Kristallnacht Was Inevitable

Contrary to an almost universal misconception, Nazi leadership did not want the November pogrom of 1939 (aka Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass) to happen – for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, Adolf Hitler stated in 1919 – in his (in)famous Gemlich Letter – that he was firmly against Jewish pogroms. His position – that had not changed since – was that all persecution of Jews (up to making Germany Judenrein) must be carried out not by general public, but by government agencies.

And must proceed in an orderly manner. Consequently, it is not surprising at all that all persecution of Jews in Greater Germany was brutal and ruthless – but not violent. Both before and after the Night of Broken Glass.

The second reason was that at that time the (then pragmatic) Nazis were not interested in physically harming the Jews – they wanted Jewish property. First and foremost, their real estate. Which in every pogrom suffers badly – to put it mildly – thus causing harm to financial interests of the Nazis and their F;hrerstaat.

And, finally, the nationwide pogrom is a high-risk endeavor – things can easily get out of control by the authorities (in November 1938, they almost did) … and cause a catastrophic harm to the state and to the people.

For this reason (again, contrary to the almost universal misconception), police and government in general in Imperial Russia had nothing to do with Jewish pogroms in that country. On the contrary, it did everything possible – including using the deadly force – to stop these events (alas, not always successfully).

That said, the Nazis still bear the ultimate responsibility for the horrific results of November pogrom – because their incessant and ugly anti-Semitic propaganda created the environment where Kristallnacht was inevitable.

In reality, the pogrom was the inevitable spontaneous reaction of radical German anti-Semites (not associated with SS, SA, NSDAP or Nazi government system in any way) to the Paris murder of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew.

Nazi leaders only wanted to control the inevitable… as it turned out, not very successfully. No surprise here – it is practically impossible to control a pogrom without using a deadly force which was politically impossible for the Nazis.

Murder of Ernst vom Rath was a very strange homicide – to put it mildly. Grynszpan stated to the police that he shot vom Rath to avenge the Jews brutally persecuted in Nazi Germany.

It sounded plausible… however, Grynszpan was never put on trial – neither in independent, nor in occupied France… nor in Germany for that matter. After the fall of France, Grynszpan was extradited to Germany. Initially, he was incarcerated in (in)famous Moabit prison in Berlin – but was soon moved to the concentration camps system. First to Sachsenhausen and then to Flossenb;rg.

In September of 1942, he was moved to the prison at Magdeburg… and then just disappeared. According to Adolf Eichmann, Grynszpan may still have been alive in late 1943 or early 1944… but he did not know what happened to him.

My guess is that Grynszpan was executed by the SS right before the end of the war meeting the same fate as Georg Elser who planned and carried out an elaborate assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler (another very strange crime).

The bizarre fate of Herschel Grynszpan points to a totally different motive (or even motives) for his crime. I have no doubt that one of the motives was to become a global celebrity… which he did.

Vom Rath’s death and the horror of Kristallnacht brought Grynszpan international notoriety. Enjoying his celebrity status, he was frequently interviewed in his prison cell and wrote letters to celebrities around the world.

In KL he continued to receive the celebrity treatment – at Sachsenhausen he was housed in the bunker reserved for special prisoners with Kurt Schuschnigg, the last pre-Anschluss chancellor of Austria.

However, circumstantial evidence points to a totally different – and a far more personal – motive. Vom Rath was homosexual – and so was Grynszpan. Vom rath met Grynszpan in Le Boeuf sur le Toit (a well-known Paris gay bar), they became lovers, one thing led to another… and at some vom Rath had promised to use his influence to legalize Grynszpan’s French residency (Hershel was an illegal alien). When vom Rath reneged on his promise, Grynszpan just shot him.

This theory appears to be close to the truth – with such motive neither the French nor the Nazis had any desire to bring Grynszpan to trial as it would have been just way too scandalous.

Curiously, no Jew ever attempted to avenge persecution of German Jews by killing a Nazis – although in Imperial Russia it happened many times (and the Bolshevist revolution was the result).

Most likely, even the Jewish hotheads – one of the hottest in the world – realized that this revenge will make the fate of Jews much, much worse… although they could not have imagined the horrors of the Holocaust.

November pogrom was horrific. Jewish homes were ransacked all throughout Germany. Although violence against Jews had not been explicitly condoned by the authorities, there were cases of Jews being beaten or assaulted. Following the violence, police departments recorded a large number of suicides and rapes.

Over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms, many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores were damaged, and hundreds of synagogues were burned or otherwise destroyed.

More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, primarily Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen – most likely, to prevent them from fighting back (it would have been a bloodbath). After the pogrom ended, almost all of them were promptly released.

Police predictably were instructed to seize Jewish archives from synagogues and community offices – these came very handy during the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, the Nazis used the pogrom to their financial advantage: Jews were forced to pay a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks for the murder of vom Rath, which was levied by the compulsory acquisition of 20% of all Jewish property by the state.

Six million Reichsmarks of insurance payments for property damage due to the Jewish community were instead paid to the Reich government as “damages to the German Nation”.

The number of emigrating Jews surged, as those who were able to leave, abandoned the country. In the ten months following Kristallnacht, more than 115,000 Jews emigrated from the Reich. The majority went to other European countries, the United States or Mandatory Palestine, though at least 14,000 made it to Shanghai, China. As part of government policy, the Nazis seized houses, shops, and other property the ;migr;s left behind.

About a hundred Jews lost their lives in the pogrom, which made the latter a key step on the Road to Holocaust – and a very heavy slab in the “slab stack” that three years later triggered the “Holocaust Avalanche” that killed four million Jews.

Although Kristallnacht was not intended to be a mass murder, it became one. For the first time in Nazi Germany a significant number of Jews were killed simply because they were Jews: not for what they did, but for who they were. Which made the subsequent Holocaust so much easier for the Nazis.

Internationally, the pogrom crossed critical line: Nazi Germany had left the community of civilized nations. It made any alliance between the latter and western democracies impossible – which ultimately destroyed the Third Reich and killed its F;hrer (and many other Nazi leaders).