Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (43 page)

The SS had been put on alert by Heydrich’s message. After the midnight swearing-in ceremony of the new SS recruits which on that same night had taken place in Innsbruck as in all other major cities of the Reich, the men reassembled in civilian clothes around 2:30 in the morning, under the command of SS-Oberführer Hanns von Feil. Within minutes a special SS murder commando, divided into three groups, was on its way to No. 4-5 Gänsbacher Strasse, where some of the more prominent Jewish families of Innsbruck still lived. According to SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schintlholzer, he “received instructions at the Hochhaus in Innsbruck from regional leader Feil to kill the Jews on Gänsbacher Strasse silently.”

At No. 4 Gänsbacher Strasse the engineer Richard Graubart was stabbed to death in the presence of his wife and daughter. On the second floor of the same building, Karl Bauer was dragged into the hall, stabbed, and beaten with pistol butts; he died on the way to the hospital. On Anichstrasse, the turn of Richard Berger, the president of the Jewish community in Innsbruck, came approximately at the same time. Berger was taken out in pajamas and winter coat and pushed into an SS car that was supposedly taking him to Gestapo headquarters. But the car started off in a different direction. According to SS-Untersturmführer Walter Hopfgartner: “We drove west through Anichstrasse, over the university bridge, in the direction of Kranebitten. During the trip, Berger asked where we were going, since this was not the way to the Gestapo. Berger, who, understandably, was somewhat nervous, was calmed down by the men in the back of the car…. Suddenly Lausegger announced, in a voice sufficiently loud so that all could hear him, that ‘no firearms are to be used.’ This upset Berger again and he asked what we wanted from him, but he was quieted down again…. After Lausegger’s statement, I realized immediately that Berger was to be killed.”

At a bend of the Inn River, Berger was dragged out of the car, battered with pistols and stones, and thrown into the river. Against instructions he was shot at, but the subsequent Gestapo investigation established that by then he was already dead.

All the SS men involved in the Innsbruck murders were old-timers fanatically devoted to Hitler, extreme anti-Semites and exemplary members of the order. Gerhard Lausegger, the man in charge of the squad that killed Berger, had been a member of a student corporation and had “headed the federation of all dueling companies at the University of Innsbruck.” On March 11 he had been among the men who, just before the arrival of the Wehrmacht, seized the provincial administration hall of the city.

Heydrich’s report of November 11 indicated that thirty-six Jews had been killed and the same number seriously injured throughout the Reich. “One Jew is still missing, and among the dead there is one Jew of Polish nationality and two others among those injured.”
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The real situation was worse. Apart from the 267 synagogues destroyed and the 7,500 businesses vandalized, some ninety-one Jews had been killed all over Germany and hundreds more had committed suicide or died as a result of mistreatment in the camps.
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“The action against the Jews was terminated quickly and without any particular tensions,” the mayor of Ingolstadt wrote in his monthly report on December 1. “As a result of this measure a local Jewish couple drowned themselves in the Danube.”
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For the Würzburg Gestapo nothing was self-evident. In an order issued on December 6 to the heads of the twenty-two administrative districts of Gau Main-Franken (Franconia) as well as to the mayors of Aschaffenburg, Schweinfurt, Bad Kissingen, and Kitzingen, the secret police demanded immediate details about Jews who had committed suicide “in connection with the action against the Jews”; question no. 3 required information about “the presumed motive.”
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In a secret letter addressed on November 19 to the Hamburg Prosecutor General about the events of November 9–11, the Ministry of Justice stated that the destruction of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, as well as of Jewish shops and dwellings, if not committed for purposes of looting, were
not
to be prosecuted. The murder of Jews and the infliction of serious bodily damage were to be prosecuted “only if committed for selfish reasons.”
²⁷

