1. Karl-Heinz Schwenke, Sturmführer and janitor (formerly tailor), age 54
It was almost midnight of November 9, 1938, when Standartenführer Kühling of the SA Kronenberg entered the Huntsmen’s Rest, at the corner of Frankfurterplatz and the Mauerweg, and said:
“The synagogue will be burned tonight.”
As the scene was reconstructed by principals and witnesses fifteen years afterward, there were present in the public room of the inn twenty or twenty-five uniformed members of the SA Reserve Troop, composed of men over fifty, and five or ten members of other SA troops who had dropped in. There were no other customers, and the innkeeper testified in 1948 that he was “in and out” of the public room that evening and did not hear any of the conversation or remember who was present.
After Kühling spoke, Sturmführer Schwenke turned to the men in the public room and said:
“You heard what the Standartenführer said. Those who want to help, come into the private room with me.”
The Standartenführer said, “I’ll be back,” and left the inn.
About half the men present, according to the testimony, followed Schwenke into the private room and closed the door. Schwenke reopened the door from within, said, “No more drinking,” and closed it again. Those who were left in the public room sat saying nothing for a few moments and then began talking in low tones. They testified afterward that they could hear the talk, but not the words, from the other room.
Twenty minutes later the Standartenführer re-entered the Huntsmen’s Rest. The dozen or so men left in the public room were eating buttered bread and drinking coffee, playing Skat, reading the paper, or just sitting there. They got to their feet and said, “Heil Hit—”
“They still in there?” said the Standartenführer.
“Yes, Herr Standartenführer.”
The Standartenführer opened the door to the private room and the talk inside stopped. The dozen or so men within got to their feet and said, “Heil Hit”
“Jetzt mal, los! los! Let’s get going, let’s get going,” said the Standartenführer, standing in the doorway. “You, Sturmführer.”
“Yes, Herr Standartenführer,” said Schwenke. “I thought I would send two men to reconnoiter.”
“You be one of them, Sturmführer.”
“Yes, Herr Standartenführer. Here, Kramer, come with me. The rest of you, remain where you are until you get orders.”
“I’ll be back,” said the Standartenführer, leaving again.
Schwenke and Kramer walked west on the Mauerweg. Half a block down, in front of the Café Schuchardt, they stopped and stood in the entrance of the darkened café. Kramer looked up and down the street. “No police,” he said. “Not a sign,” said Schwenke.
They crossed the street to the synagogue, pushed open the iron fence gate, and went around the building, trying the side and back doors. The furnace-room door was unlocked, and they went in. In a few minutes they left again. As they re-entered the private room of the Huntsmen’s Rest, the men stood up and said, “Heil—”
“Pechmann,” said Schwenke, “I want you and Heinecke and—let me see—Dowe. Upstairs. Quick. You”—to the others—“remain. This is duty. You hear me?”
The five, including Kramer, went upstairs to the SA meeting room. In a few minutes they came down.
“I don’t care,” Schwenke was saying, “we can use it. We have to have something.”
“But it’s floor oil,” said Pechmann, “and it belongs to the Theater.”
“I don’t care,” said Schwenke, “it’s oil. This is duty. You heard the Standartenführer, Pechmann.”
“Yes, Herr Sturmführer,” said Pechmann.
Pechmann, Heinecke, and Dowe headed for the Theater, a block west of the Huntsmen’s Rest, and Schwenke and Kramer returned to the furnace-room of the synagogue. In a few minutes the other three SA men entered the furnaceroom, carrying, among them, four three-gallon canisters. There were footsteps above, in the synagogue.
“Can I go now?” said Pechmann to Schwenke, in a whisper. “I’m on duty at six in the morning.”
“Go ahead, you s—t,” said Schwenke.
“Thank you, Herr Sturmführer,” said Pechmann. Heinecke and Dowe left with him, without even asking permission.
“S——ts,” said Schwenke.
Pechmann testified against Schwenke after the war, but he supported Schwenke’s claim that there were footsteps heard in the synagogue above when the SA men were in the furnace-room. Schwenke denied having had anything to do with the floor oil taken from the Theater; he had, he said, only reconnoitered. The four canisters were never found.
Schwenke and Kramer returned to the Huntsmen’s Rest around 12:50 midnight. The Sturmführer led the way to a table in the corner of the public room. Ten minutes passed. Nobody spoke in the public room; the men in the private room, beyond the door, were still talking in a murmur. The two church bells struck 1 A.M., and the rooster atop the Town Hall crowed. Then it was quiet again. Schwenke said something to Kramer, and Kramer left the inn. None of the men in the private room raised his head. Kramer returned and said something to Schwenke. Then Schwenke left the inn and returned at once.
“SA men!” he called. “The synagogue is on fire! Outside, everybody! Close off the street! It’s dangerous!”
A voice said, “Shall we call the Fire Department?”
