Hitler and the Holocaust (10 page)

Most revealing of all as a response to this fiasco was Hitler’s contemptuous reaction. Even before the results of the conference were known, he mocked the humanitarian pretensions of the Western democracies (especially Britain and America) that claimed to be so solicitous of “these criminals” (i.e., the Jews). In January 1939, he referred again to the charade: it had been a “shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them—which is surely, in view of its attitude, an obvious duty.”
⁷³
Indeed, the Nazi leadership could only have felt bolstered in its increasingly brutal policy on the “Jewish question” by the results of the Evian Conference. The whole miserable farce had demonstrated that Western nations were not at all willing to open their doors and accept Jewish refugees or to commit themselves to rescue Jews. Nor were they ready to publicly criticize Nazi anti-Semitic legislation—preferring instead to view it as an
internal
German matter. Finally, there was another troubling implication, which was as yet only dimly visible on the horizon. If Nazi Germany could no longer expect to export, sell, or expel its Jews to an indifferent world that plainly did not want them, then perhaps they would have to do something even more drastic.

3

PERSECUTION AND RESISTANCE

All the Gestapo roads lead to Ponary and Ponary means death. Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter. True we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murders is self-defence. Brothers, it is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers.

ABBA KOVNER,
Manifesto of Zionist Youth
, Vilna, 31 December 1941

Why didn’t we resist when they began to resettle 300,000 Jews from Warsaw? Why did we allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter?

EMMANUEL RINGELBLUM,
Diary
, 15 October 1942

In exile the Jews had always been in a minority; they had always been in danger; but they had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies.… A two-thousand- year-old lesson could not be unlearned; the Jews could not make the switch [when their leadership realized] … that the modern machine-like destruction process would engulf European Jewry.

RAUL HILBERG,
The Destruction of the European Jews
(1973)

I
n October 1938, seventeen thousand Jews of Polish origin hitherto residing in Germany found themselves brutally expelled en masse by the Nazi authorities. Dumped along the Polish-German frontier in appalling conditions, they were refused entry by the Polish government. Having previously rendering them stateless, Poland had already demonstrated its desire to rid itself of its Jewish citizens. Among the Polish Jews who were suddenly abandoned in no-man’s-land was the Grynszpan family. Their seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, then living alone as an illegal and stateless immigrant in Paris, was outraged by the treatment of his parents and of the Jews in general. (He later told French investigators; “My people have a right to exist on this earth.”)
¹
In an act of anguished revenge, he shot Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary at the German embassy in Paris. The German diplomat died of his wounds on 9 November 1938. Grynszpan’s action was immediately denounced by the Nazi propaganda machine as a “declaration of war” and part of a worldwide Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.

In response, the Nazis unleashed an unprecedented orgy of ferocious anti-Jewish violence and terror across Germany, euphemistically referred to as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) after the crystal-like shards of glass from the shattered windows of Jewish shops across the land. All over Germany, more than four hundred synagogues burned, while more than 7,500 businesses and other properties owned by Jews were looted and ransacked. At least one hundred Jews were murdered, many more injured, and thirty thousand summarily packed off to concentration camps, where they were to suffer unspeakable indignities. Describing these events in Berlin on
10 November, the
Manchester Guardian
correspondent noted that the plundering and destruction of Jewish shops had been going on for nearly eighteen hours. “There are streets in the business quarters whole sections of which this evening are literally paved with broken glass, while in the kerbs and on the road are lying smashed office furniture, typewriters, telephones, bales of papers and other wreckage which had been hurled out of the windows by the wrecking squads.”
²

The British correspondent went on to recount how the wreckers “entered the synagogues, throwing petrol over the pews and setting the interiors on fire. As far as could be observed the work of the fire brigades was largely to stand by and keep an expert watch that the fires did not spread from the synagogue interiors to neighbouring buildings.… The crowds watched the burning of the synagogues with apathy.”
³
The American consul in Leipzig, David Buffum, who left one of the more graphic accounts of the pogrom, wrote that the barrage of Nazi ferocity “had no equal hitherto in Germany, or very likely anywhere else in the world since savagery began.”
⁴
After describing the destruction and violation of property, he added, “The most hideous phase of the so-called ‘spontaneous’ action has been the wholesale arrest and transportation to concentration camps of male German Jews between the ages of sixteen and sixty, as well as Jewish men without citizenship. This has been taking place daily since the night of horror.”
⁵
Such was the scale of the damage that, according to internal reports of the Security Services and other evidence, a significant number of Germans were shocked and even disgusted at such vandalism of property and brazen violations of public law and order.
⁶
On the other hand, not only ideological fanatics took part. Among the mindless mobs of looters, there were many ordinary Germans, incited to a fever pitch, who seized the opportunity to enrich themselves. Moreover, there was virtually no discernible public protest, not even from the churches, though Jewish houses of worship had been primary targets.

The pogrom had been incited and masterminded by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. It was he who had made the initial incendiary speech on 9 November in a Munich beer hall (commemorating the failed Nazi putsch of 1923) after news had come of vom Rath’s murder. He called the diplomat’s death the first shot in a new war between the Germans and Jews. His diaries reveal not only that the Führer was informed of every step but that Hitler explicitly wanted to make the Jews pay for the damage and to expropriate their businesses.
⁷
Publicly, however, the Führer preferred to distance himself, preserving an attitude of aloof detachment. Hitler’s immediate concern was that the pogrom should be given the appearance of being a “spontaneous” expression of popular wrath against the Jews. The SS and SD (security services) leadership, which in principle rejected the methods of “rowdy anti-Semitism,” quickly recovered from its initial surprise and found new opportunities in the aftermath to pursue its own agenda and establish a firmer grip on all policy-making that related to the “Jewish question.”

