Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

All morning new reports of the destruction poured in. Goebbels assessed the situation with Hitler. ‘I weigh up our current measures with the Führer. Allow to strike further or stop. That’s now the question.’⁶⁷ In the light of the mounting criticism of the ‘action’, also — though naturally not for humanitarian reasons — from within the top ranks of the Nazi leadership, the decision was taken to halt it.⁶⁸ Goebbels prepared a decree to end the destruction, cynically commenting that if it were allowed to continue there was the danger ‘that the mob would start to appear’.⁶⁹ He reported to Hitler, who was, Goebbels claimed, ‘in agreement with everything. His opinions are very radical and aggressive.’ ‘With minor alterations, the Führer approves my edict on the end of the actions… The Führer wants to move to very severe measures against the Jews. They must get their businesses in order themselves. Insurance will pay them nothing. Then the Führer wants gradually to expropriate the Jewish businesses.’⁷⁰

By that time, the night of horror for Germany’s Jews had brought the demolition of around 100 synagogues, the burning of several hundred others, the destruction of at least 8,000 Jews’ shops and vandalizing of countless apartments. The pavements of the big cities were strewn with shards of glass from the display windows of Jewish-owned stores; merchandise, if not looted, had been hurled on to the streets. Private apartments were wrecked, furniture demolished, mirrors and pictures smashed, clothing shredded, treasured possessions wantonly trashed. ⁷¹ The material damage was estimated soon afterwards by Heydrich at several hundred million Marks.⁷²

The human misery of the victims was incalculable. Beatings and bestial maltreatment, even of women, children, and the elderly, were commonplace. A hundred or so Jews were murdered. One woman in Innsbruck told despairingly on 10 November of how a troop of young men had broken into the apartment she shared with her husband and four-year-old daughter. They knew none of their assailants. ‘What do you want of me?’ her husband had asked. He received no answer. Ten minutes later she found him stabbed to death. The Jewish Community was allowed only to enter, as cause of death, ‘wound in the chest’ (Brustverletzung).⁷³ It was little wonder that suicide was commonplace that terrible night. Some tried, but did not manage, to kill themselves. One Jewish doctor in Vienna, held back from throwing himself from a third-storey window, slit his wrists and throat, but could still not end his own life, and was hauled off to a psychiatric clinic.⁷⁴ Many more succumbed to brutalities in the weeks following the pogrom in the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where the 30,000 male Jews rounded up by the police had been sent as a means of forcing their emigration.⁷⁵ Hans Berger, a forty-year-old from Wiesbaden, was one of those taken into custody by the Gestapo on 10 November. Like those arrested with him, he was subjected to indescribable sadism and torture by the camp-guards in Buchenwald, where he was interned. To maximize the humiliation, the prisoners — many suffering from chronic diarrhoea — were left to stand in their own excrement. It was as if the dirt and stench were to emphasize the separation of the Jews from the ‘healthy’, ‘clean’, and ‘wholesome’ German ‘national community’.⁷⁶ Three weeks of hell on earth were finally over for Herr Berger when he was eventually released to emigrate to Brussels, and from there to southern France. He, his wife, and two sons, were presumed to be among those later deported to the death camps.⁷⁷

The scale and nature of the savagery, and the apparent aim of maximizing degradation and humiliation, reflected the success of propaganda in demonizing the figure of the Jew — certainly within the organizations of the Party itself — and massively enhanced the process, under way since Hitler’s takeover of power, of dehumanizing Jews and excluding them from German society — a vital step on the way to genocide.⁷⁸

The propaganda line of a spontaneous expression of anger by the people was, however, believed by no one. ‘The public knows to the last man,’ the Party’s own court later admitted, ‘that political actions like that of 9 November are organized and carried out by the party, whether this is admitted or not. If all the synagogues burn down in a single night, that has somehow to be organized, and can only be organized by the party.’⁷⁹