“I’m in charge!” said Schwenke. “Close off the street! It’s dangerous! Schnell, hurry!” And he turned and went, followed by all the SA men in the inn.
The instant the last man was out the door, the innkeeper of the Huntsmen’s Rest entered the public room from the swinging door behind the bar. He closed the outer door to the street, locked it, turned out the lights, and went right to bed.
2. Gustav Schwenke, soldier (formerly unemployed tailor’s apprentice), age 26
Neuhausen is a little summer resort on the Mariasee, an hour by the Post bus, two hours (and twenty-two cents more expensive) by the Scenic Steamer, from the old mining and textile town of Lich, in southern Austria. The Pension Goldener Engel—the Golden Angel Boarding House—had no guests the night of November 9, 1938, except Private Gustav Schwenke of the German Military Police and his bride of a month. It was their honeymoon.
It was, as a matter of fact, their first time together since the three terrible days they’d had in Kronenberg when they were married a month before. If Gustav had decided, at the last minute, not to take the Scenic Steamer from Lich but to take the Post bus and save on the fare, it had to be admitted that he had hired a very nice room at the Goldener Engel. He got the military rate, of course, with a seasonal discount and (after hard bargaining with the host, while the bride stood by) the special three-day discount (even though the Schwenkes were going to be there only two days, the duration of Gustav’s pass from his post at Lich).
Those three terrible days in Kronenberg, after the wedding in October, they had stayed at the groom’s home, with the groom’s father and mother and younger sister and very young brother. The groom’s father, SA Sturmführer Schwenke, had been against the marriage because the bride’s father was not even a Party member, and the bride (for all Sturmführer Schwenke knew; she never said anything) might even be a Gegner, an opponent of the regime. Frau Sturmführer Schwenke hated the bride from the first and said that the girl’s family had “a history of fits.” In those three days in Kronenberg, after the wedding, the bride had cried all the time (and Gustav hated crying), and Frau Sturmführer Schwenke said, “She can’t help it, poor girl—it’s hereditary.”
Sturmführer Schwenke had wanted his oldest son to marry a strong Party woman—any strong Party woman. The boy was not a Party enthusiast, except for anti-Semitism. He was willing to join the Party in ’32—glad to—when his father got him the first job he’d ever had, in the SA police. But that was for the job. A job, any job, was all he cared about. A good boy, but he didn’t have his father’s spirit.
No wonder. And great wonder that he had any spirit at all.
Gustav Schwenke had wet his bed until he was twenty-two years old.
His mother, whose happiest topic of conversation was sickness (she herself had had plenty of it, but her husband “had never been sick a day in his life,” except for his war wounds), told everybody in Kronenberg about her trouble with Gustav, the problem child. Everybody in Kronenberg knew that Gustav Schwenke was a bed-wetter, and Gustav knew that they knew, and he knew how they knew.
Long before he was twelve he hated his mother. One whistle from his father, and he came; a thousand whistles from his mother, and he hid. When he was twelve, his mother was pregnant. She said to him, “What if it’s a little brother?” and he said, “If he cries at night, I’ll cut his throat.” Little Robert, when he came, cried at night, and when he cried Gustav wet his bed. Little Robert wet his, of course. “That’s why he cries,” his mother told Gustav, “because he’s ashamed of wetting his bed.” Gustav never cried.
Gustav had to pull his little brother around after school, in the play wagon, and the other kids, besides calling him Bettnässcr, called him Kindermädchen, nurse girl. One day, in order to play, Gustav left the wagon, with little Robert in it, at the top of a long flight of stone steps leading down from the Market Place, and somehow the wagon went down the steps. A man stopped it halfway down, and Robert fell out and cried. Robert wasn’t hurt, but Gustav got the worst beating of his life.
When Gustav was fifteen and his father’s apprentice, the Schwenke tailor-shop failed, and the whole family went on the dole. It was then that Gustav discovered that his father was more interested in politics than in work and would take bread out of his family’s mouth in order to make himself a uniform or take a trip to the Nazi Party Day in Munich or Weimar or Nuremberg. His father a spendthrift, and the family hungry. Gustav had always been stingy, a saver of food, scraps of cloth, nails; now he became a real miser, and a miser he remained, with, unfortunately, nothing to save, even in his young manhood, but food, scraps of cloth, nails.
The room at the Goldener Engel on the Mariasee was nice but expensive. Still, a man wasn’t married every day. And when Gustav was away from Kronenberg, he didn’t feel so bad about spending something. He didn’t feel so bad about anything. Away from Kronenberg your bride didn’t cry and your mother didn’t talk and your father didn’t buy himself uniforms and you didn’t wet your bed and the wagon didn’t go down the steps and you would never go back to Kronenberg and you didn’t care what they were doing there or anywhere else tonight. It was after one o’clock in the morning when Private Gustav Schwenke fell asleep by the side of his bride in the Pension Goldener Engel, three hundred miles from the burning synagogue in Kronenberg.
