Austria

Victor Klemperer greeted 1938 with gloom. He briefly hoped that Schacht’s ejection from government might presage an internal power struggle. Instead the regime celebrated its fifth anniversary with sublime self-confidence. ‘I no longer really believe I shall live to see a change,’ he sighed. Despite domestic success and stability he noticed that the Jewish question was being ramped up again; new regulations prevented Jews from working in a slew of professional occupations. A month later he listened to Hitler make a speech to the Reichstag that sounded like nothing less than ‘a threat of war’.¹

Hitler’s belligerence and the heightened pressure on Jews were linked. To hard-core National Socialists the Jews were the enemy. It made no sense to fight international Jewry while leaving Jews in Germany free to sabotage the economy or poison morale. That was the mistake made in 1914–18. The means to destroy the basis for Jewish existence now converged with the ends set out by the Four-Year Plan. Denying Jews the opportunity to make a living would hamper their potential for economic destabilization and, ultimately, force them to leave. Starving Jewish enterprises of resources, as well as markets, would mean more raw materials to direct elsewhere. Soaking the Jews through draconian taxation would provide a welcome income stream for the Finance Ministry as it strained to pay for rearmament.

From this point, persecution of the Jews became ancillary to making war. Their fate would be determined more by Machtpolitik – the setting and achievement of geo-strategic goals by diplomacy or force of arms – than by Judenpolitik. To be sure, Hitler’s Jew-hatred, shared by his inner circle and echoed by the Nazi Party, commingled with the aspiration to make Germany into a great power; but it was not a driving force in and of itself. Rather, Germany’s economic exigencies, strategic priorities, military successes and setbacks would decisively influence how Jews were treated.

Hitler was approaching fifty and feeling anxious about his health. Would he have long enough to overturn the Versailles settlement and create an empire to sustain the German people in the coming struggle for global domination between Aryan civilization and international Jewry? In the memorandum for the Four-Year Plan he put Germany’s civilian leadership on notice that he was preparing the country for war. On 5 November 1937 he met with the military leadership, ostensibly to settle competing claims between branches of the armed forces for the allocation of resources. The meeting was attended by General Werner von Blomberg, minister of war, Admiral Erich Raeder, commander of the navy, General Werner von Fritsch, commander-in-chief of the army, Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, and Konstantin von Neurath, foreign minister. Typically for Hitler an initiative intended to solve a relatively limited practical problem actually ended up by going in a radically new direction, creating more dilemmas.²

Hitler reiterated his conviction that Germany could not solve its shortages of food and raw material through autarky or trade its way out of trouble. Salvation lay in the acquisition of a continental empire. To the question of how this could be achieved Hitler answered with brutal simplicity: ‘Germany’s problems could be solved only by the use of force.’ Nor was this some vague, futuristic aspiration. The necessary steps had to be taken by 1943–5 because, by then, Germany’s enemies would be too powerful and the German armed forces would have lost their manpower and technical edge. It might be possible, and necessary, to move even sooner if France collapsed or got into a war with Italy. In any eventuality, the immediate targets were Austria and Czechoslovakia. The ‘annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria would mean the acquisition of foodstuffs for 5–6 million people, on the assumption that the compulsory emigration of 2 million people from Czechoslovakia and a million from Austria was practicable’. It would also greatly strengthen Germany’s geo-strategic position and release forces ‘for other purposes’.³

Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath were disconcerted by their Führer’s game plan. In order to deal with a shortage of resources he was planning to take on Europe’s strongest military land power ensconced behind the most elaborate fortifications ever seen, the Maginot Line. Not only was he planning to wage a war that was bound to consume the very resources it was supposed to secure, but even if it ended successfully it would still involve the forced displacement of millions of people in order to free up sufficient foodstuffs for the Volk. However, Hitler was determined not to allow the diffidence of his generals or diplomats to hold him up. In the new year he embarked on a cabinet reshuffle, sacking Blomberg and replacing Neurath with Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had run the Nazi Party office for foreign affairs and served as ambassador in London for a brief and inglorious year. Fritsch was removed a few weeks later on trumped-up charges of homosexual activity. The new cabinet that convened for the first (and last) time on 5 February 1938 also included Walther Funk, the freshly appointed Reich minister for economics, who was wholly subordinate to Göring’s Office for the Four-Year Plan. The command structure of the army was reorganized and dozens of senior figures removed. A cadre of young officers who were more in tune with National Socialism were promoted to key staff and field positions.⁴

It was not long before Hitler made his move. Since becoming chancellor he had hankered after the unification of Austria with Germany and used the Austrian Nazi Party as a tool to this end. His meddling in 1934, before he had cleared the way with Italy, led to an embarrassing setback. But four years later Italy and Germany were allies: Germany had supported Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia provoked international condemnation, they had signed a formal pact to fight communism, and their troops fought side by side with Franco’s forces in Spain. At a meeting with Göring in September 1937, Mussolini indicated his acquiescence should the Austrian NSDAP make another bid for power. On cue from Berlin the banned Austrian Nazis set out to render Austria ungovernable. As disorder spread, Hitler demanded to see the Austrian prime minister, Kurt Schuschnigg. They met on 12 February 1938 at Berchtesgaden, the Führer’s lofty residence in the Bavarian Alps. In this intimidating spot Schuschnigg was told he must legalize the Austrian NSDAP, appoint its leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart as minister of the interior, and turn Austria into a vassal state of the Third Reich. