Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (123 page)

On the morning of 10 November, Goebbels conferred with Hitler about how to proceed. “To keep going or put a stop to it?” he noted. “That’s the question now.” The two men agreed to halt the “operation,” at least temporarily. “If we allow it to continue, there is the danger of a mob forming,” Goebbels wrote, explaining their decision.
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On Hitler’s order, he wrote a text “strictly calling upon” the German populace to “desist from all further demonstrations and acts of retribution in any form against Jewry.” Goebbels promised: “Jewry will be given the ultimate answer to the Jewish assassination in Paris in the form of legislation and ordinances.”
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Hitler approved the text that noon in Osteria Bavaria.
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The message was broadcast in the afternoon on German radio and was published on the front pages of newspapers the following day. Simultaneously, Goebbels ordered the press to be judicious in reporting the pogrom. German newspapers were not to run front-page headlines or pictures of the events.
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That evening, in a speech to press representatives in the new “Führer Building” on Königsplatz, Hitler did not mention the events of the previous night at all. On 17 November, he took part in a memorial ceremony for Ernst von Rath in Düsseldorf, but unlike at Wilhelm Gustloff’s funeral two and a half years previously, he chose not to speak. This was intended to maintain the illusion that he had had nothing to do with the pogrom.
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A report published by the Jewish division of the Reich Security Main Office on 7 December 1938 put the number of Jews killed at thirty-six. The figure was later revised upwards to ninety-one. In fact, the number was considerably higher, if suicides and those who died in or en route to concentration camps are included. More than 1,000 synagogues and prayer rooms were set on fire, and 7,000–7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked and plundered. The damage done in the violence was estimated at around 50 million reichsmarks.
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Even worse than the material damage was the humiliation and harassment Jews suffered. Just as in Vienna the previous March and April, Jews were subject to an “explosion of sadism.”
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They were forced to kneel in front of synagogues and sing religious songs, dance or prostrate themselves and kiss the ground, while SA men punched and kicked them. In many places, Jewish men were herded through the streets in broad daylight before being taken away to concentration camps amidst jeers and insults from local officials, SA and SS men and Hitler Youths. Large crowds usually watched the demeaning spectacle. “They stood packed together and watched us pass,” a Jewish department store owner from the city of Hanau recalled. “Hardly anyone said anything, and only a few people laughed. You could see pity and horror in many people’s faces.”
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In total more than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, where they were subjected to horrific mistreatment by SS guards. As soon as they arrived, kicks and blows rained down upon them. Many were forced to run to the point of exhaustion around camp grounds or to stand at attention for hours in the November cold, without being allowed to move. “It was a chain of endless physical and emotional suffering,” one of the misfortunates wrote about the reality of Buchenwald.

The first days were the worst. They deprived us of water. Water was scarce to begin with, and they did not give us any at all. Your mouth completely dried out, your throat burned and your tongue literally stuck to your gums. When they handed out bread on the third day, I could not choke it down because I did not have any saliva in my mouth. Nights were terrible. People became hysterical and broke down. One man screamed that people were trying to kill him. Another gave a kind of sermon. A third babbled something about waves of electricity. There was screaming, crying, praying, cursing, coughing, dust, filth and a horrible stench. It was as if all hell had broken loose.
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Most of the detainees were released after a few weeks if they promised to immediately begin making plans to leave Germany. They also had to promise not to tell anyone about what they had experienced in the camps. But much of the truth seeped out. “The terrified hints and fragments of stories from Buchenwald are horrific,” Victor Klemperer noted in early December 1938. “Despite the gagging order, people say that you won’t return from that place a second time—ten to twenty people die there every day anyway.”
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The night of 9–10 November 1938 was a complete shock for Jews still living in Germany. “In terms of suffering, privation, humiliation and terror, nothing that had happened previously could compare with this night,” recalled Hugo Moses, a former Oppenheim Bank employee.
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All of a sudden the pogrom had made Jews realise that they were without legal protection of any kind. They could be beaten, robbed and killed without the custodians of law and order lifting a finger or the perpetrators being threatened with any form of punishment. A line had been crossed: Germany had left the community of civilised nations. “We’ll never again return to this country if we get out alive,” the Berlin doctor Hertha Nathorff wrote in her diary one week after Kristallnacht.
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Although the Nazi Party press never ceased depicting the pogrom as a spontaneous expression of popular outrage, it was clear to everybody that this was a fictional narrative. Given the fact that the violence had obviously been organised, a state police office in Bielefeld concluded in late November 1938, the constant repetition of the propaganda version of events was “almost laughable.”
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In its report in November, the Reich Security Main Office also stated: “The people who carried out the operation generally were the party’s political organisers, members of the SA and the SS, and individual members of the Hitler Youth.”
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Foreign observers saw the participation of young people as a particularly bad sign. It revealed “the moral demise of the young generation of Germans who are capable of all sorts of attacks and violence if ordered to carry them out by the party,” the Polish consul general in Leipzig reported.
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In some places, ordinary citizens had joined in with the SA troups, encouraging the perpetrators of violence and sometimes getting directly involved. But in general, the Security Service observed that “the civilian population was only very slightly involved in the operation.”