The decisions of the courts and the various administrative decrees regarding the (lack of) culpability of the murderers were given their adequate “conceptual framework” in the report prepared by the Supreme Court of the NSDAP of February 13, 1939. The report stated that on November 10, at 2
A.M.
, Goebbels had been informed of the first killing, that of a Polish Jew. He was told that something had to be done to stop what could become a dangerous development. According to the report, Goebbels’s answer was in terms of “not getting upset because of a dead Jew.” The report then adds the following comment: “At this point in time, most of the killings could still have been hindered by an additional order. As it was not given, this very fact as well as the remarks expressed [by Goebbels] lead to the conclusion that the final result was intended or at least taken into account as possible and desirable. This being the case, the individual perpetrator has put into action not merely what he assumed to be the intention of the leadership, but what he rightly recognized as such, even though it was not clearly stated. For this he cannot be punished.”
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Was the Nazi action perceived by its perpetrators as a step that could hasten the emigration of the Jews from the Reich or possibly as an initiative aimed at furthering some other, more encompassing policy? After the pogrom Göring, on Hitler’s orders, would make the most of the Paris shooting. But despite prior SD plans about the use of violence, nothing systematic seems to have been considered before the unleashing of the action of November 9. At that moment total, abysmal hatred appears as the be-all and end-all of the onslaught. The only immediate aim was to hurt the Jews as badly as the circumstances allowed, by all possible means: to hurt them and to humiliate them. The pogrom and the initiatives that immediately followed have quite rightly been called “a degradation ritual.”
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An explosion of sadism threw a particularly lurid light on the entire action and its sequels; it burst forth at all levels, that of the highest leadership and that of the lowliest party members. The tone of Goebbels’s diary entries was unmistakable; the same tone would suffuse the November 12 conference.

An uncontrollable lust for destruction and humiliation of the victims drove the squads roaming the cities. “Organized parties moved through Cologne from one Jewish apartment to another,” the Swiss consul reported. “The families were either ordered to leave the apartment or they had to stand in a corner of a room while the contents were hurled from the windows. Gramophones, sewing machines, and typewriters tumbled down into the streets. One of my colleagues even saw a piano being thrown out of a second-floor window. Even today [November 13] one can still see bedding hanging from trees and bushes.
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Even worse was reported from Leipzig: “Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the movable effects to the streets,” the American consul in Leipzig reported, “the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw away many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding the horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight…. The slightest manifestation of sympathy evoked a positive fury on the part of the perpetrators, and the crowd was powerless to do anything but turn horror-stricken eyes from the scene of abuse, or leave the vicinity. These tactics were carried out the entire morning of November 10 without police intervention and they were applied to men, women and children.”

The same scenes were repeated in the smallest towns: the sadistic brutality of the perpetrators, the shamefaced reactions of some of the onlookers, the grins of others, the silence of the immense majority, the helplessness of the victims. In Wittlich, a small town in the Moselle Valley in the western part of Germany, as in most places, the synagogue was destroyed first: “The intricate lead crystal window above the door crashed into the street and pieces of furniture came flying through doors and windows. A shouting SA man climbed to the roof, waving the rolls of the Torah: ‘Wipe your asses with it, Jews,’ he screamed while he hurled them like bands of confetti on Karnival.” Jewish businesses were vandalized, Jewish men beaten up and taken away: “Herr Marks, who owned the butcher shop down the street, was one of the half dozen Jewish men already on the truck…. The SA men were laughing at Frau Marks who stood in front of her smashed plate-glass window [with] both hands raised in bewildered despair. ‘Why are you people doing this to us?’ She wailed at the circle of silent faces in the windows, her lifelong neighbors. ‘What have we ever done to you?’”
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Soon the Jewish masses of occupied Poland would offer the choicest targets to the unquenchable rage that, stage by stage, propelled the Greater German Reich against the hapless European Jews.
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Once again Hitler had followed the by-now familiar pattern he had displayed throughout the 1930s. Secretly he gave the orders or confirmed them; openly his name was in no way to be linked with the brutality. Having refrained from any open remark about the events on November 7–8, Hitler also avoided any reference to them in his midnight address to SS recruits in front of the Feldherrnhalle on November 9. At the time of his address, synagogues were already burning, shops being demolished, and Jews wounded and killed throughout the Reich. A day later, in his secret speech to representatives of the German press, Hitler maintained the same rule of silence regarding events that could not but be on the mind of every member of the audience;
³³
he did not even speak at Rath’s funeral. The fiction of a spontaneous outburst of popular anger imposed silence. Any expression of Hitler’s wish or even any positive comment would have been a “Führer order.” Of Hitler’s involvement the outside world—including trustworthy party members—was, at least in principle, to know nothing.

