Though initiated and spurred on by the S.S., Kristallnacht could not have taken place without widespread popular German support and planning.
On the night of Nov. 9, 267 synagogues were gutted by fire, 7,500 Jewish shops were looted, hundreds of homes were wrecked, 91 Jews were killed, and at least 20,000 Jews (some claim 70,000, and one source offers the figure of 200,000) were arrested and sent to concentration camps throughout Germany.
“The main streets of the city were a positive litter of shattered plate glass,” wrote an observer. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers called by Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, on November 12, an insurance expert estimated the damage of shattered plate glass belonging to non-Jewish landlords alone at six million dollars.
Goering imposed on the Jews a penalty of one billion marks (four hundred million dollars) for damages, to be paid to the Reich. Since it was clear the impoverished Jewish community would not be capable of additional payments in the future and since German anti-Semitism had escalated to the phase of physical violence, Goering ordered that henceforth anti-Jewish actions be carried out by specialists and the process of persecution and murder be handled by professional tacticians. The time of the skilled professionals, like Eichmann and Heydrich, had arrived.
If we are to derive lessons for the present and future, it may be of value to note that the paralysis of the democratic countries at the Evian Conference was exhibited barely two weeks prior to the construction of the first concentration camps.
The widespread concern today with the mild treatment meted out to Iran by the nations of the world – despite Tehran’s threatening posture in offensive nuclear development and its brazen public denial of Israel’s right to exist – is anchored in those fateful days that linked Evian, Munich and Kristallnacht.
The three historic events demonstrate how pious wishes of powerful and benevolent powers can remain purely in the realm of aspiration and untranslatable into action in the face of a determined stand by an authoritarian ruler.
In each case the powers issued verbal protests against aggression of any sort. They voiced faith in the unerring rationality, good will, yearning for peace and distaste for bloodshed and war imbedded in every person.
The ultimate result proved them wrong, but the process seemed to be eminently logical. Each breach of humanitarian ethics, of international agreements and conventions, by the dictatorial ruler could find some sort of justification in the camp drawing on the well of unlimited trust in the basic goodness and rationality of all men.
That noble but so thoroughly misplaced trust prevented any effective measure that would call evil to a halt. And examples of evil were not lacking.
Diplomatic dispatches to the British Foreign Office of those days report the mistreatment of thousands of prisoners in the camps. “One man suffering from heart trouble was unable to walk rapidly enough to suit the guards, and his fellow prisoners were ordered to drag him face downward, tearing his flesh until his features were unrecognizable.”
Another dispatch tells of the relatives of victims who were required to pay three marks ($1.20) for the ashes of loved ones. To protests from several nations, Goebbels, Germany’s minister of propaganda, declared, not for the first time, “If there is any country that believes it has not enough Jews, I shall gladly turn over to it all our Jews.”
As Arthur Morse succinctly stated in his book While Six Million Died, “There were no takers.”
After the atrocities of Kristallnacht, President Roosevelt remarked: “I could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”
Yet the unbelievable was just about to happen – perhaps precisely because man could not believe it, perhaps because man did not put a stop to the downhill slide until he found himself, to his amazement, caught in the inferno.
In those fateful days Chaim Weizmann declared to the English foreign secretary, Lord Halifax: “They are burning the synagogues now; tomorrow they will burn British cathedrals.”
And so Hitler moved forward relentlessly from smaller to bigger things at ever increasing speed. In 1933 he began testing man’s moral fiber by his first strikes at the Jews; 1934 brought the rearmament of Germany; in 1935 Germany declared Jews to be subhuman; 1936 saw the German army occupying the demilitarized Rhineland; 1937 brought the Rome-Berlin Axis uniting for military aggression; and in 1938 Hitler swallowed Austria, dug the grave for Czechoslovakia, sent thousands of Jews to concentration camps, and began his all-out violent assault against a defenseless people.