3. Carl Klingelhöfer, cabinetmaker (and adjutant to the Chief of the Kronenberg Volunteer Fire Department), age 36
The telephone rang by the side of the Klingelhòfers’ bed in their house on the Altstrasse, in Kronenberg—the telephone by the bed, not the fire alarm on the wall. It was the cabinetmaker’s sister calling, Frau Schuchardt, whose husband Fritz had the Café Schuchardt on the Mauerweg. Her voice was a frightened whisper: “Carl, the synagogue is burning. Inside. Schwer, bad.” It was 1:25 A.M.
Klingelhòfer got into his clothes, his boots, and his fire coat and onto his bicycle. He could have phoned the night-alarm man or, en route to the Mauerweg, have pulled the alarm in front of the Katherine Church; but he didn’t. He had to pedal slowly down the cobbled Altstrasse; but then, on the paved Hermann-Göring-Strasse and the Werneweg to Frankfurterplatz, he went at racing speed, a man who (besides flute-playing and picture-painting) had always done physical work, an old hiking-club man, who at thirty-six had the wind of a boy.
There were no policemen at the scene; the Mauerweg was closed off by SA men. But German firemen at the scene of a fire automatically have the status of uniformed policemen, and Klingelhòfer went through the SA cordon and the gate of the synagogue lawn. Smoke had begun to pour through broken windows, heavy black smoke. “Oil,” said the fireman, even before he smelled it. On the side away from the smoke he shone his flashlight into the building. What caught his professional eye was the fact that the fire was burning in several separated spots: arson.
The Sturmführer Schwenke ignored him as he ran across the street to his brother-in-law’s café and banged on the door; and when Fritz Schuchardt sleepily (or apparently so) opened the door, Klingelhòfer ran in and phoned the alarm man. “Got it already,” said the alarm man. “Your buzzer at home rang at 1:38.” Klingelhòfer, hearing the fire bells in the street, broke off.
As the first company pulled up, there was an immense whoosh; the rose windows in the synagogue dome had been broken by the updraft, and the sparks flew up in the sky. The top of the wooden dome was almost as high as the wood-shingled roofs of the timbered old houses on the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse (formerly Hochstrasse), a street built up on the ruins of the old Town Wall in back of the synagogue. If the houses up there caught, the town would go. Adjutant Klingelhòfer advised the Fire Chief to send two of the three Kronenberg companies up to the Hitler-Strasse—in his excitement he called it Hochstrasse—and call the companies from the villages of Kummerfeld and Rickling, eight and eleven miles away, to replace them at the synagogue. The Chief agreed, and Klingelhòfer got a searchlight and broke in the front doors of the burning building. The benches and prayer stands had all been piled on and around the wooden stage at the center of the prayer hall, where, at the base of the updraft, the fire was fiercest. The dome was supported by four wooden pillars, issuing from the corners of the stage. The pediments of the four pillars could not be seen in the flame; up above, they were blackened.
A little groggy, the fireman went around the edge of the floor and into a smaller room, the vestry, perhaps. There was a chest. He broke it open and scooped up its contents, some sort of altar cloths and sets of embroidered hangings. He went out through the prayer hall. In front of the gate to the lawn stood a policeman now—one policeman—and Klingelhòfer turned the stuff over to him. It was three o’clock in the morning.
There was no killing the updraft; the dome itself was glowing now. A section of it fell in with a roar; a column of fire shot up in the air. It would be dangerous to enter the prayer hall now, on account of the pillars. Klingelhòfer went back in carefully. Now that the dome was partly gone, the draft was stronger above, and the lower sections of the two front pillars could be seen. One was burned, about four feet up, to a diameter of two-and-a-half inches or so; the other, though burned at the same height, looked as if it would hold. But the two back pillars could not be seen.
The smoke was being carried off faster now and, with his searchlight, Klingelhòfer saw on the east wall of the prayer hall a set of gold-embroidered hangings like those he had got from the chest. They were charred, and he saw that something was built into the wall behind them. When I asked him, many years later, if he knew what it was, he said “No,” and when I told him that it was the Ark of the Covenant, he said, “The Ark of the Covenant…. Well, well.” He himself was a vestryman of the Parish Church.
4. Heinrich Damm, Party headquarters office manager (formerly unemployed salesman), age 28
Heinrich Damm was a country boy, though he’d been in the town ten years now; he was home from the Party anniversary celebration at 9:15, and at 9:30 he was in bed and asleep in his apartment in the attic of the Kreisleitung, Party headquarters for Kronenberg. But he slept light that night; there had been talk around town, and from SA headquarters in the basement of the Kreisleitung had come rumors of out-of-town visitors and unusual activity. He heard a noise downstairs and went down. It was the Kreisleiter, the County Leader.
“What brings you here, boss?” said Damm. (Like all country people, he had a hard time with new titles like Herr Kreisleiter, but nobody cared in Damm’s case; he could deal with country people like nobody else in the organization.)
