Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (26 page)

reveals that Goering had, on 14 October, also ordered the ‘Aryanization’ of the

entire Jewish bank, stock-exchange, and insurance system, and after 1 January

prohibited any kind of bank deals by Jews.
69

In October the regime also found itself confronted by a second problem: it was

feared that the Polish government might anticipate the deportation of Polish Jews

from the Reich by expatriating that group. It therefore decided on a major

deportation of this group. This enterprise was enforced with extraordinary bru-

tality at the end of October, and marks the transition from anti-Jewish actions

emanating from the Party base to a centrally directed campaign that was to lead

on to the November pogrom.

With its new State Citizenship Law, which came into force on 31 March 1938,

the Polish government had created the possibility of withdrawing state citizenship

from Polish citizens living abroad for a long period of time. From the point of view

of the Nazi regime, this produced the prospect of the 70,000 Polish Jews living in

Germany (and many of whom had been born there) becoming stateless people.
70

Consequently, since May deportations from Poland had been occurring on a

larger scale and in August the Decree regarding the Special Police Department for

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

Foreign Nationals was tightened, unambiguously focusing on Jews. When the

Polish Minister of the Interior decreed on 6 October that henceforth admission

would be granted only to Poles from abroad who were able to show a special note

in their passports, but that this could be withheld by the consulates if there were

reasons to deny state citizenship, at the end of October the German police

launched the operation to deport all Polish Jews, which had already been in

preparation for some time. On the evening of 27 October and the two days that

followed, Polish Jews were arrested all over the Reich, brought to collection points

and transported under inhuman conditions in sealed and strictly guarded special

trains to the border with Poland. The trains stopped just before the Polish border,

which had been closed since the run-up to the action and their passengers were

driven over the border. After the Polish side had initially turned these people away

and thousands of them were wandering back and forth in no-man’s-land, intern-

ment camps were set up in Polish border towns. The action, which led overall to

the expulsion of around 18,000 Polish Jews, ended on 29 October, after Poland had

threatened the deportation of German citizens.

Herschel Grynspan’s attempt on the life of the Legation Secretary of the

German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, on 7 November, was an act of revenge

for the brutal expulsion of Grynspan’s Hanover-based parents to Poland that has

no historical causal link with the pogrom on 9 November. Grynspan, who had

fatally injured vom Rath, merely provided the Nazi regime with an excuse to

launch a pogrom which at least parts of the Party base had been urging since the

spring of 1938. This pogrom was to form the precondition for a new wave of anti-

Semitic laws which had also been prepared since spring 1938 and which, in the

view of the Party leadership and in the face of the precarious situation in

armaments, urgently had to be put into force. A pogrom would also unleash a

new mass exodus among the Jews of the ‘Great German Reich’ and at the same

time exert the necessary pressure upon foreign governments finally to hold the

negotiations for an international solution of the ‘Jewish question’ in Germany.

On the same day of the assassination attempt, 7 November, the Nazi press,

following the instructions of the Ministry of Propaganda, announced that Gryn-

span’s crime, an attack by ‘world Jewry’, would have unforeseeable consequences

for the situation of the Jews in Germany.
71
Particularly in Hesse, on 7, 8, and 9 November Party activists organized anti-Jewish riots in which synagogue interiors were destroyed and shops with Jewish owners were smashed.
72

The actual pogrom was unleashed a few hours after Rath’s death on 9 November

by an intensely anti-Semitic speech by Goebbels at a meeting of leading Party

members in Munich’s Old Town Hall, held as it was every year in memory of the

National Socialist putsch in 1923. The speculation frequently encountered in the

literature that the news of Rath’s death arrived during the meeting, and that Hitler

immediately informed Goebbels, who immediately seized the initiative and possibly

went beyond the goal assigned him by Hitler is, however, an exaggerated account

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

111

of events.
73
In fact the news of Rath’s death arrived before the start of the event in the Rathaussaal in Munich, as Goebbels’s diaries reveal: ‘In the afternoon the death

of the German diplomat vom Rath is announced. That’s good . . . I go to the Party

reception in the old Rathaus. Terrific activity. I brief Hitler on the affair. He decides: allow the demonstrations to go on. Withdraw the police. The Jews should feel the

people’s fury. That’s right. I issue appropriate instructions to police and party. Then

I give a brief speech on the subject to the Party leadership. Thunderous applause.

Everyone dashed to the telephones. Now the people will act.
’74

After the speech by the Propaganda Minister the senior party officials present at

the meeting immediately informed the headquarters of the Gaus and the SA

Group staffs that troops of Party members and members of the SA wearing

civilian clothes were to destroy synagogues and demolish Jewish shops during

the night.
75
The orders that reached the lower echelons were thus inevitably inconsistent.
76

The most senior Party court of the NSDAP, which, following the November

pogrom, had to deal with a whole series of serious crimes such as murder,

mistreatment, and rape established the following with regard to the nature of

the order on 9 November:

The instructions of the head of Reich Propaganda, issued orally, have probably been

understood by all Party leaders present to mean that the Party should not appear as the

instigators of demonstrations, but in reality organize and carry them out . . . The examination of the conditions under which the orders were issued has revealed that in all these cases a misunderstanding has occurred in some link of the chain of command, especially

because of the fact that it is obvious to active National Socialists from the Kampfzeit that actions which the Party does not want to appear to have organized are not ordered in a clear and detailed manner. Consequently they are accustomed to reading more into such orders

than is expressed literally, as it has also in many respects become customary for the person issuing the order, in the interests of the Party—and especially if the order concerns illegal political demonstrations—not to spell out everything and only to suggest what he wishes to achieve with the order.

