Goebbels, meanwhile, was impatient to make headway with the ‘racial cleansing’ of Berlin. ‘A start has to be made somewhere,’ he remarked. He thought the removal of Jews from the economy and cultural life of the city could be accomplished within a few months.31 The programme devised by mid-May for him by Helldorf, and given his approval, put forward a variety of discriminatory measures — including special identity cards for Jews, branding of Jewish shops, bans on Jews using public parks, and special train compartments for Jews — most of which, following the November Pogrom, came to be generally implemented.32 Helldorf also envisaged the construction of a ghetto in Berlin to be financed by the richer Jews.33
Even if this last aim remained unfulfilled, the poisonous atmosphere stirred by Goebbels’s agitation — with Hitler’s tacit approval — had rapid results.34 Already on 27 May, a 1,000-strong mob roamed parts of Berlin, smashing windows of shops belonging to Jews, and prompting the police, anxious not to lose the initiative in anti-Jewish policy, to take the owners into ‘protective custody’.35 When in mid-June Jewish stores on the Kurfürstendamm, the prime shopping street in the west of the city, were smeared with antisemitic slogans by Party activists, and plundering of some shops took place, concern for Germany’s image abroad dictated a halt to the public violence. Hitler intervened directly from Berchtesgaden, following which Goebbels ruefully banned all illegal actions.36 However, Berlin had set the tone. Similar ‘actions’, initiated by the local Party organizations, were carried out in Frankfurt, Magdeburg, and other towns and cities.37 The lack of any explicit general ban from above on ‘individual actions’, as had been imposed in 1935, was taken by Party activists in countless localities as a green light to step up their own campaigns. The touchpaper had been lit to the summer and autumn of violence. As the tension in the Czech crisis mounted, local antisemitic initiatives in various regions saw to it that the ‘Jewish Question’ became a powder-keg, waiting for the spark.38
Hitler’s own approval of the antisemitic campaign of the summer may well have been linked to his expectation of a short war to crush Czechoslovakia in the autumn.39 Successful completion of that enterprise was, it appears, to have been accompanied by the completion of the expropriation of Jewish property and exclusion of Jews from the economy.40 Hitler had, in the event, no choice but to be content for the time being with the Sudetenland, and the tension had suddenly evaporated. But the triumphalism of the Nazi Movement, the pressures to exclude Jews from the economy as a matter of urgency, the demands to speed up emigration, and the general momentum of violence and discrimination that had built up over the summer meant that the radical tide surged forward. The atmosphere had become menacing in the extreme for the Jews.
Even so, from the perspective of the regime’s leadership, how to get the Jews out of the economy and force them to leave Germany still appeared to be questions without obvious answers. As early as January 1937, Eichmann had suggested, in a lengthy internal memorandum, that pogroms were the most effective way of accelerating the sluggish emigration.41 Like an answer to a prayer, the shooting of the German Third Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, on the morning of 7 November 1938 opened up an opportunity not to be missed. It was an opportunity eagerly seized upon by Goebbels. He had no difficulty in winning Hitler’s full backing.
Grynszpan had meant to kill the Ambassador. Vom Rath just happened to be the first official he saw. The shooting was an act of despair and revenge for his own miserable existence and for the deportation of his family at the end of October from Hanover — simply deposited, along with a further 18,000 Polish Jews, over the borders with Poland.42 Two and a half years earlier, when the Jewish medical student David Frankfurter had killed the Nazi leader in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff, in Davos, circumstances had demanded that the lid be kept firmly on any wild response by Party fanatics in Germany. In the menacing climate of autumn 1938, the situation could scarcely have been more different. Now, the Nazi hordes were to be positively encouraged to turn their wrath on the Jews. The death of vom Rath — he succumbed to his wounds on the afternoon of 9 November — happened, moreover, to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s attempted putsch of 1923. All over Germany, Party members were meeting to celebrate one of the legendary events of the ‘time of struggle’. The annual commemoration marked a high point in the Nazi calendar. In Munich, as usual, the Party bigwigs were gathering.
