The Holocaust: A Warning From History

The propaganda line that "Crystal Night" was a spontaneous expression of anger by the people was believed by no one. "The public knows to the last man," the party's own court later admitted, "that political actions like that of 9 November are organized and carried about by the party, whether this is admitted or not. If all the synagogues burn down in a single night, that has somehow to be organized, and can only be organized by the party." Ordinary citizens, affected by the climate of hatred and propaganda appealing to base instincts, motivated too by sheer material envy and greed, nevertheless followed the party's lead in many places and joined in the destruction and looting of Jewish property. Sometimes individuals regarded as the pillars of their communities were involved. At the same time, there is no doubt that many ordinary people were appalled at what met them when they emerged on the morning of 10 November. There was a mixture of motives; s...

Joseph Goebbels had little trouble persuading Hitler in April 1938 to support his plans to "clean up" Berlin (the city being the seat of Goebbels' Gau). The propaganda minister had already discussed his aims on the "Jewish Question" with the city's police chief: "We'll remove the character of a Jew-paradise from Berlin. Jewish businesses will be marked as such. At any rate, we're now proceeding more radically. The Führer wants gradually to push them all out." Whatever the line of policy being favored, the "final goal" remained indistinct, and as such compatible with all the attempts to further the "removal" of the Jews. This eventual "removal" was conceived as taking a good number of years to complete. Even following "Crystal Night,' Reinhard Heydrich was still envisaging an "emigration action" lasting from eight to ten years. Hitler himself had already inferred to Goebbels in July 1938 that ...

The ideological dynamic of the Nazi regime was by no means solely a matter of Hitler's personalized "world view"; the party and its numerous sub-organizations were, of course, important in sustaining the pressure for ever-new discriminatory measures against ideological target-groups. But little in the way of coherent planning could be expected from the central party office. The key agency was not the party, but the SS. Buoyed by their successes in Austria and the Sudetenland, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and the top echelons of the SS were keen to extend -- naturally, under Hitler's aegis -- their own empire. Already in August 1938, a decree by Hitler met Himmler's wish to develop an armed wing of the SS. It provided in effect a fourth branch of the armed forces -- far smaller than the others, but envisaged as a body of ideologically motivated "political soldiers" standing at the Führer's "exclusive disposal." The leaders of the SS ...

Hitler told Goebbels in the late summer of 1937 that eventually Austria would have to be taken "by force". On 5 November 1937, Hitler called a meeting with the Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, the War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the Army commander General Werner von Fritsch, the Kriegsmarine commander Admiral Erich Raeder and the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum. At the conference, Hitler stated that economic problems were causing Germany to fall behind in the arms race with Britain and France, and that the only solution was to launch in the near-future a series of wars to seize Austria and Czechoslovakia, whose economies would be plundered to give Germany the lead in the arms race. Robert Leckie writes: "The year 1938 was fateful for Europe and the world. Only nineteen year previously Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain had warned his Versailles colleagues of the folly of ringing Germany with small b...

On 21 February 1934, the State Secretary in the Prussian Agricultural Ministry gave a speech in which he argued that it was the "duty" of every single German "to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. But the one who works correctly towards the Führer along his lines and towards his aim will in future as previously have the finest reward of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work." After quoting this, Ian Kershaw writes: "These comments, made in a routine speech, hold a key to how the Third Reich operated. Between Hindenburg's death at the beginning of August 1934 and the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis in late January and early February 1938, the Führer state took shape. These were the 'normal' years of the Third Reich that lived in the memories of many contemporaries as the 'good' years (though they were scarcely that for the already growing number...

By Daniel James Brown In September 1935 the Nazi Party staged its seventh annual rally at Nuremberg, themed, with staggering irony, the Rally for Freedom. Again the storm troopers and the Blackshirts came in the hundreds of thousands. Again Leni Riefenstahl -- now thirty-three and firmly entrenched as Hitler's favorite filmmaker -- was there to document the spectacle, though the only footage that would ever emerge was a short film documenting the war games Hitler staged at the rally to dramatize Germany's defiance of the Treaty of Versailles's ban on German rearmament. Years later, after the war, Riefenstahl would speak as little as possible about her participation in the Rally for Freedom. By then it was remembered, not primarily for the war games, but for what happened on the evening of September 15. The rally reached its climax that night when Adolf Hitler stepped before the German parliament, the Reichstag, to introduce three new laws. The Reichstag had been assembled i...