Because of orders that were ‘not always felicitously formulated’ many sub-leaders

assumed that ‘Jewish blood must flow for the blood of Party comrade vom Rath,

and that, at any rate according to the will of the leadership, the life of a Jew was of

no consequence’.

For these reasons the Higher Party court had also recommended that in the

fourteen cases of crimes of killing already heard, proceedings before the state

courts be quashed and in most of these cases Party court trials should

be abandoned, or only insignificant sentences passed. Only in two cases of rape

was the case to be pursued further before the state courts.
77

This kind of indirect command, to be understood intuitively, was typical of the

National Socialists and had the advantage that the issuer of the order assumed no

112

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

legally demonstrable responsibility, but it did involve the risk that some of the

subordinates did not correctly understand the meaning of the instruction in

question and either did not act radically enough or in their over-eagerness

overshot the mark. This factored-in vagueness in the Party leadership’s orders

was, as we have seen, typical of the tactic of the ‘individual actions’ of the Party

since 1933, particularly for the anti-Jewish riots in spring and summer 1935 as well

as in the spring/early summer of 1938: in the Party base there was always a certain

uncertainty as to whether the official Party prohibitions on these individual

actions were ‘meant seriously’ or only intended to mislead the public, so that

especially radical activists very often contravened the Party line. But such calam-

ities were an inevitable element of the tactic of indirect command, and they could

only have been avoided if the Party leadership had compromised itself with clear

orders in writing. But the internal Party contradictions that repeatedly arose as a

consequence of hidden orders were primarily shaped by this tactic and not the

result of profound contradictions within the NSDAP about the course of the

Judenpolitik or an expression of the Party’s incapacity for goal-oriented action.

The curious aspect of this kind of hidden order was that because of the

calculated vagueness, corrective action always had to be taken from above.

In the case of the November pogrom this task fell to the Security Police and the

SD. The execution of the pogrom was unambiguously a Party matter; the state and

Party security apparatus, united in the person of Heydrich, clearly surprised by the

action, and yet immediately ready to act, had first of all to perform flanking

manoeuvres and adapt to accommodating the large number of prisoners driven

together by Party activists.
78

As they had been ordered to do, in the night of 9/10 November SA and SS

troops, mostly in civilian clothes and backed up by Party members, forced their

way into synagogues, smashed up the interiors, looted or destroyed the ritual

objects, and finally burned down the houses of God. The fire brigades were

commanded only to prevent the flames from spreading to the surrounding

houses. Likewise, Jewish shops were destroyed, had their windows smashed in,

and their storerooms looted or thrown into the street. In many places the Party

activists led actual processions, generally accompanied by a curious crowd, roar-

ing anti-Jewish slogans and marching from one object of destruction to the next.

The terrorist units forced their way into apartments inhabited by Jews, destroyed

the furniture, and made off with valuables. The residents of the apartments were

mocked, humiliated, and physically mistreated, in many cases in the most cruel

and shocking way; and the 25,000–30,000 Jewish men arrested during the night

also had to endure inhuman harassment and torture, which was intensified during

their subsequent concentration-camp detention.
79

The precise number of fatalities who fell victim to these acts of violence is

not known; officially the figure was given as ninety-one,
80
but to this there should be added a large number of suicides, as well as the hundreds of Jews who were

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

113

killed in the following weeks and months in the concentration camps, or died as

a result of their detention. In Buchenwald alone 227 of the prisoners delivered

died in the first six weeks; 400 Jews involved in the pogrom died in all the

camps.
81

The damage caused between 8 and 10 November, according to Reich Insurance

Group in 1939, came to 49.5 million Reichmarks. Of this, over 46.1 million was to

Jews of German citizenship, over 1.7 million was to ‘Aryans’, and more than 1.6

million to foreign Jews.
82
A survey of twenty-four private insurance companies showed that their disbursements for break-in damage caused during the November

pogrom were 3.3 million RM higher than the sum that the companies had paid

throughout the whole of the rest of the year for that offence.
83

The individual elements of the pogrom, smashed windows, destruction of

synagogues, forced entry to dwellings, looting, mistreatment, even murder, were

not new, but they were part of the anti-Semitic repertoire of the Party activists.

The pogrom represented a culmination of the anti-Jewish riots that had been

going on for years; it was an expression of the fundamental radically anti-Semitic

mood at the grass roots of the NSDAP.

Outside the circle of Party activists and supporters of the NSDAP, the

pogrom met with little sympathy, but overall the population—doubtless intimi-

dated by this unfamiliar level of violence—responded passively.
84
This acceptance of the pogrom by the majority of the population must have seemed like the

crucial success from the perspective of the Nazi regime: it had been possible to

treat Jews publicly as non-persons who could be robbed, mistreated, and killed.

The pogrom made it clear to everyone that the total exclusion of the Jews from

German society had been completed; they had been condemned to a shadowy

existence.

This ‘social death’ of the Jews still living in Germany, decreed by the regime,