complicated by its unforeseen consequences for other aspects of the law and in bureaucratic practice. Even matters that might seem simple, such as expropriation and emigration, proceeded rather slowly in Nazi Germany. When Austria was destroyed, by contrast, Austria’s Jews no longer enjoyed any state protection and were victimized by a majority that wished to distance itself from the past and align itself with the future. Statelessness opened a window of opportunity for those who were ready for violence and theft. By the very logic of
Anschluss
, the Nazi state itself had to close that window, since Austria was meant to become a part of Germany, and anarchy fomented by the SA would undo its own ability to rule. But even a moment of temporary statelessness had profound consequences. March 1938 was the first time that Nazis could do as they pleased with Jews, and the result was humiliation, pain, and flight.

Avraham Stern, the radical Zionist and client of the Polish regime, happened to be in central Europe at the time. He was visiting Warsaw for consultations with Polish authorities after a Revisionist Zionist congress in Prague in January 1938. On his way back from Poland to Palestine he stopped in Austria and spoke to the new Nazi authorities about the emigration of a few right-wing comrades to Palestine—one of the men he brought out believed that Stern had “negotiated with Eichmann.” This was the kind of thing that Polish authorities had been hoping that Stern could do, though on a far larger scale.

On March 15, 1938, the day of the
Anschluss
, Polish diplomats were preparing a pro-Zionist request to the Americans. They asked the U.S. Department of State to pressure the British Foreign Office to open Palestine to Jewish migrants from Europe. In general the Poles urged American diplomats to support an independent Israel with the most expansive possible boundaries. The timing was no coincidence. The major consequence of
Anschluss
was exactly the opposite of what the Polish leadership desired. German policy and Polish policy both aimed to extrude Jews; now an enlarged Germany was dispatching Jews to Poland. Some twenty thousand of the Jews in Austria were Polish citizens, many of whom claimed and received the right to return to their country of origin. Since America and Palestine remained blocked (except to daredevils like Stern), Poland could expect ever more Jewish immigration as German power spread.

Polish diplomats worked unceasingly to open Palestine to Jewish settlement, but were in no position to force that issue. German repressions of Jews had led Britain not to soften but to harden its line on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Polish foreign ministry asked the Polish parliament after the
Anschluss
for the right to review the documentation of all citizens who had resided abroad for longer than five years. This was granted on March 31, 1938. Although the law and most of the internal bureaucratic correspondence avoided the word “Jew,” the purpose of the new policy was clear: to block the next wave of returning Polish Jews. As Drymmer himself put it, the goal was “excluding the unworthy and above all disposing of the destructive element,” by which he certainly meant Jews. This was a qualitative change in Polish citizenship policy, occasioned by the pressure of
Anschluss
and immigration limits in Palestine and the United States, and inspired by German examples. Until 1938, Polish diplomats, whatever their personal feelings, had intervened on behalf of all Polish citizens, including Jews.

The Nazis understood the implications of the Polish initiative for the sixty thousand or so Jews of Polish citizenship residing in Germany in 1938. If these people lost their Polish citizenship while living in Germany, it would become very difficult to expel them later to Poland. Berlin asked Warsaw for a delay in the application of the Polish law, and the German coercive apparatus was mobilized for its greatest stroke thus far. With Himmler’s approval, Heydrich arranged for the forcible expulsion of some seventeen thousand Jews of Polish citizenship across the German-Polish border on the night of October 28. This was a shockingly massive exercise of coercion by the standards of the day. It was also the first major action of such a kind by the SS, whose capacity for violence expanded rapidly at the German border. The surprise deportation of Jews from Germany to Poland was a strange contrast to the words of Hitler, who was speaking just at this time to the Polish government about a common Jewish policy.

In European capitals in 1938, state destruction could appear to be something that happened to other people, perhaps even as a beneficial correction of the postwar order. Neither the western powers nor the Poles concerned themselves with the passing of Austria. The Jewish perspective was different: Jews could see the beginning of a general process of separation from European states, and began to sense that they had nowhere to go. In July 1938, representatives of thirty-two countries, led by the United States, discussed Jewish emigration at Évian-les-Bains in France. Only the Dominican Republic agreed to take any Jews. The various ways that Jews were separated from the state in Europe, meanwhile, began to interact and mutually reinforce. The German destruction of Austria brought Jews to Poland. Warsaw reacted by seeking to deny citizenship to Polish Jews living abroad. Berlin responded by expelling such people across the Polish border. By the standards of the time and place, this seemed to Jews like a catastrophe, above all to the individuals and families concerned. Very often these were people whose whole lives were in Germany and whose connections to Poland were quite limited.

