51: Prophecies of Annihilation

The open brutality of the November Pogrom, the round up and incarceration of some 30,000 Jews that followed, and the draconian measures to force Jews out of the economy had, as is made clear by Goebbels' diary entries, all been explicitly approved by Hitler, even if the initiatives had come from others even, above all, the propaganda minister. himself. When Hitler had consented to Goebbels' suggestion to "let the demonstrations continue," Hitler knew full well what those "demonstrations" amounted to. Still, during the days that followed, the Führer took care to remain equivocal, neither praising Goebbels or what had happened, nor condemning the "actions" either in public or private. Goebbels believed that his policy against the Jews met with Hitler's full support.

It seems, however, that the Führer was embarrassed when it became clear to him that the pogrom he had approved was meeting with condemnation, even in the highest circles of the regime. If Goebbels could feign anger at the burning of synagogues he had, in fact, incited if not directly ordered, Hitler was capable of the same, but he may have harbored anger that the "action" threatened to engulf him in the unpopularity he had failed to predict. Disbelieving that the Führer could have been responsible, his subordinates were happy to be deceived as they preferred the easier target of Goebbels, who had played a more visible role.

It seems clear that "Crystal Night" had a profound impact on Hitler, who had for at least two decades harbored feelings which fused fear and loathing into a pathological view of Jews as the incarnation of evil threatening German survival. Alongside the pragmatic reasons why Hitler agreed with Goebbels that it was an opportune time to unleash the fury of the Nazi Movement against Jews rant the deeply embedded ideological urge to destroy what he saw as Germany's most implacable enemy, responsible in his mind for the First World War and its most tragic and damaging consequence for the Reich, the November Revolution. This demonstration of the Jew and fear of the "Jewish world conspiracy" was part of a world view that saw the random and despairing act of Herschel Grynszpan as part of a plot to destroy the mighty German Reich.

Hitler had by that time spent months at the epicenter of an international crisis that had brought Europe to the very brink of a new war. In the context of continuing crisis in foreign policy, with the prospect of international conflict never far away, "Crystal Night" seems to have reinvoked -- certainly to have reemphasized -- the presumed links, present in his warped outlook since 1918-19 and fully expounded in Mein Kampf, between the power of the Jews and war.

He had written in his book that "the sacrifice of millions at the front" would not have been necessary if "twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas." Such rhetoric, appalling though the sentiments were, was not an indication that Hitler already had the "Final Solution" in mind. But the implicit genocidal link between war and the killing of Jews was there. 

Göring's remarks on 12 November had been an ominous pointer in the same direction: "If the German Reich comes into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future, it can be taken for granted that we in Germany will think in the first instance of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews."

With war approaching again, the question of the threat of the Jews in a future conflict was evidently present in Hitler's mind. The idea of using the Jews as hostages, part of Hitler's mentality, but also advanced in the SS's organ Das Schwarze Korps in October and November 1938, is testimony to the linkage between war and the idea of a "world conspiracy."

"The Jews living in Germany and Italy are the hostages which fate has placed in our hand so that we can defend ourselves effectively against the attacks of world Jewry," commented Das Schwarze Korps on 27 October 1938, under the headline "Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth."

"Those Jews in Germany are a part of world Jewry," the same newspaper threatened on 3 November, still days before the nationwide pogrom was unleashed. "They are also responsible for whatever world Jewry undertakes against Germany, and -- they are liable for the damages which world Jewry inflicts and will inflict on us." The Jews were to be treated as members of a warring power and interned to prevent their engagement for the interests of world Jewry.

Hitler had up to this date never attempted to deploy the "hostage" tactic was a weapon of his foreign policy. Perhaps promptings from the SS leadership now reawakened "hostage" notions in his mind. Whether or not this was the case, the potential deployment of German Jews as pawns to blackmail the western powers into accepting further German expansion was possibly the reason why, when stating that it was his "unshakeable will" to solve "the Jewish problem" in the near future, and at a time when official policy was to press for emigration with all means possible, he showed no interest in plans for international cooperation in the emigration of German Jews. The same motive may also have been behind the threat he made on 21 January 1939 to the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister:

"The Jews here will be annihilated," he declared. "The Jews had not brought about 9 November 1918 for nothing. This day will be avenged."

Again, though, rhetoric should not be mistaken for a plan or program. Hitler was scarcely likely to have revealed plans to exterminate the Jews which, when they did eventually emerge in 1941, were accorded top secrecy, in a comment to a foreign diplomat. Moreover, "annihilation" was one of Hitler's favorite words. He tended to reach for it when trying to impress his threats upon his audience, large or small. He would speak more than once the following summer, for instance, of his intention to "annihilate" the Poles. Horrific though their treatment was after 1939, not genocidal program followed.

Even so, the language was not meaningless. The germ of a possible genocidal outcome, however vaguely conceived, was taking shape. Destruction and annihilation, not just emigration, of the Jews was in the air. Already on 24 November Das Schwarze Korps, portraying the Jews as sinking ever more to the status of pauperized parasites and criminals, had concluded: "In the stage of such a development we would therefore be faced with the hard necessity of eradicating the Jewish underworld just as we are accustomed in our ordered state to eradicate criminals: with fire and sword! The result would be the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation."

This was not a preview of Auschwitz or Treblinka, yet without such a mentality, Auschwitz and Treblinka would not have been possible.

In his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his appointment as chancellor, Hitler revealed publicly his implicitly genocidal association of the destruction of the Jews with the advent of another war. As always, he had an eye on the propaganda impact, but his words were more than propaganda, giving an insight into the pathology of his mind and the genocidal intent that was beginning to take hold. He had no idea how the war would bring about the destruction of the Jews but, somehow, he was certain that this would indeed be the outcome of a new conflagration.

"I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet," The Führer declared, "and was mostly derided. In the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who received only with laughter my prophecies that I would come time take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people in Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this once hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany has meanwhile already stuck in the throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

Two years later, in January 1941, after Germany had conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, France and the Low Countries, Hitler would recall this "prophecy" in another speech to the Reichstag. "If the rest of the world should be plunged into a general war through Jewry, the whole of Jewry will have played out its role in Europe! They can still laugh today about it, just like they used to laugh at my prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that, here too, I've seen things correctly."

Though he was uncertain precisely how the war would bring about the destruction of European Jewry, he was sure that this would be the outcome, and this was only a matter of months before the war against the arch enemy of "Jewish Bolshevism" was to be launched with the invasion of Russia. The idea of the war to destroy the Jews once and for all was then beginning to take concrete shapes in Hitler's mind.

Source:

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