“Some work to finish up,” said the Kreisleiter, without looking up.
Damm went back to bed.
It was three o’clock in the morning when a crash somewhere awakened him. There was a glow in the direction of the Hitler-Strasse and sparks shooting up. In ten minutes—and without awakening his hard-sleeping country-girl wife—he reached the synagogue. SA men and firemen were all over the place. One policeman stood in front of the gate to the lawn. A few spectators (remarkably few, for such a big fire) stood outside the SA cordon. Damm muttered, “Blöd-sinn, idiocy,” and went back home. He woke up his wife and told her.
“What do you think, Heinrich?” she said. She always asked Heinrich what he thought about things.
“Blödsinn,” he said. “Would they have stopped us by burning our headquarters?”
He was undressing when his phone rang. It was the Kreisleiter, at home. “Can you bring your car, Heinrich? We’ve got to go out in the country.” The Kreisleiter, whose father had been a professor, always took Heinrich Damm with him when he had to go out in the country.
On the way to Spelle, the next big town, they said nothing. As they entered Spelle, the Kreisleiter said, “What do you think, Heinrich?”
“What do you think, boss?”
“It’s as if they had tried to stop us in the old days by burning the Kreisleitung,” said the Kreisleiter.
“By golly, boss, you’re right,” said Damm. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s Blödsinn.”
“We have to cover the county,” said the Kreisleiter, as they pulled up in front of the Kreisleitung in Spelle. “The Gauleiter’s adjutant called. Order from Reichsmarshal Göring. It’s everywhere, all over Germany. It must be stopped at once. Whoever lays a hand on Volksgut must be punished.” Damm glanced at the Kreisleiter when he said Volksgut—the “German People’s property”—and said nothing.
It was almost dawn when they got back to Kronenberg.
“Where to, boss?” said Damm.
“Home,” said the Kreisleiter.
As he got back into bed, Damm’s wife said to him, “What do you think, Heinrich?”
“Blödsinn,” said Damm, one of the “March violets” who flocked into the Party in 1933. “It’s as if they had tried to stop us in the old days by burning the Kreisleitung.”
5. Horstniar Rupprecht, high-school student, age 14
The crash—of the synagogue dome—that awakened Heinrich Damm awakened the Rupprechts on Klinggasse, three blocks from the fire. They saw the sparks from the second-floor window of their house and went up through the hatch to the roof. There they could see the glowing half-dome. Horst’s mother held his hand; he hated having his hand held.
“Papa,” said his mother to his father, “It’s the synagogue.”
The father said nothing.
“Of course it’s the synagogue,” said Horst, excited. “Juda venecke! May the Jews drop dead!”
“Come down,” said his father.
“Golly, not yet, Pa.”
His father opened the hatch.
“Can I go to the fire, Pa? They’ll all be there. Can I?”
The family—Horst was an only child and the only member of either his father’s or mother’s family who had ever gone to high school instead of to trade school—went down the hatchway to the attic. It was pitch dark, and Horst, his mother still holding on to his hand, heard his father stop instead of opening the door to the stairs.
“They’ll all be there, Pa. Can I?”
“They won’t all be there, Horstmar. You won’t be there.”
That was a long speech for Emil Rupprecht. A long speech, and it meant that a longer speech would follow. Horst’s hand stopped wriggling in his mother’s.
“Where did you learn to say ‘Juda verrecke’?” said his father.
“In the Ha-Jot, the Hitler Youth,” said Horst.
“So,” said his father, “in the Ha-Jot.”
“They don’t teach it, Pa, you just hear it there. The other kids say it. They all say it.”
“Like ‘they’ll all be there,’“ said his father.
“You just hear it, Pa, don’t you understand?”
“No.”
Father, mother, and son stood there. At fourteen Horst couldn’t stand what, when he was grown, he called his father’s Schweigsamkeit, his taciturnity, any more than he could stand what he later called his mother’s Kadavergehorsam, her unresisting obedience to her husband. Horst was one of those fourteen-year-olds who can’t stand things. And he was in the Ha-Jot.
“Horstmar,” said his father (he never called him “Horst,” and Horst couldn’t stand that, either), “do you know what a synagogue is?”
“Of course,” said Horst.
His father was silent.
“Tell Papa what it is, Son,” said Frau Rupprecht, who was afraid of both her husband and her son.
“It’s the Jews’—the Jews’—church,” said Horst.
“And a church?” said his father. “What is a church, Horstmar?”
“A house of God, Pa, golly.”
“A house of God, without the ‘Pa, golly,’” said his father.
“Yes, Pa, a house of God.”
“God’s house?” said his father.
“Yes, Pa.”
“And you, Horstmar, you want to go and see them burn God’s house down?”
“No, Pa, golly, you don’t understand. You don’t—are you for the Jews, Pa?”
Father, mother, and son stood there.
