The Holocaust (9 page)

The Germans who carried out the atrocities and cruelties had already become corrupted by their tasks; laughing when inflicting pain, and drawing in passers-by to laugh with them. Gradually entire populations became immune to feelings of outrage, and learned to shun compassion.

***

On 6 July 1938 an international conference opened at Evian, a French resort town on the shores of Lake Geneva, with the purpose of discussing the future reception of refugees. More than 150,000 Jews had already been taken in from the torments of Germany, and now of Austria. Of these 8,000 had been admitted to Britain, 40,000 into Palestine, 55,000 into the United States, 8,000 into Brazil, 15,000 into France, 2,000 into Belgium, at least 14,000 into Switzerland, several thousand into Bolivia, 1,000 into Sweden, 845 into Denmark and 150 into Norway.
²²

Not all the delegates at Evian were sympathetic to the Jewish plight. ‘It will no doubt be appreciated’, the Australian delegate, T. W. White, told the conference, ‘that as we have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.’ The conference agreed to set up an intergovernmental agency to examine what could be done. But, as the number of Jews seeking to leave grew, the restrictions against them also grew: Britain, Palestine and the United States each tightened their rules of admission. Four South American countries, Argentine, Chile, Uruguay and Mexico, adopted laws severely restricting the number of Jews who could enter; in the case of Mexico to a hundred a year.

The situation inside Germany made the search for escape even more urgent. Every day, more Jews sought the escape of suicide. On July 29, in Worms, Dr Friedrich Gernsheim, a sixty-six-year-old physician, committed suicide together with his wife Rosa.
²³

In Nuremberg, on August 10, the synagogue was destroyed by fire, two months after the synagogue in Munich had been burnt down. Hitler, without having made war on any of his neighbours, and having avoided war with the European powers, seemed oblivious to outside indignation and protest. The six months which had passed since he celebrated his first five years in power had seen an acceleration of violence against the Jews, but no ill-effects abroad as far as German national interests were concerned. For five years his anti-Jewish actions, although always severe, had been tempered with moments of caution. Since the annexation of Austria, and the Evian conference, he seemed to have thrown caution to the winds.

The international community, which at Evian had been presented with an opportunity to keep open the gates of refuge, chose that moment, so desperate for the Jews already under Nazi rule, to signal its own hesitations and reluctance. It was a neutral stance, not a hostile one, but this neutral stance was to cost a multitude of lives.

The hardening response of the European powers towards Jewish refugees was typified on August 13, when the Cabinet in Finland held a secret discussion about ‘the arrival visas’ of Austrian refugees. An official in the Finnish Embassy in Vienna had apparently been giving entry visas to Austrian Jews ‘without requesting permission from Finland first’. It was decided that all future visa applications should be submitted for approval, not only to the Finnish Foreign Ministry, but also to the German Foreign Ministry. Four days later, on August 17, fifty-three Austrian Jews reached Helsinki by sea. They were refused permission to disembark, and the boat which had brought them was ordered to Germany. Several of the passengers had the necessary papers to enter the United States, and sought only transit rights through Finland. But no exceptions were made to the new policy. A pregnant Jewess, who was about to have her baby, was allowed to leave the ship and go to a hospital, but after the birth, the mother and child had to rejoin the other passengers. On the way back to Germany, as the ship was sailing past the Porkkala peninsula, three of the rejected refugees threw themselves overboard and were drowned.
²⁴

Throughout the summer of 1938, Hitler dominated European diplomatic activity by his demand for the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. This German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia had never been a part of Germany, but, before 1914, had been within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria having itself become part of Germany in March 1938, Hitler now argued that the Sudetenland should also be annexed to the Reich. His demands were backed by the reiterated threat of military force.

On the last day of September 1938, at Munich, the British, French and Italian leaders bowed to Hitler’s demands: the Sudetenland would become a part of Greater Germany on 10 October 1938, and Czechoslovakia would lose its natural mountain defences. More than twenty thousand Jews lived in the Sudetenland. They fled, most of them to the Czechoslovakian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, which Hitler had allowed to retain their independence.

On October 27, less than three weeks after annexing the Sudetenland, Hitler moved again. He struck this time against the Jews alone, expelling from Germany eighteen thousand Jews who, although living in Germany since 1918, had been born in the former Polish provinces of the Russian Empire. The expulsion, eastward, to the Polish border, was a swift and brutal act, but it was in keeping with what the world now understood to be the Nazi method. Two days before the expulsions, a British diplomat, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, wrote from Berlin that the treatment of Jews and political opponents in concentration camps made the Germans ‘unfit for decent international society’. A senior colleague in the Foreign Office in London agreed. The Germans, he minuted, ‘are out to eliminate the Jews at any cost to the latter and nothing we can do or say will stop them’.
¹