The Grynszpan family, for example, had moved to Germany from the Russian Empire in 1911, seven years before Poland had regained independence. The children had been born in Germany, spoke German, and regarded themselves as Germans. They held Polish passports after 1918 because their parents hailed from a part of the Russian Empire that had become Poland. In 1935, the Grynszpans sent their son Herschel, then fifteen, to stay with an aunt and uncle in Paris. By 1938, his Polish passport and his German visa had both expired, and he had been denied legal residency in France. His aunt and uncle had to hide him in a garret so that he would not be expelled. On November 3, they showed him a postcard from his sister, mailed right after the family had been deported from Germany to Poland: “everything is finished for us.” The next day Herschel Grynszpan bought a gun, took the metro to the German embassy, asked to meet a German diplomat, and shot the one who agreed to see him. It was, as he confessed to the French police, an act of revenge for the suffering of his family and his people.

Some of the top Nazis saw an opportunity to move toward a Final Solution on the territory of Germany. With Hitler’s permission, Goebbels organized the coordinated attacks on Jewish property and synagogues on the night of November 9 that came to be known, as a result of all the broken glass, as
Kristallnacht
. The official pogroms were indeed a shattering experience for many German Jews. Some two hundred of them were killed or committed suicide. The deliberate violence in Germany itself in November 1938 was thus the closing of a circle that was opened with the destruction of the Austrian state. The
Anschluss
had led to the flight of Jews to Poland; this prompted new Polish restrictions on Jews living abroad; this led the Germans to expel Polish Jews; this caused an assassination in Paris that served as a pretext for organized violence in Germany. The
Kristallnacht
pogroms showed not only what the destruction of Austria had enabled, but also the limits of applying the violent side of the Austrian model
within Germany. In Austria, public violence was possible during the interval between the end of Austrian authority and the consolidation of German authority. Such an opening could not really be created in Germany. The German state was to be mutated but not destroyed.

With
Kristallnacht
, Goebbels did show that the Austrian model of expropriation and emigration could function in Germany. It was only after violence had actually been delivered on a national scale that German Jews began to leave their homeland in large numbers. Nevertheless, disorderly violence within the Reich itself was revealed to be a dead end. Most of German public opinion was opposed to the chaos. Visible despair led to expressions of sympathy with Jews, rather than the spiritual distancing that Nazis expected. Of course, it was possible for Germans not to wish to see violence inflicted upon Jews while at the same time not wishing to see Jews at all. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich immediately drew the conclusion that inspiring pogroms inside Germany had been a mistake. Not long after they would organize pogroms in much the same way as Goebbels had, but beyond the borders of Germany, in time of war, in places where German force had destroyed the state.

Hitler did nothing to defend Goebbels, whom he had unleashed in the first place, and said nothing in public about
Kristallnacht
. Three days after
Kristallnacht
, Göring said that Hitler would now approach the western powers with a Madagascar plan for the resettlement of Jews. Two weeks after
Kristallnacht
, Hitler was discussing the deportation of European Jews to Madagascar with confused Polish diplomats. The Poles could not understand how Germans could intend such a complicated logistical operation when all they seemed able to organize was chaos in Austria and Germany. Furthermore, in light of the consequences of previous German policy towards Jews, and in the context of the ongoing discussions of a “comprehensive solution” to the problems of German-Polish relations, the idea had a whiff of blackmail. More than thirty thousand Jews had been delivered by German policy to Poland thus far in 1938. If Poland agreed to improve relations with Germany on the terms proposed by Hitler, then Germany would stop sending Jews to Poland and instead cooperate in sending them somewhere else. The Jewish question had become a source of tension in German-Polish relations. German pressure was one reason Hitler’s idea of a comprehensive solution of German-Polish problems, with its promise of joint policy on Jewish matters, was unattractive.

In Warsaw in 1938, Hitler’s negotiating style, so effective in Vienna, had an effect opposite to what was intended.

Over the course of 1938, as Hitler was seeking, with success, to destroy the Austrian state, and working, without success, to recruit Poland as an ally, he was also trying to provoke a conflict over Czechoslovakia. The pretext was the status of the three million Czechoslovak citizens who identified themselves as Germans. In February 1938, as Hitler was threatening Austrian leaders, he also declared that the Germans of Czechoslovakia were under his personal protection. This had no legal meaning, but that was the point: States did not matter but races did; conventions did not matter but the personal decisions of the
Führer
did. When Austria fell in March 1938, the future of Czechoslovakia darkened.