“No, of course not, Son, of course he’s not,” said Frau Rupprecht, who was afraid of her husband, of her son, of God, and of Hitler.
Emil Rupprecht opened the attic door, and the family went down and back to bed. But Horst was disturbed—and excited. In a way he felt sorry for his father, in a way he had not felt before: a locomotive engineer all his life, at $144 a month, a little man with a little job and a little wife and a little house, a man who said nothing because, the fact was, he had nothing to say, a man who knew nothing of politics and the world and who claimed to be a Nazi. Horst had been eight when his father joined the Party in the fall of ’32; now he knew that his father was just a metooer.
“You want to go and see them burn God’s house down?” Men setting fire to houses at night. God’s house. Horst’s house, his father’s house. Horst rolled around in his sleep and awakened, afraid. Whenever Horst was afraid at night, he looked into his parents’ room to see if they were there. Now he crept to the door and opened it. The light had begun. His mother was in bed, but his father was sitting in the rocking chair at the window. It was 5:15 in the morning.
6. Heinrich Wedekind, baker, age 51
At 5:15 the Brötchen, the little breakfast rolls, had to be in the oven to be out with the boy before six. Baker Wedekind, behind his shop at the far west end of Hitler-Strasse, was at work in his slippers and trousers and apron (which needed changing), his suspenders over his quarter-sleeve heavy gray underwear. He got the Brötchen in and stepped to the front of the shop to open the door, have a look at the breaking light, and smoke his cigar. He had been thinking of going down to his garden plot, at the edge of town, and turning it before it got any colder, but the dawn looked like rain. He’d go tomorrow.
As he stood there, two men whom he knew came by, from the direction of Frankfurterplatz. “What’s up, at this hour?” he said. They told him that the synagogue had burned down in the night. “So,” he said, and went back to his Brötchen. The synagogue.
In 1933 Baker Wedekind had been Party manager for his block and, as he himself put it, a flotter SA Mann, a jaunty Storm Trooper. One day he’d been sitting in the Felsenkeller having a beer, when somebody threw a rock through the window of the Jew Mannheimer’s shoestore. Wedekind rushed into the store and scooped up the money from the cash register—just to protect it—and the police came. The next day the plainclothesman, old Hofmeister, called him in and said that some of the money was missing. That was taken care of by the Party, but there was a rumor around town that Baumert, the Social Democrat Bolshevik, had taken a snapshot of the baker standing in front of the cash register with his hands full of money. It was just a rumor, of course, but Wedekind quit the SA as soon as he had a good excuse, when the Handicrafts and Trades Office of the Party in Kronenberg was opened and he was offered the thankless job of mediator.
As he took his rolls from the fire, Baker Wedekind thought that he would like to see the Jew church burned down, but, on second thought, it might be better to go to the garden and work. No use looking for trouble; the shoe shop affair was enough. He would go by tomorrow, just walk past on his way to Frankfurterplatz and have a good look. That was the way to do it.
So he finished the rolls and went upstairs to eat breakfast with his wife, who was just as thick and strong as he was and did social work for the Party. He never talked to his wife, or to his son, whose wife resented her husband’s low pay at the bakery, or to his daughter, who had got into trouble and could not be got rid of. The fact is that Baker Wedekind was not a jaunty man at all. He was a baker, and he baked. Each month he looked through that month’s Master-Baker. Each day he read the headlines of the Daily Kronenberger. He had a copy of Mein Kampf (who hadn’t?), but he had never opened it (who had?).
If he had been a profoundly reflective man, Baker Wedekind might have said to himself, as he ate his breakfast: This life is work. The next—if only a man knew for sure—will be different. In bad times, in this life, you work without reward. In good times, you work with reward. But in bad times and good, you work. These are good times. The regime?—the regime promised the people bread, and I bake the bread. The “Thousand-Year Reich”?-If it lasts a thousand years, fine; a hundred years, fine; ten years, still fine.
It was 6:15 A.M.
Beginning to rain. Baker Wedekind went down to the garden anyway.
7. Hans Simon, bill-collector, age 42
Hans Simon got up at 6:15, as he always did, shaved, waxed his little mustache, had his breakfast, in the course of which he reviewed the world situation, as he always did, with his wife, his son, and his daughter as audience, and set out (banging the door behind him) for the municipal electric works to pick up his morning calls. He bicycled firmly along, never swerving, preoccupied with the world situation.
He had a right to be. Cell Leader Simon—cell leader was the very lowest rank in the Party—was one of the first Nazis in Germany and the first in Kronenberg. Sturmführer Schwenke, the bankrupt tailor, always claimed to be the first. He always talked about wir älte Kämpfer, we Old Party Fighters, but he never gave his Party Number and no one had ever seen his Gold Party Badge. Simon wore his badge on his jacket, where everyone saw it, and whenever it was the thirteenth of the month he walked under ladders and so on and said, “Thirteen is nothing unlucky for me. My Party Number is 5813, the five thousand eight hundred and thirteenth German to join the Party, and I call that lucky. And, before that, a member of the Führer’s Freiheitsbewegung, the Freedom Movement, before the Bloody Parade in Munich.”