One of the eighteen thousand Jews expelled from Germany, Zindel Grynszpan, had been born in the town of Radomsko, in Russian Poland, in 1886. Since 1911 he had lived in Hanover. His eldest son, Hirsch Grynszpan, had gone to Paris, as a student, in 1936. The rest of the family, Zindel, his wife, his daughter and second son, remained in Hanover. As Zindel Grynszpan later recalled:

‘I found thousands crowded together in pigsties,’ a British woman sent to help those who had been expelled later recalled. ‘The old, the sick and children herded together in the most inhuman conditions.’ Conditions were so bad, she added, ‘that some actually tried to escape
back
to Germany and were shot’.
³

Another of those who had gone to the Polish frontier, to the frontier town of Zbaszyn, was the thirty-nine-year-old Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who not only directed relief work on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, but also collected testimonies from many of the deportees, and used the opportunity to gather information on recent events in Nazi Germany.
⁴

While at Zbaszyn, Zindel Grynszpan later recalled, the Jews were put in stables still dirty with horse dung. At last a lorry with bread arrived from Poznan, but at first there was not enough bread to go round.
⁵

Zindel Grynszpan decided to send a postcard to his son Hirsch, in Paris, describing his family’s travails. The young man, enraged by what he read, went to the German Embassy in Paris, and, on 6 November 1938, shot the first German official who received him, Ernst vom Rath.

As vom Rath lay wounded, Hitler and the Nazis denounced the deed as part of a Jewish-inspired world conspiracy against Germany. On November 8 Wilfrid Israel called at the British Embassy in Berlin to repudiate Grynszpan’s act, and to warn of imminent reprisals.
⁶
By the following day, November 9, vom Rath was dead. From the moment that news of his death reached Hitler in Munich, an unprecedented wave of violence broke over Germany’s remaining three hundred thousand Jews.

One young boy, Paul Oestereicher, later recalled how he was walking with his mother in one of the main shopping streets of Berlin, excitedly window-shopping after several months in hiding, when, in seconds the dream was over. ‘What seemed like hundreds of men, swinging great truncheons, jumped from lorries and began to smash up the shops all around us.’
⁷

Among those who witnessed this outburst of destruction was a twenty-five-year-old Jew from Holland, Wim van Leer. Walking in a Leipzig street, he saw a truck draw up a few houses down the road from him, and ‘some twenty louts jumped down’.

Van Leer watched as Stormtroops rang the door bells, smashed the glass windows in the doors if there was no reply, and entered the Jewish houses. ‘Suddenly,’ he later recalled, ‘third-floor balcony doors were flung open, and Stormtroops appeared, shouting to their mates below. One yelled something about all blessings coming from above, and, in expectation, that part of the pavement beneath the balcony was cleared. Next they wheeled an upright piano on to the balcony and, smashing the balustrade with one mighty heave—there must have been eight of them—they pushed the piano over the edge. It nose-dived on to the street below with a sickening crash as the wooden casing broke away, leaving what looked like a harp standing in the middle of the debris…’.
⁸

Bonfires were lit in every neighbourhood where Jews lived. On them were thrown prayer books, Torah scrolls, and countless volumes of philosophy, history and poetry. In thousands of streets, Jews were chased, reviled and beaten up.

In twenty-four hours of street violence, ninety-one Jews were killed. More than thirty thousand—one in ten of those who remained—were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Before most of them were released two to three months later, as many as a thousand had been murdered, 244 of them in Buchenwald. A
further eight thousand Jews were evicted from Berlin: children from orphanages, patients from hospitals, old people from old peoples’ homes. There were many suicides, ten at least in Nuremberg; but it was forbidden to publish death notices in the press.
⁹

It was not by the killing, however, nor by the arrests or the suicides, that the night of November 9 was to be remembered. During the night, as well as breaking into tens of thousands of shops and homes, the Stormtroops set fire to one hundred and ninety-one synagogues; or, if it was thought that fire might endanger nearby buildings, smashed the synagogues as thoroughly as possible with hammers and axes.

The destruction of the synagogues led the Nazis to call that night the
Kristallnacht
, or ‘night of broken glass’: words chosen deliberately to mock and belittle. From Leipzig, the United States Consul, David H. Buffum, reported that the three main synagogues, set on fire simultaneously, ‘were irreparably gutted by flames’. At the Jewish cemetery in Leipzig the Nazis practised ‘tactics which approached the ghoulish’, uprooting tombstones and violating graves. In the city itself, Buffum reported, ‘Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the effects to the streets, the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight.’
¹⁰

Among the witnesses to these events was Dr Arthur Flehinger from Baden-Baden. Later he recalled how all Jewish men in the town were ordered to assemble on the morning of November 10. Towards noon they were marched through the streets to the synagogue. Many non-Jews resented the round-up. ‘I saw people crying while watching from behind their curtains,’ Dr Flehinger later wrote, and he added: ‘One of the many decent citizens is reported to have said, “What I saw was not one Christ, but a whole column of Christ figures, who were marching along with heads high and unbowed by any feeling of guilt.”’