Part VIII

A period of comparative tranquility prevailed, especially during the first half of 1936 when Germany hosted the Olympic Games. Though there were practically no assaults against Jews during this time, the public’s callous attitude toward them became more intense and pervasive throughout the country. The late Holocaust historian David Bankier did not attribute this to Nazi propaganda, which the public viewed as “dull and tedious,” but the “wedge” that had been created between the Jews and Germans. Even while Jews were socially segregated, as long as Germans benefited economically from patronizing Jewish stores, they continued to do so, particularly those who were not fanatic antisemites. Some shopped in Jewish stores as a way to express their resistance to the Nazis, not out of concern for the welfare of the Jewish owners.

1938 and Kristallnacht

After the Olympic games concluded, antisemitism began in earnest once again, particularly from the end of 1937. The government accelerated the process of Aryanization, leading to a massive attempt to pressure Jews to leave the country. Jewish institutions, businesses and private homes were vandalized; Jews were victimized and subject to random arrests. Not to be outdone, the Nazi party began competing with the government on abusing Jews.

Between the late evening hours of November 9 and the early morning of November 10, 1938, gangs of German brownshirts and the SS publicly destroyed and firebombed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. British historian Richard J. Evans noted that the police and the SS were instructed not to stop the destruction of Jewish property or restrain those committing violent acts against German Jews.

There were a number of responses to this mass pogrom, Bankier found. The large majority of Germans denounced the attacks of “brute force,” while still strongly approving the “social segregation and economic destruction of the Jews.” Many people were humiliated and shamed by Germany because the country was embarrassed throughout the world. Some Germans attempted to “compensate” the Jews for these disgraceful acts. A number of non-Jews felt a genuine threat that they could be the next target of Nazi terror. In certain areas, the Catholic Church was attacked, when there were no Jews to assault.

Unlike any other antisemitic act, Kristallnacht stirred the educated bourgeoise from their indifference. They had been willing to tolerate the regime’s crude and absence of German Kultur, as long as they could save Germany from Bolshevism. The wanton destruction of property and violence alienated them even further from the Nazis.

Policy of Deportations And Mass Murder

The Germans did not oppose the deportation and mass murder of the Jews because they demonstrated “moral insensibility” to the plight of the Jews, Bankier concluded. Though opposition during the war had to be passive out of fear of the Gestapo or the Sicherheitsdienst, (SD) the “hardening of attitudes blurred moral boundaries,” and “social atomization precluded a collective response.” Moreover, “a good many Germans were psychologically prepared to accept the reality of genocide.”

Perhaps a letter from SS Obersturmführer Karl Kretschmer (attached to Einsatzgruppe 4a), to his wife, Soska, explains the rationale for murdering the Jews. On September 27, 1942, he wrote: “The sight of the dead (including women and children) is not very cheering. But we are fighting for the survival or non-survival of our people…. My comrades are literally fighting for the existence of our people. The enemy would do the same. I think that you understand me. As the war is in our opinion a Jewish war, the Jews are the first to feel it. Here in Russia, wherever the German soldier is, no Jew remains. You can imagine that at first, I needed some time to get to grips with this.”

A Final Note

One of the lingering questions about the Third Reich was addressed by George Mosse, one of the greatest historians of the 20th century. “All have wondered,” he said, “whether men of intelligence and education could really have believed the ideas put forward during the Nazi period. To many, the ideological bases of National Socialism were the product of a handful of unbalanced minds. To others, the Nazi ideology was a mere propaganda tactic, designed to win the support of the masses but by no means the world view of the leaders themselves. Still others have found these ideas so nebulous and incomprehensible that they have dismissed them as unimportant.

…[I]t is a fact of history that they [these ideas] were embraced by many normal men … the Nazis found their greatest support among respectable, educated people…. Historians have … regarded this [Nazi] ideology as a species of sub intellectual rather than intellectual history. It has generally been regarded as a facade used to conceal a naked and intense struggle for power, and therefore the historian should be concerned with other and presumably more important attitudes toward life. Such, however, was not the case. It was precisely that complex of particularly German values and ideas which conveyed the great issues of the times to important segments of the population.”

Germany’s Guilt

David Bankier noted: “With the collapse of the Third Reich, the question of Germany’s guilt became a burning question also in the German public. Yet in Germany itself, only a few dared to argue for collective guilt of the entire people…. From the public political viewpoint the question that arose was: What are the limits of liability of the Germans as a people for the actions of the Nazi regime? It follows that the question that troubled the people of that period was not who was guilty for the outbreak of the war, but a completely different question—whether the Germans are guilty of denial of the basic principles of human civilization.”

For chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the answer was clear as biographer Helmut Heiber points out. On February 1, 1945, Goebbels wrote: “Our people will be without guilt, and history will demand us no atonement, for we are fighting and suffering for a higher morality among peoples.” Germany had no choice but to become “the crusaders of God,” he said, because they alone could fulfill their “historic duty.” Only Germans possessed the “character and firmness to carry it out. Any other people would collapse under it.”

Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of The National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He lives in Jerusalem.