49: Reich Crystal Night

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 Jews must be removed from Germany in ten years." In the meantime, he added, they were to be retained as "surety."

Goebbels, meanwhile, was impatient to make headway with the "racial cleansing" of Berlin. "A start had to be made somewhere," he remarked. He though the removal of Jews from the economy and cultural life of the city could be accomplished within a few months. The Berlin Chief of Police devised a plan with a variety of discriminatory measures, to include special identity cards for Jews, the branding of Jewish shops, bans on using public parks, and special train compartments for Jews. Most of the proposed measures were implemented generally after "Reich Crystal Night." The police chief had also proposed establishing a ghetto in Berlin, to be financed by wealthy Jews, but this was not implemented.

Nonetheless, the poisonous atmosphere fostered by Goebbels' agitation, and with Hitler's tacit approval, had rapid results. By as early as 27 May 1938, a mob 1,000-strong roamed parts of Berlin, smashing windows of Jewish shops, which prompted the police, in order not to lose the initiative in anti-Jewish policy, to take the owners into "protective custody." In mid-June, Jewish stores on the Kurfürstendamm, the prime shopping street in the west of the city, were smeared with antisemitic slogans by party activists, and the plundering of some shops also occurred.

Concern for the image of Germany abroad led Hitler to intervene and halt the public violence. Reluctantly, Goebbels banned all illegal actions. Even so, by mid-summer, Berlin had set the tone and similar "actions", initiated by local party organizations, were carried out in Frankfurt, Magdeburg, and other towns and cities. The lack of any explicit general ban from above on "individual actions," as had been imposed in 1935, was taken by party activists in countless localities as a green light to step up their own campaigns. The touchpaper had been lit to the summer and autumn of violence.

As the tension of the Czech crisis accelerated to its conclusion, local antisemitic initiatives in various regions saw to it that the "Jewish Question" became a powder-keg, waiting for the spark. The radical tide surged forward and the atmosphere became menacing in the extreme for the Jews. For all of it, though, the question of how to remove the Jews from the economy and force them to leave Germany appeared to lack an obvious answer. And then Herschel Grynzpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, lit the match by shooting Ernst vom Rath, the Third Legation Secretary in Paris.

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Ernst vom Rath succumbed to his wounds on 9 November, which happened to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch, and all over Germany, party members were gathering to celebrate. This had followed two days of vicious press attacks on the Jews, orchestrated by Goebbels, guaranteed to incite violence. Sure enough, pogroms were instigated on 8 November in more than a few places throughout Germany by the agitation of local party leaders without any directives from on high. Goebbels noted the "actions" with satisfaction in his diary:

"In Hessen big antisemitic demonstrations. The synagogues are burnt down. If only the anger of the people could now be let loose!"

The following day, the propaganda minister referred to the "demonstrations," burning of synagogues, and demolition of shops in Kassel and Dessau. During the afternoon, news of vom Rath's was announced. "Now that's done it," remarked Goebbels.

The party's "old guard" were meeting that evening in the Old Town Hall in Munich. Hitler and Goebbels were also present, and at one point in the evening they were see to be in consultation with each other. Hitler then left to return to his Munich apartment. Around 10 p.m., Goebbels delivered a brief but highly inflammatory speech, reporting the death of vom Rath, pointing out that there had already been "retaliatory" action against the Jews in Kurhessen and Magdeburg-Anhalt. He made it abundantly plain without explicitly saying so that the party should organize and carry out "demonstrations" against the Jew throughout the country, though  they should make it appear that they were expressions of spontaneous popular anger.

In his diary, Goebbels left no doubt of the content of his discussed with the Führer:

"I go to the party reception in the Old Town Hall. Huge amount going on. I explain the matter to the Führer. He decides: let the demonstrations continue. Pull back the police. The Jews should for once get to feel the anger of the people. That's right. I immediately give corresponding directives to police and party. Then I speak for a short time in that vain to the party leadership. Storms of applause. All tear straight off to the telephone. Now the people will act."

Goebbels did his best to make sure "the people" acted. He put out detailed instructions of what was and was not to be done. He fired up the mood where there was hesitancy. Immediately after he had spoken, the Stosstrup Hitler, an "assault squad" whose traditions reached back to the heady days of pre-putsch beerhouse brawls and bore the Führer's name, was launched to wreak havoc on the streets of Munich. Almost immediately they demolished the old synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse, left standing after the main synagogue had been destroyed in the summer.

Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria, himself no moderate on "the Jewish Question," got cold feet, but Goebbels pushed him into line. The "capital city of the Movement," of all places, was not going to be spared what was happening already all over Germany. Goebbels then gave direct telephone instructions to Berlin to demolish the synagogue in Fasanenstrasse, off the Kurfürstendamm.

The top leadership of the police and SS, also gathered in Munich but not present when Goebbels had given his speech, learned of the "action" only once it had started. Heydrich was informed by the Munich Gestapo office around 11:20 p.m., after the first orders had already been issued to the party and the SA. He immediately sought to secure Himmler's directives on how the police should respond. The Reichsführer-SS was reached in Hitler's Munich apartment. He asked what orders the Führer had for him and was advised -- most likely at Himmler's prompting -- that he wanted the SS to keep out of the "action." Disorder and uncontrolled violence and destruction were not the SS's style. Himmler and Heydrich preferred the "rational," systematic approach to the "Jewish question."

Soon after midnight orders went out that any SS men participating in the "demonstrations" were to do son only in civilian clothing. At 1:20 a.m. Heydrich telexed all police chiefs instructing the police not to obstruct the destruction of the synagogues and to arrest as many make Jews, especially wealthy ones, as available prison accommodation could take. The figure of 20-30,000 Jews had already been mentioned in a Gestapo directive sent out before midnight.

Meanwhile, across the Reich, party activists -- especially SA men -- were suddenly summoned by their local leaders and told to burn down synagogues or were turned loose on other Jewish property. Many of those involved had been celebrating at their own Beer Hall Putsch commemoratives, and some were drunk. The "action" was usually improvised on the spot.

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"The Stossrupp is doing dreadful damage," Goebbels commented at one point that night. He received reports that 75 synagogues, 15 in Berlin, were one fire across Germany. He then learned of the SS directive to arrest 20-30,000 Jews. Though he had instigated the pogrom, the propaganda minister believed the key decisions had come from Hitler. Upon hearing the noise of shattering glass he wrote, "Bravo, bravo." After getting a few hours of sleep, he added:

"The dear Jews will think about it in the future before they shoo down German diplomats like that. And that was the meaning of the exercise."

All morning on 10 November came new reports of the destruction occurring across Germany, and Goebbels assessed the situation with Hitler. In the light of the morning criticism of the "action" from within the top ranks of the Nazi leadership -- though not for reasons of humanitarianism -- the decision was made to bring it to a halt. Goebbels prepared a decree to end the destruction, cynically commenting that if it were allowed to continue there was the danger "that the mob would start to appear." He reported to Hitler, who was, Goebbels claimed, "in agreement with everything. His opinions are very radical and aggressive. . . . With some minor alterations, the Führer approves my edict on the end of the actions. . . . The Führer wants to move to very severe measures against the Jews. They must get their businesses in order themselves. Insurance will pay them nothing. Then the Führer wants gradually to expropriate the Jewish businesses."

By that time, the night of horror for Germany's Jews had brought the demolition of around 100 synagogues, the burning of several hundred others, the destruction of at least 8,000 Jewish-owned shops and the vandalizing of countless apartments. The pavements of the big cities were strewn with shards of glass from the display windows of Jewish-owned stores; merchandise, if not looted, had been hurled into the streets. Private apartments were wrecked, furniture demolished, mirrors and pictures smashed, clothing shredded, treasured possessions trashed. The material damage was estimated soon afterwards by Heydrich at several hundred million Marks.

The human misery of the victims was impossible to calculate. Beatings and bestial maltreatment, even of women and children, and the elderly, were commonplace. A hundred or so Jews were murdered. Unsurprisingly, suicide was commonplace on that terrible night, but many more succumbed to brutalities in the concentrations camps in the weeks that followed. Thirty thousand male Jews had been rounded up by police and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

The scale and nature of the savagery, and the apparent aim of maximizing degradation and humiliations, reflected the success of propaganda in demonizing the figure of the Jew -- certainly within the organizations of the party itself -- and massively enhanced the process, under way since Hitler's takeover of power, of dehumanizing Jews and excluding them from German society, a vital step on the way to genocide.

Source:

Kershaw, I. (2008). Hitler: A Biography. London: W. W. Norton and Company.