Gustloff’s murder, he suggested that Jews be subjected to collective punishment, but at the time this plan was not realized because of bureaucratic reservations expressed by the ministries, and especially because of Göring’s concerns. Now Göring took up the idea and on 12 November issued an order to the effect that the Jews, as ‘atonement’ for their hostile attitude toward the German people, should pay a fine of one billion Reichsmarks. The no less obscene idea that the Jews themselves not only had to see to it that the damage was repaired but also that all monies proceeding from insurance claims were to be confiscated by the Reich was also Hitler’s; it occurred to him while he was lunching with Goebbels at the Osteria. Göring implemented this proposal in his own ‘Order on the restoration of the appearance of the streets by Jewish businesses’.
Whereas the two speakers at the 12 November meeting, Göring and Goebbels, sought to outdo each other in outlining perverse means of harassment – should Jews continue to be able to walk in German forests? What restrictions should be put on their use of railway sleeping cars? – Heydrich reminded them of the question they were there to discuss. He asked whether, in view of the fact that it would probably be eight or ten years before the last Jews left Germany, it wouldn’t make sense to provide them with a special badge. Göring ridiculed this suggestion – ‘A uniform!’ – and recommended for his part the construction of ghettos, which Heydrich rejected, however, pointing to the impoverishment and criminality to which that would lead. This went on, back and forth, for hours: in its brutality, cynicism and bureaucratic laziness in conceiving regulations whose sole goal was to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, the record of the meeting on 12 November 1938 was every bit the equal of the Wannsee conference in January 1942.31
In the early afternoon, as the meeting was about to end, Göring indulged in a grim prediction of what German Jews could expect: ‘If within any foreseeable future the German Reich is involved in some conflict with another nation, it goes without saying that here in Germany we will think first of all of settling accounts with the Jews.’ Two and a half months later Hitler, in his notorious, often-cited speech delivered on 30 January 1939, which he later liked to claim was given on the day war broke out, said almost the same thing, but with significantly more aggressiveness and the crucial difference that he then immediately named ‘world Jewry’ as the instigator of a possible war: ‘If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging nations once again into a world war, then the result will be not the bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’32 It was this poisonous symbiosis of madness and calculation that made it possible for the death of a legation secretary to become the pretext for the greatest organized pogrom in modern history.
‘I am reminded of what an Aryan in a Düsseldorf cinema experienced,’ we read at the end of the memoirs of Harry Kaufman, a young man who was able to emigrate in late 1938. ‘It was in 1937, when people were not yet so firmly convinced that Jews were to blame for everything. An insurance company was showing a promotional film about the consequences of a traffic accident. After the accident took place, on the screen there appeared in large letters the question: “And who is to blame for this?” A joker in the cinema shouted: “The Jews!” People laughed so hard that for several minutes you couldn’t hear a word.’33 The mirth in the cinema gives us a good idea of the country’s mood on the eve of the pogroms: most people didn’t know what to make of anti-Semitic agitation. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to reduce somewhat the influence of Jews in economic life, as the government had already been successfully doing for years, and maybe it would actually be best for the Jews to leave Germany, sooner or later. But why this fervour, this strident rabble-rousing? After all, the Nazis’ conspiracy theories were sometimes positively ludicrous. The joker in the cinema had put it in a nutshell.
How the November pogroms were received by the German people and to what extent they approved of them is still a subject of controversy. Can the indifference that according to sources characterized the great majority of the population already be seen as an indication of ‘passive complicity’ (Kulka/Rodrigue), or does the awkward silence point instead to an ‘embarrassed distance’ (Frank Bajohr)?34 In endeavouring to arrive at a balanced judgement it should not be forgotten – as Peter Longerich recently emphasized again – that in the Third Reich there was no such thing as public opinion built on the free expression of personal views. Under National Socialism, ‘public opinion’ always meant ‘the public opinion staged, controlled and manipulated by the regime’. In this area, ‘in which the guiding principles and interpretive models were reproduced’, it was very dangerous to confide one’s views to another person unless one was sure that this other person shared them.35
As a result, there are few documents that provide reliable answers to the question as to what most Germans thought in November 1938. The government-commissioned reports on the situation and public opinion, including reports made by local offices regarding the success of the measures taken, are sources that have to be evaluated critically, as are the ‘Deutschland-Berichte der SOPADE’ produced by the leadership of the Social Democratic Party in exile in Prague. Although the idealists in exile tended, for understandable reasons, to greatly overestimate Germans’ covert resistance to Hitler, we nonetheless have to agree with their general conclusion that ‘the riots were strongly condemned by the great majority of the German people.’36 But this condemnation was nowhere expressed in open protests.
The collection of materials published last year by the Wiener Library made a significant contribution to our understanding of the initial impression from the point of view of the victims.37 Immediately after the outbreak of the pogroms, the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam had begun to collect all the information it could get its hands on in order to find out exactly what had happened and which Jewish communities were affected in what way by the catastrophe. The exchange of personal communications, names and dates was intended to help put an end to uncertainty concerning the survival of relatives and friends.
At its outset, the present book also reaches back seventy years, but has an entirely different background. On 7 August 1939, nine months after the pogroms, the New York Times reported, under the headline ‘Prize for Nazi Stories’, that scholars at Harvard University were seeking eyewitness accounts of life in Germany before and after 1933 and to this end had organized a competition with prizes totalling one thousand dollars. Anyone who could report, on the basis of his own experiences, on how everyday life had changed after Hitler’s seizure of power, was eligible to enter the contest. These reports could be presented anonymously or under a pseudonym, and were to be handled with strict confidentiality – ‘but they must be authentic’.
‘My Life in Germany Before and After 30 January 1933’ – that was the name given the prize competition, and the detailed invitation, written in German, to submit entries which was subsequently distributed all over the world by Jewish information offices and aid associations outlined the project very exactly. The life stories should be about eighty pages long, ‘as simple as possible, direct, complete, and vividly recounted’. Only ‘real occurrences’ should be described, and therefore anyone who had ‘a good memory, a gift for sharp observation and a knowledge of people’ could take part, even if he had never written anything before. ‘Quotations from letters, notebooks, and other personal writings give your description the desired credibility and completeness.’ Those who did not win a prize could also be sure that their ‘work could be very useful for the study of the new Germany and National Socialism’. The deadline for submissions was 1 April 1940.
Figure 1: Prize advertisement
More than 250 manuscripts from all over the world were received in Cambridge. Of these, 155 came from the United States, 96 of them from New York alone; 31 authors gave return addresses in Great Britain, and 20 sent their contributions from Palestine. Six manuscripts
