Not one nation, incredibly, reached out to Germany's Jews.
By ERVIN BIRNBAUMKristallnacht 224.88(photo credit: AP)
The assassination of the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, by the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan in the beginning of November 1938 unquestionably was a crime. Under normal circumstances, Grynszpan would have been arraigned in court to receive his just rewards. But in November 1938 circumstances were not normal anymore. The German reaction to the act of a Jewish youngster, indignant at the scandalous treatment of his parents at their hands, served as a pretext for murderous mass violence.
Even a year or two earlier such large-scale violence would have been inconceivable. Indeed, in February 1936, a Jewish youth, David Frankfurter, assassinated Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi gauleiter in Switzerland, without provoking any noticeable ripples. But by November 1938, we find ourselves in a totally different landscape. Although the person murdered in 1938 was of lower official standing in the Nazi hierarchy than the Swiss gauleiter who headed a Nazi country apparatus, the Nazis found conditions ripe to utilize Vom Rath's murder as an excellent pretext for their brutal vandalism of the Jewish community.
By then, internal developments within Germany, as well as international developments, had conditioned the typical German to accept highly intensified measures of Jewish persecution. In his revealing book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen describes "the steady anti-Semitic barrage" to which the German population had been exposed since the Nazi rise to power in January 1933. As of September 1935, with the passage of Nuremberg Laws relegating Jews to second-class citizenship, highly respected organs of law and cheap propaganda became inextricably interlaced. Anti-Jewish incitement intensified with the end of the Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936, during which all external signs of anti-Semitism had been carefully covered up.
"More and more localities announce themselves to be Judenrein," writes Goldhagen. Signs warning "Jews to enter at their own risk" became ever more widespread. Movies and cartoons depicting Jews as vermin, extortionists and rapists became ordinary fare. Loyalty to the Führer became unconditional and presented as catechism not only to the German armed forces and to the Hitler Youth, but throughout the national educational system from kindergarten to university.
The molding of the Jewish image in its most classical satanic form, as the crawling, underhanded creature who seeks the destruction of the pure, naïve and trusting Aryan, had its own impeccable rhythm that would have produced the desired results sooner or later. What expedited the process was the remarkable tolerance exhibited by the enlightened nations of the world for the public display of progressive rejection of the Jew within the fabric of German society, and the destruction of Jewish economic independence within the larger context of the German nation. The Jew was turned into a pariah.
The turning point of German anti-Semitism from the stage of psychological and social isolation to massive physical isolation and violence is clearly marked by the Evian Conference of July 1938. The paralysis of the democratic nations searching for a solution to the Jewish refugee problem proved to the Germans the indifference of the democratic nations to the fate of the Jews. A Nazi observer at the conference returned to Berlin with the glowing message to Hitler: "You can do what you like with the Jews, nobody is interested in them." The German public quickly got the message. An upsurge of attacks on Jews, destruction of their property, public humiliations and arrests came in the wake of Evian.
Emboldened by the change in social climate and by the world's passive response to German anti-Semitism, the Nazi government began taking measures at the end of October 1938 to expel some 20,000 resident Polish Jews who did not have German citizenship. The act was carried out with utmost brutality. One of the victims recounted at the Eichmann trial how his family members were taken from their home in the middle of the night with only the clothing on their backs:
"The streets were black with people shouting Juden raus to Palestine... The SS men were whipping us, they hit those who lingered, and blood was flowing on the road. They treated us in a most brutal manner... I was hit and fell into a ditch. My son helped me, and he said: 'Run, father, run, or you will die.'"
Thousands of people were taken to the Polish border. By the town of Zbonszyn, the Germans drove them over the border and left them there without food or protection against the cold for three days. The Poles eventually put them up in stables.
From Zbonszyn, Zindel Grynszpan wrote to his son, Herschel, in Paris, relating the hardships and suffering to which his family and thousands of others had been exposed until their transfer to Poland was completed. Young Herschel, in his desire to call the world's attention to the plight of the Jews, acquired a gun and entered the German embassy determined to shoot the ambassador. When this proved impossible, he shot Vom Rath, the third secretary. Ironically, Vom Rath was at that point under discreet Gestapo investigation for suspicion of sympathies toward Jews. Two days later, on November 9, 1938, Vom Rath died. The Nazis were given the pretext they sought for the next devastating action against the Jews.
That same day the following message was sent from Gestapo headquarters to the district stations: "At very short notice, actions against Jews, especially against their synagogues, will take place throughout the whole of Germany. They are not to be hindered."
KRISTALLNACHT, THE Night of Broken Glass, though initiated and spurred on by the SS, could not have taken place without widespread popular support in Germany that demanded thorough preparation. The generally accepted belief that the night of November 9, 1938, was a "spontaneous" outbreak of popular indignation in reaction to a specific Jewish crime is a legend invented to cover up barbarity unprecedented in the modern age in the Western world. For on that night 267 synagogues were gutted by fire, 7,500 Jewish shops were looted, hundreds of homes were wrecked, 91 Jews were killed and at least 20,000 Jews (some claim 70,000, and one source offers the figure 200,000) were arrested to be sent to concentration camps.