These reflections having taken Hans Simon across the Werne Bridge and into Frankfurterplatz, he saw a fire truck a half-block down on the Mauerweg and a small crowd held back by SA men. It was drizzling, but the bill-collector decided to pedal to the scene; it might be something of great importance.
The building was gone. The outer walls and part of the wooden dome, still smoking, were left. There was one policeman present, in front of the gate of the iron fence around the lawn. A skinny old woman was talking in a cackle to whoever would listen: “A church, a church, a church,” she kept saying. SA men answered her; no one else said anything.
“A Jew church,” said one SA man.
“It’s not even a church,” said another.
“Why don’t you join, Auntie?”
“Be a Jew girl.”
“A church, a church, a church,” the old woman kept saying.
Bill-collector Simon, Party Number 5813, Gold Party Badge, rode on in the rain to pick up his morning calls and pondered the world situation. It was 7:30 in the morning.
8. Johann Kessler, Labor Front inspector (formerly unemployed bank clerk), age 46
At 7:30 Inspektor Kessler got off the local train from Kummerfeld and walked to his office in the Labor Front, in Hermann-Göring-Strasse. He got there at twenty to eight (he wasn’t due until eight), and Picht came in and said, “Have you heard? They burned the synagogue last night, here, everywhere.”
He and Picht picked up Euler on their way out, and the three men walked down the Werneweg to Frankfurterplatz and the Mauerweg in the drizzle. There it was, still smoking.
None of them said anything until they reached the Werneweg on their way back to the office. Then Kessler, a renegade Catholic who “preached” in the Nazi Faith Movement, said:
“This is a change. A big change.”
“Burning property,” said Picht, shaking his head, “burning property, whether it’s a church or whatever.”
“It won’t make them love us abroad,” said Euler.
“Do they love us now?” said Picht. Euler didn’t reply.
“A big change,” said Kessler again, “eine Evolution.” Kessler liked to use flowery language.
Ahead of them Pastor Tresckow of the Katherine Church was walking slowly away from the scene of the fire, an old man who had always kept out of politics. “Der Pfarrer guckt auch, the pastor took a squint at it, too,” said Euler. Just then there was a shout behind them:
“Nächstesmal die Katherinenkirche! The Katherine Church next!”
Picht and Euler raised their eyes to each other, but Kessler, the renegade Catholic, stopped sharply and looked back. People were hurrying to work on both sides of the street, some of them under umbrellas. Nobody but Kessler had stopped or raised his eyes. Pastor Tresckow was walking slowly on.
9. Heinrich Hildebrandt, high-school teacher, age 34
“Herr Studienrat, Herr Studienrat!” Studienrat Hildebrandt waited until Pfeffermann caught up with him. Pfeffermann was a student at the university now, but he had been one of Ilildebrandt’s students in the classical high school. Pfeffermann liked and admired Hildebrandt. Even though Hildebrandt was a Nazi, and an ostentatious one, he was a highly cultivated man who really knew literature and music, a true Continental. It was even said—no one knew—that before coming to Kronenberg he had once been an anti-Nazi and owed his survival to the personal influence of his father, an old Army colonel. How anxious Hildebrandt was to talk with Pfeffermann, who was a Mischling (his father was the Jew in the marriage, which made it worse), was another question, although the teacher certainly liked the student.
“Have you heard, Herr Studienrat? They have—the synagogue has been burned.”
“The synagogue?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been there?”
“No. Have you time to go?”
Herr Hildebrandt had time this morning; his literature class were writing their examination, and he always made a point of arriving late on examination days to show the students that he trusted them. He hesitated a moment, began to blush, and then said, “Yes, I have time.”
It was 8:45 or so when they got there. The fire had almost burned itself out, but the smoke still came through the half-fallen dome of the building. The fire trucks, one on the Mauerweg, one up above on Hitler-Strasse, were no longer pumping. It was drizzling.
“The synagogue,” said Pfeffermann, shaking his head.
Hildebrandt, blushing, said nothing. The American, Henderson, a buoyant young man who was studying (not very hard) at Kronenberg University and, through Pfeffermann, had met Hildebrandt before, came over to them; he said good morning without shaking hands (American fashion), and asked, in German, “Was ist los, Herr Studienrat?” Hildebrandt shook his head, without answering. He felt himself blushing and, feeling himself blushing, blushed worse.
As he entered his classroom, the class interrupted its writing to stand until he had said good morning and sat down at his desk. He opened his briefcase and took out Crime and Punishment, in French, with a plain wrapping-paper cover over the binding, to read while the class continued their examination.