Goebbels himself had been out of favor with Hitler since mid-1938 because of his messy affair with a Czech actress, a circumstance which may help to explain the particular zealousness he exhibited in calling for vengeance against the Jews. He, too, was eager to reestablish his own
locus standi
in Jewish policy but would certainly not have incited the pogrom without Hitler’s prior authorization. Goering, on the other hand, who now supervised the “Aryanization” policy, was determined to keep the “Jewish question” as far as possible out of radical Nazi hands. Like Himmler and Heydrich, who respectively controlled the German police and the SD, he opposed methods of uncontrolled violence, preferring to tighten the net around German Jewry through administrative measures. Goering, in fact, considered actions like Kristallnacht to be serious public-relations blunders and deplorable lapses into “wild Aryanizations.”
⁸
He wanted to seize Jewish property for the German state, not to see it destroyed by marauding mobs.
Moreover, he was initially alarmed at the insurance claims (estimated at 225 million reichsmarks) that could result. Himmler shared his disapproval, even writing in a memo that it was Goebbels’s “megalomania” and “stupidity” that were primarily responsible for initiating an operation that could only exacerbate Germany’s already difficult diplomatic relations. But whatever the policy differences and power struggles within the Nazi elite, there was no basic disagreement about the need for a “reckoning with the Jews.”
⁹

Kristallnacht was the most violent public display of anti-Semitism seen in German history since the Crusades. It also proved to be a significant turning point on the road to the Holocaust. Undoubtedly, the lessons that the Nazi leadership drew in its aftermath brought about a shift in its methods of persecution. At a marathon session in Goering’s offices at the Reich Air Ministry on 12 November 1938, it was decided to levy a fine of one billion marks on German Jewry for what was styled its “hostile attitude” toward the German Reich and its people. After announcing the fine, Goering added cynically, “Moreover, I have to say once again that I would not wish to be a Jew in Germany.”
¹⁰
The participants apparently felt that the public degradation they were inflicting in making Jews pay and even apologize for the huge damage caused by the Nazis, was not enough. Goebbels, Goering, and Heydrich took turns during the meeting in fantasizing about additional humiliations: that Jews should wear personal insignia, that they should have isolated compartments in trains or be forced to give up their seats to Germans, that they should be placed in forests alongside animals they resembled, and so on.
¹¹
Goebbels suggested expelling Jewish children still in German schools, banning Jews from all public places, and imposing curfew restrictions. In the following month, the more concrete suggestions were promptly agreed to by Hitler; the momentum of the anti-Jewish campaign had indeed increased.
¹²

The most practical outcome of the November 1938 meeting
was the elimination of the Jews from the economy and the confiscation of all remaining Jewish factories and businesses. The department stores, major industrial concerns, and merchant banks that had been spared longest were now stripped, closed, or taken over.
¹³
An additional decree was issued to exclude Jews from the retail trade, crafts, and sales agencies, from managing firms, and from membership in any cooperatives. In a highly significant sentence at the outset of his remarks, Goering invoked directly the Führer’s authority for these steps: “Gentlemen! Today’s meeting is of a decisive character. I have received a letter written on the Führer’s orders by [Martin] Bormann, the chief of staff of the Führer’s deputy, requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or the other” (
so oder so
).
¹⁴
So oder so
was a key Hitler phrase in relation to the Jews—one that intimated that there would be no turning back. Nazi policy had clearly been radicalized by Kristallnacht. In its wake, all Jewish business enterprise, freedom of movement, and social intercourse with Germans was brought to a virtual end.
¹⁵
The scale and impunity of the violence had stigmatized the Jews, even more than before, as a pariah people, to be degraded at will, placed outside the ranks of society and the universe of moral obligation. Their existence on German soil was being torn up by the roots. Excluded from using public transport, from going to concerts, theaters, cinemas, shopping centers, beaches, and park benches and even from owning a dog, German Jews were not merely outcasts at the end of 1939: they were
socially dead
people. They could even lose their driving licenses because their presence on the roads might conceivably offend the “German traffic community.” Three years later they would be obliged to wear the yellow stars that were to definitively seal their pariah status.

There was an immediate increase in the pressure on German and Austrian Jews to emigrate, which was still official Nazi policy. But there was also an upsurge in attitudes that
hinted at what would eventually climax in the “Final Solution” a few years later. Thus, on 24 November 1938, the SS journal
Das Schwarze Korps
, under the heading
JEWS, WHAT NOW?
prophesied that Germans could not tolerate the presence of hundreds of thousands of Jewish “criminals” and “subhumans” much longer. Mocking the indifference and hypocrisy of the “civilized nations” and “the great screaming of world Jewry,” it called for a solution that went beyond mere segregation. “We would be faced with the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld in the same way as, under our government of law and order, we are wont to exterminate any other criminals, namely by fire and sword. The result would be the factual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its absolute annihilation.”
¹⁶
The mood was ripe for a revival of the apocalyptic anti-Semitism that identified Jews with the criminal “subhuman” underworld. Demonization had accompanied the Nazi campaign against Jewry since 1919, but now it seemed as if the Jews who were still left in Germany could more easily be branded as total outcasts and made to fit existing propaganda stereotypes. As Ian Kershaw has written, this depersonalization accentuated the numbing indifference of German popular opinion “and formed a vital stage between the archaic violence of the pogrom and the rationalised ‘assembly line’ annihilation of the death camps.”
¹⁷