What, however, proved spontaneous was the readiness of the ordinary Germans to join in the brutalities without undue provocation and encouragement. "Even youths and children contributed to the attacks, some undoubtedly with their parents' blessings. Hundreds and thousands more watched the night's assault, as well as the next day, when the perpetrators ceremoniously marched Jews off to concentration camps," writes Goldhagen.
"The main streets of the city were a positive litter of shattered plate glass," wrote an observer. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers called by Goering on November 12, an insurance expert estimated the damage of shattered plate glass belonging to non-Jewish landlords alone at $6 million. Accordingly, the night of November 9 became marked in history as Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass.
After the event Goering regretted the hasty action, which brought enormous damage to Jewish property at the hands of the Germans themselves. Adding insult to injury, he rectified the situation by imposing on the Jewish community a penalty of 1 billion marks ($400 million), to be paid to the Reich for the damage.
Since it became clear that the impoverished Jewish community would not be capable of additional payments in the future and since German anti-Semitism had escalated to the phase of physical violence, Goering ordered that henceforth anti-Semitic actions be confined to specialists and the process of persecution and murder be handled by professional tacticians. The time of the skilled professionals, like Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich, had arrived.
Events of Kristallnacht brought to the world's attention three concentration camps that, according to a Reuters dispatch of August 11, 1938 as reported in the Manchester Guardian, were in preparation since the beginning of August: Dachau near Munich, Sachsenhausen near Berlin and Buchenwald near Weimar.
To derive our lessons for the present and the future, it may be of value to note that the paralysis of the democratic countries at the Evian Conference was exhibited barely two weeks prior to the construction of the first concentration camps. Hitler proceeded to act immediately in the face of the expected verbal protests of the hypocritical world that would bewail the deplorable behavior of Nazi hooligans, but would not take any concrete steps to penalize or to restrain Germany.
The deep concern of numerous observers with the mild-handed treatment meted out to Iran today by the nations of the world, despite its threatening posture in offensive nuclear development and its brazen public denial of Israel's right to exist, is anchored in those fateful days that link Evian, Munich and Kristallnacht. The three historic events demonstrate how pious wishes of powerful and benevolent powers can remain purely in the realm of aspirations not translatable into action in the face of a determined stand by an authoritarian ruler. In each case the powers issued verbal protests against aggression of any sort. They voiced faith in the unerring rationality, goodwill, yearning for peace and utmost distaste for bloodshed and war embedded in every person. The ultimate result proved them wrong, but the process seemed to be eminently logical, and the hopes and aspirations justified and achievable to the inveterate optimists to the very end.
Each breach of humanitarian ethics, of international agreements and conventions by the dictatorial ruler could find some sort of justification in the camp drawing on the well of unlimited trust in the basic goodness and rationality of all men. That noble, but so thoroughly misplaced trust, prevented any effective measure that would call evil to a halt. And examples of evil were not lacking.
Diplomatic dispatches to the British Foreign Office of those days report the mistreatment of thousands of prisoners in the camps. "One man suffering from heart trouble was unable to walk rapidly enough to suit the guards, and his fellow prisoners were ordered to drag him face downward, tearing his flesh until his features were unrecognizable." Another dispatch tells of the relatives of victims who were required to pay three marks ($1.20) for the ashes of their loved ones. To the protests from several nations, Goebbels declared once again: "If there is any country that believes it has not enough Jews, I shall gladly turn over to it all our Jews." As Arthur Morse succinctly states in his book, While Six Million Died, "There were no takers."
After the atrocities of Kristallnacht, US president Franklin Roosevelt remarked: "I could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th-century civilization." Yet the unbelievable was just about to happen - perhaps precisely because man could not believe it, perhaps because man did not put a stop to the downhill slide until he found himself, to his amazement, caught in the inferno. In those fateful days Chaim Weizmann declared to the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax: "They are burning the synagogues now, tomorrow they will burn British cathedrals." The world chose to live complacently and did not pay attention to parched scrolls and manifestations of inhumanity.
And so Hitler moved forward relentlessly from smaller to bigger things at ever increasing speed: In 1933 he began testing man's moral fiber by his first strikes at the Jews; 1934 brought the rearmament of Germany; in 1935 he declared Jews to be subhuman; 1936 saw his army occupying the demilitarized Rhineland; 1937 brought the Rome-Berlin Axis uniting for military aggression; in 1938 Hitler swallowed Austria, dug the grave for Czechoslovakia, sent thousands of Jews to concentration camps and began his orgy of violence against a defenseless people.
In the summer of 1936 the admiring world congratulated Hitler's Germany on gracefully hosting them at a dazzling display in the Olympic Games. In late 1938, Neville Chamberlain referred to Hitler as an honorable gentleman.
One wonders, in weighing one against the other - Germany's degeneration and mankind's unbelievably blind disinterest - which was more incredible?
The writer, a leader on the Exodus 1947, is founder and director of She'arim Netanya, the first outreach program to Russian olim in Israel. At the request of David Ben-Gurion, he founded and directed the English Language College Preparatory School at Midreshet Sde Boker.
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