Scholars have suggested that Reichskristallnacht was a “degradation ritual,” a sadistic rite designed to let the Jews know that they were pariahs who could expect no protection from the state or their fellow citizens. Although intended primarily to intimidate the Jews, it served also to warn gentile Germans that they had best not show any sympathy for these outcasts. Fortunately for young Peter Gay and his mother, his father got the point. As a consequence of the pogrom, “a determination was born in him to do anything, no matter how illegal, to get the three of us away from the German nightmare.”
The response among the capital’s non-Jewish citizenry to this night of terror was mixed, as it was in other German cities. Some Berliners joined in the action, or at least took obvious delight in the Jews’ distress. Inge Deutschkron, a young Jewish girl living in a fashionable Berlin quarter, recalled a barber calling out to her father “Hey, you Jew!” as Herr Deutschkron inspected the damage to the Fasanenstrasse synagogue. Inge’s mother, unintimidated, wheeled on the barber and yelled, “You damn swine!” prompting admonishments from her husband to “keep quiet, for God’s sake.” Ursula von Kardorff saw some Nazi thugs beat up a young girl who had taken pictures of the pillaging. Nobody intervened to help her. Foreign journalists who witnessed the action reported that some citizens cried “Down with the Jews,” while others seemed “deeply disturbed by the events.” There were, in fact, plenty of expressions of outrage and shame. Watching the looting, a janitor was heard to remark: “They must have emptied the insane asylums and penitentiaries to find people who’d do things like that!” One group of elderly Berliners fell back in horror when SA looters offered them bottles of wine that they had just stolen from a Jewish-owned restaurant. A gentile shop owner could not understand why the police did not stop some children from throwing stones through the windows of a synagogue: “After all, it is private property.”
Expressions like this (and one could quote many more) suggest that much of the public dismay over the Night of the Broken Glass probably derived less from sympathy for the Jews than from outrage over the hooliganism of the perpetrators. These actions challenged deeply entrenched ideals of order and decorum. Some Berliners reasoned, moreover, that if the Nazis could do this with impunity to the Jews, could they not visit similar indignities on non-Jews? Or might not the Jews themselves find a way someday to punish all Germans for the Nazi crimes? As one woman predicted on the day after Reichskristallnacht: “We Germans will pay dearly for what was done to the Jews last night. Our churches, our houses, and our stores will be destroyed. You can be sure of that.”
The Nazi leadership was not uniformly pleased with the pogrom, and not just because of the ambivalent public response. Göring worried that it would be hard to replace all the fine Belgian glass smashed by the looters. Himmler was appalled by the disorderliness of the action, which he was afraid would give Germany a black eye abroad. He also hated to see the SA unleashed so soon after its recent “disciplining” by his SS. Unwilling to hold Hitler responsible for the fiasco, Himmler blamed “that airhead Goebbels,” whom he associated with the urban rowdiness and loose morals of the national capital. (Himmler, we should remember, was a Bavarian.)
Hoping to deflect further criticism of the action, especially from abroad, the Nazi leadership argued that the Jews had brought the riot on themselves by inciting “the people’s fury.” Accordingly, the regime levied a billion mark fine on Germany’s Jews to pay for the damages. In Berlin as elsewhere, local Jews were also required to pay for the cleanup following the pogrom. Goebbels called these measures “a nice bloodletting.”
But there was more to come. In the immediate aftermath of Reichskristallnacht, the Nazis instituted a new wave of “aryanization” designed to shift Jewish property to gentile hands. In Berlin the hands were eager, if discriminating: 1,200 Jewish firms were put up for auction, but 500 remained unpurchased because, even at rock-bottom prices, they were considered unattractive. Beginning in December 1938 Berlin’s Jews were forcibly segregated by a “ghetto decree,” which prohibited them from living in the government district or the wealthier western suburbs. One district after another was declared “Jew-free.” Jews’ movement in the city was further restricted by measures that banned them from theaters, movie houses, concert halls, museums, swimming pools, the exhibition buildings at the Funkturm, the Deutschlandhalle, the Sportpalast, and the Reichssportfeld. Off-limits too was the Wilhelmstrasse from Leipziger Strasse to Unter den Linden; the VoBstrasse from Hermann-Göring-Strasse to the Wilhelmstrasse, and Unter den Linden from the University to the Prussian Armory.
