Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Indeed, the November Pogrom had in the most barbaric way imaginable cleared a pathway through the impasse into which Nazi anti-Jewish policy had manoeuvred itself by 1938. Emigration had been reduced to little more than a trickle, especially since the Evian Conference, where, on the initiative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, delegates from thirty-two countries had assembled in the French resort, deliberated from 6 to 14 July, then confirmed the unwillingness of the international community to increase immigration quotas for Jews. Moves to remove the Jews from the economy were still proceeding far too slowly to satisfy Party fanatics. And anti-Jewish policy had suffered from complete lack of coordination. Hitler himself had been little involved. Goebbels, a driving-force, as we have noted, in pressing for tougher measures against the Jews since the spring, had recognized the opportunity that vom Rath’s assassination gave him. He sniffed the climate, and knew conditions were ripe. In a personal sense, too, the shooting of vom Rath was timely. Goebbels’s marital difficulties and relationship with the Czech film actress Lida Baarova had threatened to lower his standing with Hitler.⁹⁴ Now was a chance, by ‘working towards the Führer’ in such a key area, to win back favour.

One consequence of the night of violence was that the Jews were now desperate to leave Germany. Some 80,000 fled, in the most traumatic circumstances, between the end of 1938 and the beginning of the war.⁹⁵ Some, like the Fröhlichs, the family of the eminent American historian Peter Gay, were able through daring ingenuity, involving minor but dangerous forms of illegalities in forging documents and smuggling out possessions, to outwit intimidating and obstructive bureaucrats, and to subvert their chicanery in managing, amid constant anxiety and with many travails, to buy exit visas for Cuba, after being denied entry to Great Britain.⁹⁶ Countless others were less fortunate — sick with worry at the unknown fate of husbands and fathers marched off by the Gestapo, or taking flight with no more than they could carry with them. Many, with little hope of an official exit route, fled across the borders illegally — 1,500 into the Netherlands alone.⁹⁷ Many other Jews pleading for asylum were turned back at the Dutch frontier as border guards were doubled in number to deny entry to the Nazis’ victims.⁹⁸ By the time the Dutch closed their borders on 17 December, nevertheless, some 7,000 German Jews had, legally or illegally, found refuge there.⁹⁹ In the same days, the British government opened the country’s doors to 10,000 Jewish children — though it rejected an appeal to allow a further 21,000 Jews to enter Palestine.¹⁰⁰ By whatever desperate means, tens of thousands of Jews were able to escape the clutches of the Nazis and flee across neighbouring borders, to Britain, the USA, Latin America, Palestine (despite British prohibitions), and to the distant refuge with the most lenient policy of all: Japanese-occupied Shanghai.¹⁰¹

The Nazis’ aim of forcing the Jews out had been massively boosted. Beyond that, the problem of their slow-moving elimination from the economy had been tackled. Whatever his criticism of Goebbels, Göring had wasted no time in ensuring that the chance was now taken fully to ‘aryanize’ the economy, and to profit from ‘Reichskristallnacht’. When he spoke, a week later, of the ‘very critical state of the Reich finances’, he was able to add: ‘Aid first of all through the billion imposed on the Jews and through the profits to the Reich from the aryanization of Jewish concerns’.¹⁰² Others, too, in the Nazi leadership, critical or not of Goebbels, also seized the chance to push through a flood of new discriminatory measures, intensifying the hopelessness of Jewish existence in Germany.¹⁰³ Radicalization fed on radicalization.