Hitler's Hangman (33 page)

scite on 10 April.

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Unfortunately, in recent days members of the Party have participated in

large-scale and utterly undisciplined assaults. Today I have published a

statement in the press stating that Communist supporters dressed in

Nazi Party uniforms have been conducting illegal confiscations,

house searches and arrests. I must point out that my comments were in

fact not primarily directed against Communist supporters but rather

against our own party comrades. It would be regrettable if the Gestapo

was forced to arrest our own party comrades on a larger scale. I therefore

urgently request that you issue appropriate instructions to all party

agencies.33

Three weeks later, on 5 April, Heydrich felt the need to remind his SS

men that ‘all excesses and measures against the Jews on the part of the SS

must cease’. It was not until 29 April, however, when SS leaders were

threatened with dismissal if they continued to participate in these

outrages, that the tide of violent incidents began to subside.34 The experi-

ences in Austria prompted Heydrich to issue a more general order for the

entire police and SD apparatus on 14 April: although it was ‘self-evident

that the struggle against all vermin that infests the people and state [must

be conducted] consistently and mercilessly’, all measures had to be carried

out in an ‘orderly’ way, which would reassure the general population of the

‘just cause’ pursued by the Gestapo.35 This did not mean that the terror in

Austria was ended – quite the contrary. The policy of ‘merciless combat

against all political, intellectual and criminal opponents’, as Heydrich

described it in the SS journal,
Das Schwarze Korps
, that April, was to be

continued ‘in silence’. This ‘silent terror’ could assume different forms,

ranging from the secret night-time arrest of prominent critics of the

Anschluss to restrictions on postal privacy and press freedom.36

When the plebiscite on the Anschluss was held on 10 April amid

massive manipulation and intimidation, Heydrich’s apparatus played

an important role: SS men rounded up voters from their homes and

marched them to polling stations where booths had been removed or

were labelled with signs ‘only traitors enter here’, thus forcing the

electorate to cast its vote in public. The SD was also in charge of collating

information on ‘abnormalities’ and ‘disturbances’, which were then

passed on to the Gestapo for further investigation.37 Partly as a result

of such precautions, a predictable 99.75 per cent of Austrian voters

supported the Anschluss, although probably, to judge from some SD

reports, only a third of Viennese voters were genuinely committed to the

idea of union.38

Following the plebiscite, the country’s new Nazi rulers rapidly intro-

duced all of the Old Reich’s anti-Semitic legislation. Jews were summar-

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ily ousted from the civil service and the professions. An elaborate

bureaucracy – the Property Transfer Office, with a staff of 500 – was set

up to manage the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. By May

1938, 7,000 out of 33,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Vienna had been

closed down; by August 1938, a further 23,000 had gone. The remaining

ones were Aryanized.39

The Nazis also initiated the forced expulsion of Jewish populations in a

manner that was far more direct than in the Old Reich. In the small

eastern region of the Burgenland, bordering on Hungary, the new

Nazi rulers confiscated the property of the 3,800 members of the old-

established Jewish community, closed down all Jewish businesses, arrested

community leaders and then used the creation of a ‘security zone’ on the

border as an excuse to expel the entire Jewish population. Many Jews were

hauled off to police stations and beaten until they signed documents

surrendering all their assets. The police then took them to the border and

forced them across. Since neighbouring countries often refused to accept

them, many Jews were left stranded in no man’s land. Fifty-one of them,

for example, were dumped on a barren island on the Danube, in an inci-

dent that aroused worldwide press condemnation. The majority fled to

friends and relatives in Vienna. By the end of 1938 there were no Jews left

in the Burgenland.40

Partly in response to this mass flight, between 25 and 27 May 1938 the

Gestapo in Vienna arrested nearly 2,000 Jews who were known to have

criminal convictions (however trivial), sending them to Dachau, where they

were segregated and particularly brutal y mistreated. The police also arrested

and expel ed al foreign Jews and even German Jews living in Vienna.

Altogether, 5,000 Jews were deported from Austria by November 1938.

Thousands of others sought to leave the country by any means available.41

In order to speed up the process of ‘orderly’ Jewish emigration,

Heydrich established a Central Office for Jewish Emigration on 20

August, which was based in the Rothschild Palace in Vienna and run by

Adolf Eichmann, whose procedures and techniques created for this

Central Office were to have a far wider application in the years that

followed.42 On Heydrich’s orders, Eichmann had rushed to Vienna on

16 March as part of a special unit authorized to arrest prominent Austrian

Jews. Heydrich and his Jewish experts realized that the orderly conduct of

forced emigration required the collaboration of leading figures within the

Jewish community itself, especially if the poorest Jews, who lacked the

means to leave their homeland and start a new life elsewhere, were to be

included in the plan. As Heydrich would emphasize a few months later,

the ‘problem was to get rid not of the richer Jews, but of the Jewish

rabble’.43

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125

With Heydrich’s blessing and the help of forcibly enlisted members of

the Viennese Jewish community, Eichmann and his team began to fast

track applications for exit visas and drew on the confiscated assets of the

Jewish community to subsidize the emigration of poor Jews. Frightened

by the continuing terror on the streets, thousands of Austrian Jews queued

to obtain exit visas. The Central Office, with its assembly-line processing

of exit visas, its plundering of Jewish assets to subsidize the emigration of

the poor, its application of terror and its use of Jewish collaborators

became a model for Heydrich’s apparatus in its subsequent dealings with

the Jews.44

Kristallnacht

The Anschluss of Austria added some 200,000 Jews to the population of

Nazi Germany. This new influx more than balanced out the roughly

128,000 Jews who had left Germany by the end of 1937.45 It also made

Heydrich’s previous efforts to speed up the process of forced emigration

seem pointless, particularly after the Evian conference of July 1938 at

which representatives of thirty-two countries had made it clear that inter-

national enthusiasm for accepting German Jewish refugees was limited.