Always fire, always fire. The Reichstag fire. The book-burning in the Paradeplatz in Königsberg. He was an anti-Nazi then, in ’33, a man who read the Baseler Nachrichter and Le Temps every day and even once in a while (with great difficulty, for his English was weak) the Times of London. Now he was a Nazi, reading Crime and Punishment in French, with a plain wrapping-paper cover over the binding. Now he was a Nazi, and the Nazis were burning synagogues.
The noon bell rang. The students brought their examination books to the desk, and each said, “Guten Morgen, Herr Studienrat,” but the Studienrat, reading his book in the wrapping-paper cover, did not look up.
10. Willy Hofmeister, policeman, age 57
It was noon, and Plainclothesman Hofmeister of the Kronenberg detective bureau was pedaling over the Werne Bridge on his way to work. Thursday was his morning to paint, but you can’t paint in the rain. Hofmeister had chronic lead poisoning; he was allowed to paint once a week, out of doors. His paintings, in oil, were, like Cabinetmaker Klingelhöfer’s, what a critic would call “calendar art” as far as subject, mood, and technique were concerned, but of their kind they were skilled and delicate.
Willy Hofmeister had had to give up his profession of scenery-painting when he was twenty-eight. In 1908 he had become a policeman in Kronenberg, first in the traffic police and then in the criminal division. It had not been a bad life. In thirty years there had been only three killings in Kronenberg, only one of them a murder (the other two were sex-maniac cases). In three more years he would retire on full pension. Not bad; but Willy Hofmeister had wanted to paint.
When his wife (who always made him stay in bed late and rest on Thursdays) told him that there was smoke coming up near Frankfurterplatz, Hofmeister knew right away what it was. The morning before, Oskar Rosenthal, the former Bank Director, had come to his office, stood with his hands at his side, and said, as Nazi protocol required, “Ich bin der Jude, Oskar Israel Rosen——”
“Bitte, bitte, please, please, Herr Direktor,” Hofmeister said to the former Bank Director, “sit down, won’t you?” When Rosenthal, the chairman of the board of the Kronenberg synagogue, told him that more windows had been broken the night before and the janitor had reported a smell of gasoline, Hofmeister said to the old man:
“A man will investigate at once, Herr Direktor, especially the gasoline smell. The windows—well, such things are difficult, you know, with, well, with the shooting in Paris yesterday.”
“I understand, Herr Kriminalinspektor,” said Rosenthal.
“So,” said Kriminalinspektor Hofmeister, rising, “if you will excuse me a moment, I’ll get the stenographer and you can dictate a report of the gasoline smell and the windows, and then we will register the complaint.”
“No, no, Herr Kriminalinspektor,” said Rosenthal. “I would rather not make a report, and there is certainly no complaint.”
“But,” said Hofmeister, “a report must be made.”
“No, really,” said Rosenthal, rising, “it is not at all necessary from our—from my point of view. I would much prefer not to make a report.”
“But there must be a report, Herr Direktor,” said Hofmeister.
“Only if you insist, Herr Kriminalinspektor,” said Rosenthal.
The old policeman twisted his immense white mustache and said, “I shall make the report myself, Herr Direktor, after we have investigated. All possible steps will be taken.” He held out his hand to the former Bank Director and said, “Bitte, Herr Direktor.”
The old Jew took his hand and said, “Bitte, Herr Kriminalinspektor,” and left.
Hofmeister had sent a policeman to the synagogue to investigate and, before he himself left for home at the end of the day, he wrote the report and placed it in the Kronenberg police files, which were found, incompletely burned, in the alley behind the police station when the American troops entered Kronenberg seven years later. The report, dated November 9, 1938, read:
“Synagogue, Mauerweg, report of broken windows, etc.
“Investigation at the scene established the fact that on the night of November 8, seven windowpanes in the synagogue on the Mauerweg were broken by stones thrown by unknown persons. Some of the stones lay in the prayer hall, some on the lawn. On the southeast gable side of the building, just outside the window leading to the furnace-room, which window was also found to have been broken, were the remnants of two wine bottles. These bottles had obviously been filled with a liquid, the odor of which was still present on the glass particles and in the immediate vicinity, corked with paper and rag bits, and ignited. Indications point to an explosion of small extent, i.e., of limited effect. Damage to the building, apart from a blackening on the wall, was not present.
“Criminologically valuable clues not present.
“Search for perpetrators without result, as of 5:20 P.M. instant date.
“On the side of those whose interests were injured, there was no demand for investigation.”
That was the afternoon before, and now, as he pedaled over the Werne Bridge, Policeman Hofmeister was worried. The report had gone down to the chiefs of both the traffic and criminal police before 6 P.M., and Hofmeister was sure that there must have been uniformed police guarding the building during the night. The SA—of course it was the SA—did not like the police, and the police despised the SA. So there must have been trouble. Hofmeister decided to go over to the synagogue.
There were SA men everywhere, and only one uniformed policeman, Baumann, of the traffic division, in front of the synagogue gate. Hofmeister talked to him, Baumann answered, Hofmeister asked him something, and Baumann shrugged his shoulders as he replied. Then Hofmeister walked away.