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So what did the German people think about the pogrom of November 1938? Did they approve of or reject what had happened? It is difficult to arrive at a clear answer since there was no public sphere in Germany in which people could freely articulate their opinions and attitudes. “If we could only find out who was for it and who was against it!” Ruth Andreas-Friedrich wrote after witnessing a silent crowd looking at the smouldering ruins of the synagogue in Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse on 10 November.
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On 14 November, the Argentinian ambassador to Germany reported: “It cannot be determined what people’s inner feelings about the events were since it is publicly known that the regime does not permit or tolerate criticism of the actions of party members and those working for them.”
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Publicly announcing one’s disgust would have been risky since there were enough people in the general populace whose loyalty to the regime made them only too happy to turn others in to the Gestapo.
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On 12 November, the Italian consul general in Innsbruck wrote that the population was “deeply outraged” at the pogrom, but was “very cautious about voicing opinions since word has it that three Aryans were taken off to the Dachau concentration camp at night for openly expressing their disapproval.”
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Drawing on information gathered throughout the Reich, the SPD-in-exile reports concluded that the “excesses were strongly condemned by the vast majority of the German people.”
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But of course the information collected by people trusted by the SPD tended to come from former Social Democratic circles and probably only reflected the views of part of the populace. Still, foreign observers like the American consul general in Stuttgart, Samuel W. Honacker, also found that around 80 per cent of Germans disagreed with the violent operation while only 20 per cent had expressed satisfaction with it.
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Even reports made by local officials, mayors and Gestapo offices spoke of “widespread disagreement” with the “operation” of 9–10 November and of a “generally quite unpropitious” effect on the popular mood. Even party members had rejected it, although they were “extraordinarily careful with their criticism lest they be branded Jew-lovers.”
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Given all of these indications, it is fairly safe to say that the majority of the German populace reacted negatively to the Kristallnacht pogrom, although their public rejection of the violence was largely based not on empathy with the Jews but rather on their dismay at the destruction of valuable commodities. “On the one hand, we save toothpaste tubes and tin cans,” complained an NSDAP member from the city of Duisburg, “and on the other houses are destroyed, and windows are smashed.”
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Significantly, Hitler as the main instigator again remained exempt from criticism. Various reports registered remarks such as “The Führer surely did not intend this.”
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The dictator’s strategy of passing himself off as the disengaged statesman far above any such unpleasantness, while delegating responsibility to his underlings, was a complete success. On 26 November the temporary British consul general reported from Munich: “A childlike faith in the Führer and the conviction that he had nothing to do with the ‘Pogrom’ subsists, but criticism can be heard of other Party leaders, especially Goebbels, Himmler, Göring and von Schirach.”
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There were isolated cases of neighbours and friends showing solidarity with those being persecuted and trying to help them, but they were the exceptions. As a rule, people expressed sympathy with the victims and outrage at the perpetrators only in private. On 24 November, the Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter wrote in a letter to his mother that what he had seen in the previous few weeks was “the most shameful and terrible spectacle that has happened in very many years.” Nonetheless, Ritter, a conservative patriot, hoped that those responsible would have “an internal change of heart and a return to being calm.”
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Ulrich von Hassell, whom Hitler had removed from his post as German ambassador to Italy at the beginning of the year, noted on 25 November that he was “still under the burdensome impression of the vile persecution of Jews.” There was no doubt, he added, that “this was an officially organised tempest against the Jews unleashed at one and the same hour of the night throughout Germany—a true scandal!”
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Like Ritter and Hassell, many Germans seem to have felt ashamed that the barbaric excesses of 9–10 November could have happened in their ostensibly civilised nation. The Swiss consul general in Cologne reported being asked by people from all walks of life in the days following the pogrom: “What do you say to these terrible events?” Every one of them, the consul continued, had added: “It makes you ashamed to be German.”
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Nonetheless, people’s rejection of the pogrom did not worry the regime because it remained in the private sphere. Nowhere was there vocal public protest, not even within the Churches, as might have been expected.
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That being the case, Hitler and his henchmen could consider Kristallnacht a success. They had unleashed anti-Semitic violence against the Reich’s Jewish minority on a previously unprecedented scale without encountering any resistance. That was a clear sign that the majority of Germans had accepted the exclusion of Jews from the “ethnic-popular community,” even if they had reservations about open brutality. As Richard Evans has rightly concluded, the National Socialists now knew that they could do whatever they wanted to Jews, and no one would stop them.
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As far as further action on the “Jewish question” was concerned, Hitler set the agenda at a noon meeting with Goebbels in the Osteria Bavaria on 10 November. “His views are radical and aggressive,” Goebbels noted afterwards. “The Führer wants to move on to extremely strict measures against the Jews. They will have to repair their businesses themselves. Insurance companies will pay them nothing. The Führer then wants to gradually confiscate the businesses and give their former owners certificates, which we can devalue at any time.”
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On 11 November, Hitler instructed Göring, as the head of the Four Year Plan, to convene a conference in order to “centrally summarise the decisive steps.”
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