This is where it all began, exactly fifteen years before, at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. But tonight, for once, the three thousand people gathered here have not come to celebrate the past. The speakers have taken their turn onstage and all of them have screamed for vengeance. The day before yesterday, in Paris, a seventeen-year-old Jew killed a German ambassadorial secretary because the Germans had deported his father. This is no great loss, as Heydrich is well placed to know: as a staunch anti-Nazi, the ambassadorial secretary was under Gestapo surveillance. But there is an opportunity here and it must be seized. Goebbels has entrusted him with a great mission. While the evening is in full swing, Heydrich gives his orders: there will be spontaneous demonstrations during the night. All police stations must immediately contact the commanding officers of the Party and the SS. The demonstrations will not be suppressed by the police. All the police need do is ensure that there is no danger to German lives or goods (for example, synagogues will be set on fire only if there is no risk to the neighboring buildings). Jewish shops and private apartments may be destroyed, but not pillaged. The police must arrest as many Jews, especially rich ones, as the prisons can hold. As soon as they are under arrest, officers are advised to make immediate contact with the appropriate concentration camps so that they can be sent away at the earliest possible moment. This order is transmitted at 1:20 a.m.
The SA is already on its way, with the SS following. In the streets of Berlin, and all the other cities of Germany, the windows of Jewish shops are turned to flying shards of glass. Furniture is thrown from the windows of Jewish apartments, and the Jews themselves are arrested, beaten up, or even shot. Typewriters, sewing machines, even pianos, are seen smashed to pieces on the ground. The honest folk stay in their houses; the more curious go out to watch, careful not to get involved, like silent ghosts. Not that we can ever know the true nature of their silence: complicit? Disapproving? Incredulous? Satisfied? Somewhere in Germany, an eighty-one-year-old lady hears a banging at the door. When she opens to the SA, she sniggers: “Oh, what important visitors I have this morning!” But when the SA tell her to get dressed and follow them, she sits on the sofa and declares: “I won’t get dressed and I won’t go anywhere. Do with me what you will.” And when she repeats, “Do with me what you will,” the squad leader draws his pistol and shoots her in the chest. She collapses on the sofa. He puts a second bullet in her head. She falls off the sofa and rolls over on the carpet. But she is not yet dead. Her head turned toward the window, she emits a quiet groan. So he shoots her again—in the middle of her forehead this time, from four inches away.
Elsewhere, an SA guard climbs onto the roof of a sacked synagogue, brandishing scrolls of the Torah and yelling: “Burn yourselves with these, Jews!” And he throws them like carnival streamers. Already, we see the inimitable Nazi style.
In a report written by the mayor of a small town, we read: “The acts against the Jews occurred promptly and without any particular tension. Following the measures taken against them, a Jewish couple threw themselves in the Danube.”
All the synagogues are burning, but Heydrich, ever the professional, has ordered that any official records to be found in them must be sent to SD headquarters. Boxes of documents arrive at Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis love burning books, but not files. German efficiency? Who knows if the SA didn’t wipe their asses with some of those precious archives …
The next day, Heydrich sends the first confidential report to Göring: the scale of destruction is not yet measurable in terms of numbers. According to the report, 815 shops have been destroyed, 171 houses burned or destroyed, but this is only a fraction of the actual damage. One hundred and nineteen synagogues have been set on fire, another 76 completely destroyed. Twenty thousand Jews have been arrested. The number of deaths is reported as 36. The number of serious injuries is also 36. All the dead and injured are Jewish.
Heydrich has also been informed about all rapes: in these cases, the Nuremberg racial laws apply. Anyone guilty of having sex with a Jew will be arrested, kicked out of the Party, and handed over to the courts. Those who have committed murder, on the other hand, have nothing to worry about.