“Heil Hitler, Herr Kriminalinspektor!”
It was Schwenke, the Sturmführer. “Morgen,” said Hofmeister, getting on his bicycle. Schwenke, the Sturmführer. In 1931 Hofmeister had been sent to search Schwenke’s apartment for evidence of illegal possession of arms by the SA, and Schwenke had said, “You find nothing in my mail, Herr Kriminalinspektor; do you think you will find something in my apartment?” Schwenke, the Nazi. Now it was Hofmeister, the Nazi, Schwenke and Hofmeister. The old policeman had three years to go, and then his pension, and the doctor had said that if he wasn’t working he could paint.
At the office Hofmeister was told to report to the Police Chief, the Oberinspektor.
“Herr Kriminalinspektor,” said the Police Chief, a young man, “I have here an order to be executed. I will read it to you, and then I will ask you to read it yourself and sign it.”
“‘And sign it,’ Herr Oberinspektor?” said Hofmeister.
“And sign it, Herr Kriminalinspektor.”
The order said that all male Jews in Kronenberg between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five were to be taken into protective custody at once. The order was to be executed before midnight of the instant date, November 10, 1938, by the Criminal Police (who in Germany could always arrest without a warrant). Kriminalinspektor Hofmeister was to deliver the following persons, whose names began with F through M, to the storerooms of the Town Hall, which would be used for custody because of the shortage of custodial quarters.
“Clear, Herr Kriminalinspektor?”
“Yes, Herr Oberinspektor.”
“You will remain on duty until all the persons on your list are in custody, and then you will get your overtime off.”
“Yes, Herr Oberinspektor.”
Policeman Hofmeister took his list and began his round, without his bicycle. He carried no weapon.
It was a long afternoon. It might have been longer, except that every man on the list was at home; no Jew in Kronenberg had gone out of his house since the night before. Still, it was a long afternoon, and when Policeman Hofmeister rang the apartment bell alongside Salo Marowitz’s tailor-shop, it was going on nine o’clock.
Marowitz opened the door and said, “Come in, Herr Kriminalinspektor.”
“Thank you, Hen Marowitz.”
On the parlor table, under the green glass tulip chandelier, was a suitcase, closed. On the sofa were a man’s coat and hat.
“Herr Marowitz—”
“Won’t you sit down, Herr Kriminalinspektor?”
“I—. Thank you, a moment only, Herr Marowitz.”
“You have come for me, Herr Kriminalinspektor.”
“Yes, Herr Marowitz. Just for your own protec——”
“I understand, Herr Kriminalinspektor. Shall we go?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind…. Herr Marowitz, may I ask if you have blankets and food, and a little money?”
“Money, yes, but not blankets. And my wife will bring me food if it’s necessary.”
“Why don’t you take a blanket, just to have one, and maybe some bread and sausage or something, Herr Marowitz? You understand, I don’t—”
“Thank you, Herr Kriminalinspektor…. Mama, come in and say good evening to Kriminalinspektor Hofmeister.”
“No,” from the other room.
“I’m sorry, Herr Kriminalinspektor. Frau Marowitz isn’t so well this evening. I’ll get the blanket and food.”
Hofmeister sat in the room alone, and the apartment door was unlocked from the outside. Samuel, the tailor’s 17-year-old Mischling son came in.
“Hello, Herr Kriminalinspektor. I saw Georg this afternoon, at the synagogue. They blew it up, as a safety measure.”
“I know,” said Hofmeister; Georg was his youngest son.
“You don’t see something like that every day,” said Samuel.
“No, you don’t, Samuel,” said Hofmeister.
“And Georg says he’s sure I can get in the Air Corps; they take half-Jews. He’s going to speak to—hello, Pop, what’s the blanket for, where you going?”
“Hello, Schmul. I’m going to spend the night out.”
“Where?”
“At the Town Hall. Herr Hofmeister is going with me.”
“Oh.” The boy paused. “Can I go along?”
“Well—”
“Oh, yes,” said Hofmeister, “part way, we’ll all walk together.”
“Well,” said Marowitz, “a glass of wine, Herr Kriminal-inspektor?”
“No, thank you, Herr Marowitz, not on duty, you know. Maybe just a—. No. Thank you anyway. I appreciate it.”
The son carrying the father’s suitcase and walking between the two older men, the three of them climbed up through the streets, around the turns, up the steps, to the Market Place which led to the Town Hall.
“We’re traveling at a snail’s pace,” said the son.
“Herr Hofmeister and I are older than you are, Son, aren’t we, Herr Kriminalinspektor?”
“Yes, Herr Marowitz,” said Hofmeister, “yes, we are.” Then he stopped and said, “I’m a little out of breath, if you don’t mind, Herr Marowitz. I’m tired tonight. If you and Samuel care to walk on ahead, I’ll catch up with you.”