The radicalization now encountered no opposition of any weight. Any opposition would have had to come from those with access to the levers of power. The ordinary people who expressed their anger, sorrow, distaste, or shame at what had happened were powerless. Those who might have articulated such feelings, such as the leaders of the Christian Churches, among whose precepts was ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, kept quiet. Neither major denomination, Protestant or Catholic, raised an official protest or even backing for those courageous individual pastors and priests who did speak out. Within the regime’s leadership, those, like Schacht, who had used economic or otherwise tactical objections to try to combat what they saw as counter-productive, wild ‘excesses’ of the radical antisemites in the party, were now politically impotent. In any case, such economic arguments lost all force with ‘Crystal Night’. The leaders of the armed forces, scandalized though some of them were at the ‘cultural disgrace’ of what had happened, made no public protest. Brauchitsch shrugged his shoulders when outraged comments from generals came to his ears. His gutless response mirrored the broader feeling of powerlessness among an officer corps whose collective strength and moral authority
Beyond that, the deep antisemitism running through the armed forces meant that no opposition worth mentioning to Nazi radicalism could be expected from that quarter. Characteristic of the mentality was a letter which the revered Colonel General von Fritsch wrote, almost a year after his dismissal and only a month after the November Pogrom. Fritsch was reportedly outraged by ‘Crystal Night’. But, as with so many, it was the method not the aim that appalled him. He mentioned in his letter that after the previous war he had concluded that Germany had to succeed in three battles in order to become great again. Hitler had won the battle against the working class
‘Crystal Night’ marked the final fling within Germany of ‘pogrom antisemitism’. Willing though he was to make use of the method, Hitler had emphasized as early as 1919 that it could provide no solution to the ‘Jewish Question’.106 The massive material damage caused, the public relations disaster reflected in the almost universal condemnation in the international press, and to a lesser extent the criticism levelled at the ‘excesses’ (though not at the draconian anti-Jewish legislation that followed them) by broad sections of the German population ensured that the ploy of open violence had had its day. Its place was taken by something which turned out to be even more sinister: the handing-over of practical responsibility for a coordinated anti-Jewish policy to the ‘rational’ antisemites in the SS. On 24 January 1939, Göring established — based on the model which had functioned effectively in Vienna — a Central Office for Jewish Emigration under the aegis of the Chief of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich.107 The policy was still forced emigration, now transformed into an all-out, accelerated drive to expel the Jews from Germany. But the transfer of overall responsibility to the SS nevertheless began a new phase of anti-Jewish policy. For the victims, it marked a decisive step on the way that was to end in the gas-chambers of the extermination camps. Heydrich was to refer back to this commission from Göing when opening the Wannsee Conference, to coordinate extermination measures, in January 1942.108
