Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

action, which led overall to

the expulsion of around 18,000 Polish Jews, ended on 29 October, after Poland had

threatened the deportation of German citizens.

Herschel Grynspan’s attempt on the life of the Legation Secretary of the

German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, on 7 November, was an act of revenge

for the brutal expulsion of Grynspan’s Hanover-based parents to Poland that has

no historical causal link with the pogrom on 9 November. Grynspan, who had

fatally injured vom Rath, merely provided the Nazi regime with an excuse to

launch a pogrom which at least parts of the Party base had been urging since the

spring of 1938. This pogrom was to form the precondition for a new wave of anti-

Semitic laws which had also been prepared since spring 1938 and which, in the

view of the Party leadership and in the face of the precarious situation in

armaments, urgently had to be put into force. A pogrom would also unleash a

new mass exodus among the Jews of the ‘Great German Reich’ and at the same

time exert the necessary pressure upon foreign governments finally to hold the

negotiations for an international solution of the ‘Jewish question’ in Germany.

On the same day of the assassination attempt, 7 November, the Nazi press,

following the instructions of the Ministry of Propaganda, announced that Gryn-

span’s crime, an attack by ‘world Jewry’, would have unforeseeable consequences

for the situation of the Jews in Germany. 71 Particularly in Hesse, on 7, 8, and 9 November Party activists organized anti-Jewish riots in which synagogue interiors were destroyed and shops with Jewish owners were smashed. 72

The actual pogrom was unleashed a few hours after Rath’s death on 9 November

by an intensely anti-Semitic speech by Goebbels at a meeting of leading Party

members in Munich’s Old Town Hall, held as it was every year in memory of the

National Socialist putsch in 1923. The speculation frequently encountered in the

literature that the news of Rath’s death arrived during the meeting, and that Hitler

immediately informed Goebbels, who immediately seized the initiative and possibly

went beyond the goal assigned him by Hitler is, however, an exaggerated account

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

111

of events. 73 In fact the news of Rath’s death arrived before the start of the event in the Rathaussaal in Munich, as Goebbels’s diaries reveal: ‘In the afternoon the death

of the German diplomat vom Rath is announced. That’s good . . . I go to the Party

reception in the old Rathaus. Terrific activity. I brief Hitler on the affair. He decides: allow the demonstrations to go on. Withdraw the police. The Jews should feel the

people’s fury. That’s right. I issue appropriate instructions to police and party. Then

I give a brief speech on the subject to the Party leadership. Thunderous applause.

Everyone dashed to the telephones. Now the people will act. ’74

After the speech by the Propaganda Minister the senior party officials present at

the meeting immediately informed the headquarters of the Gaus and the SA

Group staffs that troops of Party members and members of the SA wearing

civilian clothes were to destroy synagogues and demolish Jewish shops during

the night. 75 The orders that reached the lower echelons were thus inevitably inconsistent. 76

The most senior Party court of the NSDAP, which, following the November

pogrom, had to deal with a whole series of serious crimes such as murder,

mistreatment, and rape established the following with regard to the nature of

the order on 9 November:

The instructions of the head of Reich Propaganda, issued orally, have probably been

understood by all Party leaders present to mean that the Party should not appear as the

instigators of demonstrations, but in reality organize and carry them out . . . The examination of the conditions under which the orders were issued has revealed that in all these cases a misunderstanding has occurred in some link of the chain of command, especially

because of the fact that it is obvious to active National Socialists from the Kampfzeit that actions which the Party does not want to appear to have organized are not ordered in a clear and detailed manner. Consequently they are accustomed to reading more into such orders

than is expressed literally, as it has also in many respects become customary for the person issuing the order, in the interests of the Party—and especially if the order concerns illegal political demonstrations—not to spell out everything and only to suggest what he wishes to achieve with the order.

Because of orders that were ‘not always felicitously formulated’ many sub-leaders

assumed that ‘Jewish blood must flow for the blood of Party comrade vom Rath,

and that, at any rate according to the will of the leadership, the life of a Jew was of

no consequence’.

For these reasons the Higher Party court had also recommended that in the

fourteen cases of crimes of killing already heard, proceedings before the state

courts be quashed and in most of these cases Party court trials should

be abandoned, or only insignificant sentences passed. Only in two cases of rape

was the case to be pursued further before the state courts. 77

This kind of indirect command, to be understood intuitively, was typical of the

National Socialists and had the advantage that the issuer of the order assumed no

112

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

legally demonstrable responsibility, but it did involve the risk that some of the

subordinates did not correctly understand the meaning of the instruction in

question and either did not act radically enough or in their over-eagerness

overshot the mark. This factored-in vagueness in the Party leadership’s orders

was, as we have seen, typical of the tactic of the ‘individual actions’ of the Party

since 1933, particularly for the anti-Jewish riots in spring and summer 1935 as well

as in the spring/early summer of 1938: in the Party base there was always a certain

uncertainty as to whether the official Party prohibitions on these individual

actions were ‘meant seriously’ or only intended to mislead the public, so that

especially radical activists very often contravened the Party line. But such calam-

ities were an inevitable element of the tactic of indirect command, and they could

only have been avoided if the Party leadership had compromised itself with clear

orders in writing. But the internal Party contradictions that repeatedly arose