The Pogrom
Between the late evening hours of November 9 and the early morning of November 10, 1938, gangs of German brownshirts and the SS destroyed and firebombed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Historian Richard Evans said the police and the SS were instructed not to stop the destruction of Jewish property or restrict those committing hostile acts against German Jews. Looting was prohibited, foreign nationals were to be unharmed even if they were Jewish, and German properties had to be shielded from being damaged, which meant no fires were to be started next to Jewish stores or synagogues. But stormtroopers shattered shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses. Jewish homes and apartments were ransacked, and the contents stolen. Residents were terrorized and beaten. In many towns, gravestones in Jewish cemeteries were smashed.
Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 were sent to concentration camps. Historian David Cesarani said approximately 11,000 were transported to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. Overcrowding and malnutrition led to disease, causing a number of deaths. Those with emigration papers, individuals prepared to sell their businesses and the lawyers required to assist them, were among this initial group. The next group included combat veterans and elderly men, and then those over 50 years old and teenagers.
The objective of Kristallnacht was to coerce Jews to emigrate. Historian Christian Gerlach pointed out that out of a Jewish population of 500,000 living in Germany at the beginning of 1933, 214,000 remained by 1939. By 1941, two-thirds of the German and Austrian Jews had emigrated.
Collective Guilt
On November 12, 1938, the Germans demanded one billion Reichsmarks restitution from the German Jewish community, a 20 percent tax on all their reported assets as declared on April 16, 1938, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. This amounted to 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates. Insurance reimbursements for Jewish homes that were pillaged and demolished were appropriated by the government, leaving the onus on the individuals to assume the expenses of restoration
German Public Response
The Nazi party’s invitation for a pogrom satisfied the need for significant action against the Jews, noted German historian Wolfgang Benz. The organized vandalism was “evidently an outlet for their lust for murder and destruction, which could now be publicly indulged since it was officially sanctioned.” Elation and contentment, he said, were often the observed reaction to the aggression and mayhem, “expressed in plundering, blackmail and denunciations, and aimed especially at enriching oneself at the expense of the outlawed Jews.”
Historian David Bankier found that in the south, except in Austria, and in the primarily Catholic west, which was more populated and metropolitan, disapproval was greater than in the Protestant north, which was rural and not as populated. Those in finance were critical of the economic damage the riots caused, while the educated bourgeois feared the repercussions from abroad, which stirred them from their indifference. Until that point, they held the regime in utter disdain for its “vulgarity and lack of culture.” Nazis were tolerated because they ensured Germany from collapsing into Bolshevism.
Bankier said that for every German, this was the first instance they were “personally confronted with antisemitic violence,” which is why there is not the slightest hint of apathy on the part of any segment of society. Members of the Nazi party and “their periphery” were totally supportive of the violence, while the majority of the population denounced it. “Shame at the act, shock at its extent, and regret for the property destroyed converged to create a negative reaction,” is how he describes the response to Kristallnacht. In other words, the denunciation of the material devastation and the cost of the damages “came before the immorality of abusing defenseless civilians.”
Those who opposed the persecution, Bankier said, particularly many who had benefited from Aryanization, feared the resumption of extremism might mean they were the next to be targeted. Seizure of Jewish assets could be used as a precedent for confiscating possessions from the more affluent members of German society. The Catholic public expressed the most visible concerns, especially since there were attacks against the Catholic Church, including effigies and crosses being destroyed, when no Jews could be found during the pogrom.
Kristallnacht occurred at a point of a renewed upsurge of antisemitic terror throughout 1938, Bankier observed, especially during the summer and autumn, when Jewish institutions, homes and businesses were vandalized, houses were searched and arrests were made. Behind the pervasive distrust and dissatisfaction with the German government’s policies were a number of factors: discontent with economic conditions in Germany such as price increases and shortages of raw material, the fading enthusiasm for the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, which ceded to Germany the “Sudeten German territory” of Czechoslovakia, and concern that little could be done even at the last minute to prevent war.
A Final Note
Antisemites often rationalized violence against Jews, even murder, in terms of self-defense, explained German historian Götz Aly. In 1841, German poet Franz von Dingelstedt wrote: “Where you go, grab a Jew,/G-d’s supposed chosen few/ Christians, stick him in his ghetto/ Before he does the same to you.”
Because “Death to the Jews” and other comparable invectives were not appropriate to articulate “in polite academic circles,” Aly said, Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, expressed the vilification of the Jews in a more professional manner, that nevertheless still remained homicidal. In 1934, he complained that the “world thinks that we are fighting the Jews only to rid ourselves of financial and intellectual competition. On the contrary, our struggle is to save the race that created Germanness and to cleanse it from foreign, racially alien elements, which threaten to divert, and in part already diverted, its spiritual development in other directions. The consequences will be hard, indeed terrible for many quite honorable individuals. But is that too great a sacrifice for an entire people?”
After being confronted with persistent protests that not all Jews were the same, Aly said that in 1930 one Gauleiter, a regional leader of the Nazi party, responded with a vicious analogy: “That may be. But if someone is lying on a hotel mattress infested with bed bugs, he doesn’t ask, ‘Are you a good or bad bedbug?’ He simply crushes them all.”
Dr. Alex Grobman is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of The National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel (NCLCI).