Dissatisfaction at Nazi Party grassroots level with the ‘slow progress’ of

Jewish emigration from Germany began to intensify. In the summer of

1938, Germany witnessed a noticeable upsurge of violence against the

Jews.46

Among the first to feel the Nazis’ newly intensified desire to rid

Germany of its now increased Jewish population were the roughly 70,000

Polish Jews living in the Reich, many of whom had fled their homeland

after the post-war pogroms that took place in Galicia and elsewhere. The

presence of Polish Jews had been a source of increasing aggravation for the

SS and police authorities since March 1938, when the Polish government

nullified the citizenship of anyone who had lived abroad for more than

five years – a deliberate move to prevent the return of Jews to Poland.

Faced suddenly with the possibility that nearly 70,000 Polish Jews

residing in Germany and Austria would be rendered stateless and trapped

in German territory, the Nazi government demanded in April that Jews

holding Polish passports leave the Reich. However, the authorities in

Warsaw refused to allow these Jews back into Poland, and by late October

Himmler and Heydrich chose to act unilaterally. During the night of

28–29 October, the Gestapo and Security Police detained and forcibly

expelled 18,000 Polish Jews.47

Caught up in this first wave of Nazi mass deportations was a Polish

master tailor named Sendel Grynszpan, his wife Rivka and their two

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eldest children, Esther and Mordechai, who were arrested in the city of

Hanover and swiftly expelled across the German–Polish border. In Paris,

Grynszpan’s younger son, Herschel, heard of the fate that had befallen his

family. Humiliated and outraged, he decided to act. On 7 November, in an

act of revenge, Herschel shot a junior official at the German Embassy in

Paris, Ernst vom Rath, injuring him severely.48

On 8 November, Heydrich travelled to Munich in order to attend the

annual commemoration ceremony of the failed Hitler putsch of 1923 and

the traditional gathering of the SS leadership corps on the previous after-

noon. Himmler used the gathering to address the Jewish question, in

which he had previously shown little interest. The Jews had no future in

Germany, he assured his attentive audience, and would be expelled from

the Reich over the next few years. Himmler did not mention the Paris

incident and his insistence that the Jews would be expelled over the

coming ‘years’ does not indicate an imminent dramatic radicalization of

anti-Jewish policy.49

The following day, 9 November, vom Rath succumbed to his injuries.

The not altogether unexpected news of his death arrived in Munich in

the afternoon and was officially announced during the annual gathering

of the ‘Old Fighters’ in Munich’s City Hall that evening. The death

of vom Rath provided those Nazi leaders who felt that they had lost

influence over the direction of anti-Jewish policies, most notably radical

Gauleiters such as Streicher and Goebbels, with a welcome cue. Hitler

left the gathering without making his customary speech, but instructed

Goebbels to speak instead. The Propaganda Minister used the opportunity

to tell his agitated audience about the ‘spontaneous actions’ against

Jews that had already occurred in Kurhesse and Magdeburg-Anhalt

in the wake of the assassination attempt. The Führer, Goebbels pro -

claimed, had decided that the Nazi Party would not initiate further

demonstrations, but if they happened, ‘he was not going to do anything to

stop them’.50

Heydrich was among the audience that evening in the Munich City

Hal . According to the Gauleiter of Magdeburg, Rudolf Jordan, Heydrich

assured the gathering after Goebbels’s speech that the police would

not intervene in the event of ‘spontaneous’ anti-Jewish riots.51 Indeed,

SS members, who had come together in many places throughout the

Reich to celebrate the anniversary, participated in the riots. Whether

they received instructions from Himmler or Heydrich to do so is difficult

to say.52

The assembled regional party leaders nonetheless drew the necessary

inference from Goebbels’s speech and immediately called upon their party

comrades in local constituencies by telex and telephone to unleash the

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127

pogrom. Heydrich returned to his hotel, the
Vier Jahreszeiten
, to confer

with Himmler before calling Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller in Berlin.

The exact content of their conversation is unknown, but shortly before

midnight Müller set all regional State Police offices across the Reich on

full alert and informed them that anti-Jewish ‘actions’ would begin shortly

all over the Reich, ‘especially against synagogues’. These incidents were not

to be hindered: only looting and larger excesses were to be prevented. The

State Police were to prepare for the arrest of 20,000 to 30,000 Jews,

‘particularly wealthy Jews’.53

Less than two hours later, Heydrich followed up Müller’s orders with a

second telegram. He reiterated that ‘demonstrations against the Jews are

to be expected in all parts of the Reich in the course of this night’. The

‘demonstrations’ were not to be prevented. However, the police were to

make sure that ‘German lives or property’ were not endangered and to

note that ‘businesses and apartments belonging to Jews may be destroyed

but not looted’ while ‘foreign citizens even if they are Jews are not to be