heart bleeds when I think about our tragedy,’ Herschel said in a note he left for his uncle on the morning of the assassination. ‘I have to protest in such a way that the whole world hears my protest, and that is what I intend to do.’2 Then he bought a revolver in a gun shop and took the metro to the German embassy. The rumours suggesting that Grynszpan’s attack might have had a private motive, since both he and vom Rath frequented homosexual milieus, have no foundation in fact.3 It was pure chance that Grynszpan was sent to the office of vom Rath, who just happened to be on duty on Mondays.
The following morning, Professor Georg Magnus, the director of the University Surgical Clinic II and his chief physician, Dr Brandt, arrived in Paris. The two doctors, sent as an ‘expression of the Führer’s sympathy, made a visible impression on Herr vom Rath’, wrote the German ambassador, Graf Welczek, in the report that he prepared for the Foreign Office that evening.4 Vom Rath’s condition, which Magnus and Brandt had described in their first bulletin as promising, deteriorated rapidly in the course of the day. Hitler, who by sending his personal physician had shown his unfailing instinct for the explosiveness of a situation, immediately promoted the young diplomat to the rank of Gesandtschaftsrat I. Klasse (legation councillor first-class), two floors up, even though he had only recently been appointed a legation secretary.
Grynszpan’s desperate act immediately reminded people of the Gustloff case which had occurred only a few years earlier. On 4 February 1936, David Frankfurter, a medical student, had fired five revolver shots at the Nazi party’s regional group leader, Wilhelm Gustloff, in his apartment in Davos, killing him as a protest against Germany’s policy regarding Jews. Gustloff’s body was transported with great ceremony from Switzerland to Schwerin, where Hitler attended the burial. In his speech, the Führer blamed international Jewry for the crime and described Gustloff as a ‘holy martyr’ and ‘the first genuine martyr for National Socialism abroad’.5 However, because the Winter Olympic Games were to begin in Garmisch-Partenkirchen two days after Gustloff’s assassination, no anti-Jewish reprisals were taken at that time.
In November 1938, there were neither Olympic Games nor foreign powers whose reactions had to be taken into account. On the contrary, after the Munich Agreement, in which the western powers had only five weeks earlier caved in and accepted the transfer of the Sudetenland to the German Reich, the National Socialist regime was more powerful than ever. Many people in Germany were awaiting the opportunity finally to strike and initiate a great, nationwide action against the Jews.
On the basis of the first reports from Paris, the Propaganda Ministry had advised the press to give the assassination ‘the greatest attention’ and to emphasize that this act ‘was certain to have the most serious consequences for Jews in Germany’. On 8 November, the tension was ratcheted up another notch, and the next day the German News Bureau announced that vom Rath was expected to die.6 In Berlin, ‘an oppressive anxiety like that felt before a storm’ prevailed that morning, as the journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary. When she asked Heinrich Mühsam, a colleague who had been dismissed and whom she had stopped to see on her way to work, whether vom Rath was likely to die, he replied: ‘Of course he will die. Otherwise the whole thing would make no sense … Don’t you know that political incidents usually occur only when everything has been prepared down to the last detail?’7
When at about 4.30 p.m. on 9 November vom Rath finally succumbed to his injuries, practically the entire state and party leadership had assembled in Munich. On the preceding evening, Hitler had inaugurated the annual commemoration of the failed putsch of 1923 by giving a speech in the Bürgerbräukeller. The programme for 9 November included an ‘informal gathering of the NSDAP leadership’ at the City Hall, whose concluding high point was to be the swearingin of new SS units in front of the Feldherrenhalle at midnight. Just how the news of the death of vom Rath – who was now referred to only as an envoy or party member – reached Munich by telephone between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. is not absolutely clear. What is clear is that at the party leadership’s dinner in the Rathaus, Hitler had an intense conversation with Goebbels, who was seated next to him.8 Immediately afterwards, Hitler surprised the other guests by leaving and having himself driven to his apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz, where he prepared for the midnight ceremony. He obviously considered it more prudent not to be directly connected with the speech that Goebbels was about to deliver.9 He could count on his propaganda minister. Hitler’s preference for blanket verbal authorization, leaving precise intentions open to interpretation, was ‘typical of the unstructured and non-formalized style of reaching decisions in the Third Reich’.10
At this time Goebbels was on top form. On 10 November, when Ernst vom Rath’s life still hung by a thread, Goebbels wrote ‘If only we could release the wrath of the people right now’, as if he couldn’t wait for the diplomat to die.11 Did the cynical Goebbels really believe in the wrath of the people? Didn’t he see it instead as an instrument that had only to be correctly manipulated? An SD memo of January 1937 concerning the situation of Jews in Germany had stated that ‘the wrath of the people is the most effective means of depriving Jews of their sense of security… . This is all the more comprehensible from a psychological point of view because Jews have learned a great deal from the pogroms of recent centuries and fear nothing more than a hostile mood that can turn against them at any time.’12 In November 1938, ‘the wrath of the people’ (Volkszorn) was one of Goebbels’s favourite expressions. When the right moment comes, he noted on the day after the riots, it would be necessary to ‘let things take their course’.13
Goebbels knew that by instigating a pogrom he could score points with Hitler. A large-scale action against the Jews would help him, put him once again at the centre of things and strengthen his position (which had been weakened by his affair with the actress Lida Baarova) in the delicate power mechanism of the Third Reich. Among all the Nazi paladins, Goebbels certainly had the keenest ear for Hitler’s obsession with driving Jews out of Germany by any means. As they sat cosily with the old guard in Hitler’s favourite café the previous evening, discussing ‘all possible questions’ until 3 a.m., the two of them had probably already arrived at an agreement on their options with regard to the attack in Paris.
In the particular situation of 9 November, Goebbels sensed a unique opportunity to steal a march on his greatest rival, Hermann Göring, who had taken over one office after another and since 1936 had enjoyed enormous power as plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan. Göring had recently proven his ruthlessness in the Blomberg–Fritsch affair and in the annexation of Austria; but during the Sudeten crisis of late September, he had for the first time been among those who hesitated and urged caution. Since then his star had been on the decline. Göring had repeatedly spoken out against anti-Jewish demonstrations because they only further aggravated the Reich’s economic difficulties, particularly with regard to the currency problem. ‘Gentlemen, I have had enough of these demonstrations,’ he said indignantly and with his characteristic theatricality during the extraordinary meeting he called two days after the pogroms. ‘They do not harm the Jews, but rather me, because as the final authority I am responsible for the entire economy.’14
Four years earlier, in the run-up to the Nuremberg party rally where the ‘race laws’ were promulgated, there had already been conflict between authorities regarding the ‘Jewish question’. Under the motto ‘This city must become free of Jews (judenfrei)’, almost every German community had come up with its own perversities, and the attacks on Jews had been threatening to get out of hand. On 20 August 1935, Hjalmar Schacht, then the Reich’s Minister of Economic Affairs, had called a meeting of leaders at which he complained about the ‘serious damage to the German economy being done by the exaggerations and excesses of anti-Semitic propaganda’.15 Consequently, interior minister Wilhelm Frick issued a statement informing regional governments that ‘individual actions against Jews … must absolutely stop.’16 However, the head of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, had already decreed that ‘in order to collect information regarding Jews in Germany … a Jewish registry should be drawn
