Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

consequence of hidden orders were primarily shaped by this tactic and not the

result of profound contradictions within the NSDAP about the course of the

Judenpolitik or an expression of the Party’s incapacity for goal-oriented action.

The curious aspect of this kind of hidden order was that because of the

calculated vagueness, corrective action always had to be taken from above.

In the case of the November pogrom this task fell to the Security Police and the

SD. The execution of the pogrom was unambiguously a Party matter; the state and

Party security apparatus, united in the person of Heydrich, clearly surprised by the

action, and yet immediately ready to act, had first of all to perform flanking

manoeuvres and adapt to accommodating the large number of prisoners driven

together by Party activists. 78

As they had been ordered to do, in the night of 9/10 November SA and SS

troops, mostly in civilian clothes and backed up by Party members, forced their

way into synagogues, smashed up the interiors, looted or destroyed the ritual

objects, and finally burned down the houses of God. The fire brigades were

commanded only to prevent the flames from spreading to the surrounding

houses. Likewise, Jewish shops were destroyed, had their windows smashed in,

and their storerooms looted or thrown into the street. In many places the Party

activists led actual processions, generally accompanied by a curious crowd, roar-

ing anti-Jewish slogans and marching from one object of destruction to the next.

The terrorist units forced their way into apartments inhabited by Jews, destroyed

the furniture, and made off with valuables. The residents of the apartments were

mocked, humiliated, and physically mistreated, in many cases in the most cruel

and shocking way; and the 25,000–30,000 Jewish men arrested during the night

also had to endure inhuman harassment and torture, which was intensified during

their subsequent concentration-camp detention. 79

The precise number of fatalities who fell victim to these acts of violence is

not known; officially the figure was given as ninety-one, 80 but to this there should be added a large number of suicides, as well as the hundreds of Jews who were

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

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killed in the following weeks and months in the concentration camps, or died as

a result of their detention. In Buchenwald alone 227 of the prisoners delivered

died in the first six weeks; 400 Jews involved in the pogrom died in all the

camps. 81

The damage caused between 8 and 10 November, according to Reich Insurance

Group in 1939, came to 49.5 million Reichmarks. Of this, over 46.1 million was to

Jews of German citizenship, over 1.7 million was to ‘Aryans’, and more than 1.6

million to foreign Jews. 82 A survey of twenty-four private insurance companies showed that their disbursements for break-in damage caused during the November

pogrom were 3.3 million RM higher than the sum that the companies had paid

throughout the whole of the rest of the year for that offence. 83

The individual elements of the pogrom, smashed windows, destruction of

synagogues, forced entry to dwellings, looting, mistreatment, even murder, were

not new, but they were part of the anti-Semitic repertoire of the Party activists.

The pogrom represented a culmination of the anti-Jewish riots that had been

going on for years; it was an expression of the fundamental radically anti-Semitic

mood at the grass roots of the NSDAP.

Outside the circle of Party activists and supporters of the NSDAP, the

pogrom met with little sympathy, but overall the population—doubtless intimi-

dated by this unfamiliar level of violence—responded passively. 84 This acceptance of the pogrom by the majority of the population must have seemed like the

crucial success from the perspective of the Nazi regime: it had been possible to

treat Jews publicly as non-persons who could be robbed, mistreated, and killed.

The pogrom made it clear to everyone that the total exclusion of the Jews from

German society had been completed; they had been condemned to a shadowy

existence.

This ‘social death’ of the Jews still living in Germany, decreed by the regime,

was the essential element in the organization of the public that the Nazi

government associated with the third wave of anti-Semitism in 1938. The ‘Jewish

question’ within Germany, raised repeatedly by the Nazi regime since 1933, was

now declared to have been largely ‘solved’; after almost six years of radical anti-

Semitic policies, the Jews living in Germany had essentially played their part as

dangerous aliens to its conclusion. Disregard and contempt for the Jews still

living in Germany, indifference to their further fate was now the attitude that

propaganda prescribed for the population. With the worsening of the inter-

national situation and the approaching war, the ‘Jewish question’ had to be

raised onto the international stage, the Jewish ‘enemy’ had to be presented as the

potential enemy in the capital cities of potential opponents. A Volksgemeinschaft

under National Socialist rule battling against the ‘Jewish global enemy’—that

was how one might describe the new arrangement that the Nazi regime, in the

phase of transition to war, presented as a leitmotif for the treatment of the

‘Jewish question’.

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

Judenpolitik between the Pogrom and the Start of the War

Discussions of the Party and State Leaderships Concerning

Further Anti-Jewish Measures

In the weeks that followed the pogrom, a series of major conferences of leading

representatives of the Nazi state were held to discuss further steps in Judenpolitik. So

far researchers have reconstructed the sessions chaired by Goering on 12 November

and 6 December, and the discussion on 16 December, chaired by Frick. At the centre

of these debates was the problem, and the solution of that problem: how the planned

complete exclusion of the Jews from German society could be harmonized with the

goal of forced emigration.

On 12 November, two days after the official announcement of the end of the

pogrom, more than a hundred representatives of a great variety of state and Party

offices met to discuss further developments in Judenpolitik. 85 At this meeting leading representatives of the regime made a series of remarkable declarations on

the ‘Jewish question’, which should be quoted here in some detail.

Goering introduced the session by first referring to the ministerial meeting of

28 April at which the ‘Aryanization question’ had been discussed, and finally

considered the June events in Berlin, the ‘dry run’ for Reichskristallnacht: ‘In the

meeting at which we first discussed this question and made the decision to

Aryanize