At the time of the conference at Munich, Roosevelt was still in this indecisive mood, letting things drift until new outrages by Hitler and the Japanese later roused him to renewed efforts, sending ineffective appeals abroad and encouraging more effective military preparedness at home. Like Chamberlain and Daladier, he resigned himself to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
Abandoned and betrayed, the Czechs had little choice but to let go of the Sudetenland. During this first Czech crisis, Hitler gave solemn promises that this would be the last territorial demand he would make; he even swore to God that he would fulfill this promise! He also went on record that he only wanted Germans and not Czechs, giving the false impression that he would not grab the rest of Czechoslovakia.23 But since it had all been so easy at Munich, with the British and the French “acting like little worms” rather than real men of action, his intention to dismember the whole of Czechoslovakia was greatly strengthened. It was just a matter of timing, and of neutralizing the democracies—Britain, France, and, more remotely, the United States.
Kristallnacht
On November 7, 1938, a secretary in the German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, was fatally shot by a seventeen-year-old Polish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan, acting in response to the mistreatment of his family and seventeen thousand others by the Nazi government. In March 1938, Poland had passed a law specifying that Polish nationals who had resided outside Poland for a period of five years would be stripped of their citizenship. The law was specifically aimed at about fifty thousand Polish Jews who had been residing in Germany, and whom the Polish government did not want to return to Poland. Grynszpan’s parents, who had emigrated from Poland and had lived in Hanover since 1914, automatically became stateless. The German government regarded the Polish law as a provocation designed to dump their Jews permanently in Germany. In response, the Gestapo rounded up some seventeen thousand Polish Jews and transported them to the Polish border, but since the Polish authorities refused to accept them, they were herded into camps where they lived under deplorable conditions. Young Grynszpan wanted to send a message of protest through his desperate deed.
The Nazis were quick to retaliate. On November 9, the day the Nazi leadership celebrated the anniversary of the 1923 beer hall Putsch (coup) in Munich, Ernst vom Rath died in Paris. News of his death was conveyed to Hitler while he was eating dinner with his “old fighters” (alte Kämpfer) in the Old Town Hall in Munich. The evidence indicates that Hitler authorized a proposal by Goebbels to set in motion “spontaneous demonstrations” against the Jews throughout Germany, slyly suggesting that the storm troopers “should be allowed to have a fling.”24 Hitler then playacted his typical script of fading into the background to immunize himself in case the pogrom should backfire. The result was an orchestrated nationwide pogrom later referred to as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), after the glass shards from the shattered windows of Jewish businesses that littered the streets of Germany. The actions of party functionaries, storm troopers, and incited mobs produced widespread devastation of property and many injuries and deaths. It is estimated that 267 synagogues were burned to the ground and their contents looted or defiled. More than 7,500 businesses were vandalized, and 91 Jews were killed, while others in despair committed suicide.25 These crimes were perpetrated openly and blatantly because they were sponsored by the government. The police were helpless because orders had been given that the führer did not want them to interfere except when German lives and property were directly involved—and he did not regard German Jews as Germans.
The American reaction to Kristallnacht was one of outrage. The German ambassador in Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, cabled Berlin and said that the public in America was incensed by the violence in Germany. Close to one thousand editorials condemning the pogrom were published in newspapers all over the United States. The American Legion and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) denounced the violence in Germany. Dorothy Thompson, the first American reporter expelled from Germany for her critical articles on the Nazi regime, made an emotional plea on behalf of Herschel Grynszpan on a nationwide CBS radio program, asking, “Who is on trial in this case?” She answered, “I say we are all on trial. I say the men in Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities…. The Nazi government has announced that if any Jews anywhere in the world protest at anything that is happening further oppressive measures will be taken. They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage.”26 Roosevelt told the press that “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”27 He then recalled Ambassador Hugh Wilson from Berlin, a significant diplomatic protest that let the Nazis know that the United States condemned such anti-Jewish violence. Wilson was replaced by a chargé d’affaires, Alexander Kirk. Though diplomatic relations were not discontinued, Roosevelt showed his displeasure with Nazi mistreatments of Jews by downgrading the Berlin position to the chargé level.28 The Germans retaliated by recalling ambassador Dieckhoff, and it looked as though diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany might be broken altogether. This did not happen, but the two sides were now steadily sliding down the slippery slope to open conflict.
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