numbers given at the beginning of each text correspond to the original 1939–40 numbering with which Hartshorne worked, while the numbers between parentheses refer to the current Harvard numbering. Information in the brief biographies preceding each text is taken from the cover sheets of the originals, from the accompanying letters, and the texts, as well as from the editors’ own research. It often proved impossible to discover what happened to the contributors later on, or even their date of death. However, it can be broadly assumed that, with the exception of Siegfried Wolff, who emigrated to Holland and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, all the authors survived the war, since they had been able to leave the European continent in time.
The number of footnotes had to be kept to a minimum. Basic information regarding the events of 9 November will be found in the introduction; individual names and contexts are explained only on their first occurrence. The footnotes were produced by Thomas Karlauf. The editors thank the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen Memorials for information on individual prisoners. The editors owe special thanks to Robin Hartshorne, who made the materials from his father’s papers available to us and gave us access to many documents that were used in preparing the afterword. Finally, we would also like to thank Christian Seeger of Propyläen Verlag, who spontaneously supported the project and shepherded it into print with his usual care.
Uta Gerhardt and Thomas Karlauf
Heidelberg and Berlin, June 2009
FOREWORD
The testimonies to the pogrom of 9 and 10 November 1938 and its sequels, assembled in this volume, describe what the authors deemed to be the height of Nazi barbarism. In reality, these events were but the faintest of preludes to what was about to happen to the Jews in Germany and in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, these reports carry a poignancy of their own that overwhelmingly evokes the suffocating and terror-filled atmosphere of Jewish everyday existence under the Reich during those November days and the immediate pre-war months.
These texts were written one or two years at most after the events and the countless details they relate, often vividly rendered, fit into the overall historical picture that we know so well today. Minor mistakes of interpretation in fact add to the sense of complete authenticity carried by each of these testimonies. They tell of the organized nature of these ‘outbursts of popular anger’, of the relentless and thuggish savagery of the SA, SS and Hitler Youth involved in the orgy of destruction and humiliation; they tell of the sheer perversity of the perpetrators and of their inventiveness: an old lady, for example, forced under SA supervision, hammer in hand, to herself destroy all the precious objects in her apartment; and much worse of course. But many of the witnesses also stress that Germans in different walks of life appeared embarrassed by the savagery of the regime and, at times, did not hesitate to express their empathy for the suffering of their Jewish neighbours. The voices of some of these German supporters (Marie Kahle and her family, among others) are included in the volume.
A few of the narratives offer lighter moments in the midst of the overall gloom. For instance, one cannot but be pleased in imagining the adventurous escape of Rudolf Bing and his wife from their house in Nuremberg as they slid down from their bedroom window on tied sheets while the mob was breaking down their front door. Generally, however, the narratives dwell on quite different scenes: the groups of Jews huddled in the waiting-room of the Berlin Bahnhof am Zoo, because these railway-station waiting-rooms remained some of the rare public places to which access was not yet forbidden to Jews; the endless queues of Jewish women in front of foreign consulates, as male Jews in their tens of thousands had been arrested and shipped off to camps – Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Much has been written about camp existence, even during the pre-war period, yet the wave of sudden arrests of Jews, about 40,000 of them, created new and unexpected conditions in which the sadism of the SS guards found an ideal outlet. The constant beatings for every and any reason, the hours-long roll-calls in freezing weather, the repeated ‘exercises’, which on each occasion left a few of the old and sick inmates dead, the cramped barracks, the lack of food, the torturing thirst and the one constant fixation: How fast would getting a visa lead to release from the camp and allow quick departure from the country?
At times, a few inmates themselves drifted towards very problematic choices. Thus, Kurt Lederer, a Viennese physician, arrested and sent to Buchenwald before November 1938, improvised a small ‘subcamp’ in one of the buildings, in which, with the help of the camp authorities, he kept mentally ill inmates to avoid additional chaos among the prisoners; at one point, he was in charge of 150–60 people. As controlling the mentally ill without adequate medicine became increasingly difficult, one of the SS guards offered help: the physician could choose twenty of the most difficult cases and hand them over. He did. Ultimately, some thirty-five patients disappeared: they were ‘killed in the bunker’. Did the physician foresee this outcome? Thus, even in these early testimonies, we at times approach that ‘grey zone’ which Primo Levi described many decades later when reflecting on human behaviour in the death camps.
In this volume, over and above the bare facts, readers will discover an extraordinary array of details about Jewish attitudes, perceptions, and reactions during these fateful months. They will grasp a wealth of aspects defining the atmosphere that suffused the world of central European Jewry in the penultimate phase of its existence, moments before its final doom.
Saul Friedländer
INTRODUCTION: ‘THUS ENDED MY LIFE IN GERMANY’1
Thomas Karlauf
9 November 1938
At about 9.30 on the morning of 7 November 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, entered the Hôtel de Beauharnais at 78 rue de Lille, which had since 1814 been the site of the Prussian, later the German, embassy in Paris. The porter’s wife was the first person he met in the courtyard. He said he had an important document to deliver and wanted to speak to an embassy secretary. Frau Mathes directed him to the corresponding door. Grynszpan rang and repeated his business to the aide who opened the door. After he had sat for a short time in the waiting room, he was shown into the office of the legation secretary, Ernst vom Rath.
A few minutes later the aide heard loud cries. He raced back and found the legation secretary lying wounded in the corridor. While two of his colleagues saw to the wounded man, the aide led away the assassin, who had put down his revolver and put up no resistance, and handed him over to the police officer posted in front of the embassy. The severely injured vom Rath was taken to the nearby Alma Clinic, where he was immediately operated on.
Herschel Grynszpan’s parents had emigrated from western Russia to Germany in 1911 and settled in Hanover. After the reconstitution of Poland at the end of the First World War, they acquired Polish citizenship, but remained in Hanover, where his father first worked as a tailor and later eked out a living selling junk. In the summer of 1936, when he was fifteen years old, Herschel fled these impoverished conditions and travelled through Belgium to Paris, where he was taken in by one of his father’s brothers.
In late October 1938, Grynszpan received terrible news. On 31 March, the Polish government had announced that all Poles who had lived abroad for more than five years would lose their Polish citizenship. New passport regulations were issued to that effect on 30 October. This measure was aimed above all at Polish Jews living in Germany and would have left them stranded there. The Reich Foreign Office sought to prevent this from happening by expelling Polish Jews before the deadline. On 27 and 28 October, the police and the SS arrested about 16,000 Jews throughout the Reich, transported them to a point on the Berlin–Poznan railway line just short of Zbąszyń, and then herded them over the Obra River. The Polish authorities denied them the right to cross the border, so they wandered about for days in the no-man’s land