However, knowledge of Hitler’s direct responsibility quickly trickled out from the innermost circle. According to the diaries of Ulrich von Hassell, the former German ambassador to Rome and an early opponent of the regime, many conservatives were outraged by the events, and the minister of finance of Prussia, Johannes Popitz, protested to Göring and demanded the punishment of those responsible for the action. “My dear Popitz, do you want to punish the Fuhrer?” was Göring’s answer.
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At the low end of the party hierarchy some justifications were rapidly concocted. On November 23 a Hüttenbach Blockleiter (block leader), who was also the chronicler of party history in his town, was ordered by his district party leader to collect incriminating evidence against the local Jews. Only two days later he had completed his research and could report that the task had been accomplished: “Herewith,” the Blockleiter wrote, “I am sending some material about the Jews in Hüttenbach. I don’t know whether I hit upon the right things. I couldn’t do it more quickly, if what was wanted was an overview of these racial foreigners and about how they behaved in Hüttenbach.” At that point the Blockleiter, with engaging openness, voiced some doubts about his own qualifications as a full-fledged historian: “I may have more material here, but I cannot become a historian along with my professional work and in any case the necessary documentation is missing.”
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Incidentally, the same local historian had not yet exhausted his efforts, or his worries, regarding the events of November 9 and 10. On February 7, 1939, he announced to his district party leader that he had completed the chronicle for the year 1938. The November events he memorialized as follows: “During the night of November 9, 1938, Party member v. Rath died in Paris as a result of the cowardly aggression perpetrated by the Jew Grünspan. During the same night all the Jews’ synagogues went up in flames all over Germany; Party member Ernst v. Rath was avenged. Early, at 5 in the morning, District Party Leader Party Comrade Waltz and Mayor Party Comrade Herzog, District Propaganda Leader Party Comrade Büttner and Sturmführer Brand, arrived and set the Jewish temple on fire. Party members from the local section gave energetic help. But this sentence was criticized by a few Party members: it should not be written that Party members Walz, Herzog, and Büttner/Brand set the synagogue on fire, but the people did it. That’s right. But as the writer of a chronicle I should and I must report the truth. It would easily be possible to take this page out and to prepare another entry. I ask you, my District Party Leader, how should I prepare this entry and how should it be worded? Heil Hitler.”
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II

On the morning of November 12, Goebbels summed up the events of the previous days in the
Völkischer Beobachter
. “The Jew Grynszpan,” so the last paragraph ran, “was the representative of Jewry. The German vom Rath was the representative of the German people. Thus in Paris Jewry has fired on the German people. The German government will answer legally but harshly.”
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The German government’s legal answers were hurled at the Jews throughout the remaining weeks of 1938; they were accompanied by three major policy interpretations: the first on November 12, at the top-echelon conference convened by Göring; the second on December 6, in Göring’s address to the Gauleiters; the third on December 28, in a set of new rules also announced by Göring. All of Göring’s initiatives and interpretations were issued on Hitler’s explicit instructions.

It has often been assumed that Göring had lost much of his influence since the summer of 1938 as a result of his relatively moderate attitude in the Sudeten crisis.
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The new star among Hitler’s underlings was Ribbentrop, the presumptuous new foreign minister, who was convinced that the British would continue to back down from crisis to crisis. It may well be, however, that within the new scheme of things following Munich, Göring’s role as coordinator of Jewish matters had become essential for Hitler’s plans. Göring was to orchestrate all measures that would make Jewish life in Germany untenable and accelerate Jewish emigration. The constant threat of further anti-Jewish violence and the need to find places of refuge for the fleeing Jews would mobilize “world Jewry” and convince it to tone down its anti-German incitement; this in turn would persuade the Western governments that compromise solutions to Hitler’s new demands were a necessity. In other words, Hitler may well have thought that anti-Jewish pressure in Germany would ensure the success of Nazi foreign aggressions, due to what he believed to be the influence of world Jewry on the policies of the Western democracies. And Hitler’s forthcoming declarations about settling Jews in some Western colonies, and his public threats to exterminate them in case of war, also indicate that his belief in the influence of world Jewry in Paris, London, and Washington was an essential part of his worldview.