the centralization of state intervention, the prevention of spontaneous actions and the protection of German economic interests.
All the steps taken served one and the same goal, about which there was general agreement: the Jews had to be expelled. ‘Jews have to be expelled from Germany, indeed from Europe as a whole,’ Goebbels wrote after a long conversation with Hitler at the end of November 1937. ‘It will take a while, but it will and must happen. The Führer has made up his mind on this point.’18 The question was only in what way this goal could best be achieved without inflicting too much damage on Germans. Moreover, the state and party leadership were confident that in implementing the necessary measures they could count on the support of the population.
At the previously mentioned meeting with the minister for economic affairs in August 1935, Adolf Wagner, the Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria, acting as the Führer’s representative, put on record his view that 80 per cent of the population called for ‘a solution to the Jewish question in line with the party’s programme; the Reich government has to respond to this demand, otherwise it will suffer a loss of authority.’ To reassure other participants in the meeting who were less inclined to take immediate action, he added that ‘this need not happen all at once.’19
With the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the ‘Jewish question’ acquired a new dynamic, and suddenly everything had to move very fast. Of the approximately 520,000 Jews who had been living in Germany in 1933, only about 360,000 were still in the country; now there were in addition some 190,000 Austrian Jews (of whom about 170,000 lived in Vienna). The Germans immediately increased the pressure. In a very short time, they not only implemented in Austria all the laws and regulations that had for the past five years made life increasingly difficult for Jews in the Old Reich, but also introduced numerous new rules to coerce the Jews to hand over all their possessions and then leave the country. In the spring of 1938, there were further, even more violent, riots and, in the context of the so-called ‘June action’, 1,500 Jews were sent to concentration camps. When at the international conference on refugees organized by the United States in Evian in July, all of the thirty-two participating states declared more or less openly that they could not increase their immigration quotas, the German press commented scornfully on the conference’s failure and let it be known that, since no other country would accept the Jews, no meddling in the question of how Germans dealt with the ‘Jewish problem’ would be tolerated. In August, the first Central Office for Jewish Emigration was set up under the direction of Adolf Eichmann.
It was against the background of the stepping-up of anti-Jewish measures in Austria and the successful expulsion of the 16,000 Polish Jews at the end of October, the prestige won in Munich, the inaction by the international community, and also the growing pressure among party members, especially in the ranks of the SA and the Hitler Youth, to finally get rid of the Jews that, on the evening of 9 November, Hitler unleashed his propaganda minister. The fanatical thirty-minute hate speech that Goebbels delivered (and of which no verbatim record has been preserved) before the party bigwigs who had gathered in the great hall of the Munich Rathaus was received, as Goebbels himself noted in his diary, with thunderous applause: ‘They all immediately dashed to the telephones. Now the people will act.’20
In his speech, Goebbels had made it clear that the Nazi party would have to ‘organize and implement’ everything, but should not ‘outwardly appear to be the instigator of the demonstrations’.21 The district and local group leaders and SA leaders throughout the Reich were instructed to set the corresponding actions in motion – and these instructions were understood to mean also that ‘Jewish blood should flow.’22 In the meantime, Hitler received the national leader of the SS and the head of the German police in his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz. Himmler was obviously surprised. Although he had himself given an inflammatory anti-Jewish speech to the SS Standarte ‘Deutschland’ the preceding evening – ‘We will force them out with unparalleled ruthlessness’23 – he found it annoying that Goebbels had been quicker to seize the opportunity and had been able to use the Paris attack to further his own interests. In this awkward situation, Himmler fell back on his position as supreme protector of order: a clever tactic that led to the SS – and in particular the head of the secret police and the SD, Reinhard Heydrich – emerging from the events of November as the great winners. When Heydrich, who had been awakened in his hotel room around 11.30 p.m. so that he could examine reports from the Munich Gestapo, asked how the police and the SS should respond, Hitler told him – on Himmler’s advice, according to Ian Kershaw24 – that the SS should keep out of it, but that the police should ensure that the pogrom was carried out in an orderly way.
Heydrich did not have much time to transform his orders into specific actions. His telegraph to all police chiefs, which went out around 1.20 a.m. – ‘Flash, urgent, pass on immediately!’ – was completely unambiguous. The police forces received orders not to hinder the ‘demonstrations’ likely to occur throughout the Reich, and to intervene only if German property was endangered. ‘Businesses and apartments belonging to Jews are only to be destroyed, not plundered.’ The police actions were to be led by the local state police departments or by security police inspectors, who were also expected to see to it that ‘as soon as the events of this night allow the use of the regular officials’, as many Jews as ‘could be accommodated in the available holding cells’ were immediately arrested. At first, only male Jews who were healthy, not too old, and if possible, wealthy, were to be arrested and transported to the concentration camps concerned after consultation with camp officials.25 Barely 64 hours had passed since the shooting in Paris.
On the morning of 10 November, synagogues all over Germany were put to the torch. The fire brigade was allowed to intervene only if the fires threatened to spread to neighbouring buildings. Thousands of apartments were demolished during that night, and thousands of Jewish businesses were smashed to bits in the course of the following day. The broken glass that piled up in the streets gave the night the ironically euphemistic name of Kristallnacht, ‘the night of broken glass’. It is estimated that 400 people were murdered or driven to suicide. About 40,000 Jews were arrested, and 30,000 of them were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen,26 where they were subjected to the cruellest harassment. Those who were lucky enough to be able to prove that they had the necessary visas and were about to emigrate were released; the number of Jews who died in concentration camps as a result of the ‘November action’ is estimated to be about 1,000. Whereas in the first half of 1938 only about 14,000 Jews had emigrated from Germany, the number of emigrants now rose dramatically. By the end of 1939, about 100,000 Jews had left Germany, and another 100,000 had left Austria. Most of those who remained were poor or old.
During lunch in the Osteria in the Schwabing area of Munich, Goebbels gave the Führer a report. ‘He approves of everything. His views are very radical and aggressive.’27 Others were less enthusiastic; Göring, who had travelled back from Berlin the previous night and had not been informed, telephoned Hitler to complain about the enormous economic damage that had been incurred. While Goebbels was busy winding down the actions before ‘mob rule took over’28 and instructing the press to play down the events – ‘no big headlines on page one, no pictures for the time being’29 – Göring was preparing for the Saturday morning meeting, at which the next steps to be taken against the Jews were to be coordinated with account taken of economic considerations. The declared goal of the 12 November meeting, which lasted several hours and in which representatives of all the departments concerned participated – over a hundred persons from the interior, finance, economic affairs and justice ministries, from the Foreign Office, the Reichsbank, and so on – was the complete exclusion of Jews from German economic life. The idea of the new measures was to isolate them and put them under pressure so they would be forced to leave Germany rapidly and in large numbers. Heydrich had had Eichmann specially brought in from Vienna in order to report on his experiences there.
The decisions made on 12 November can once again be traced in essence back to Hitler himself. In 1936, in his memo on the Four-Year Plan, he had already demanded that ‘the whole of Jewry be held responsible for all
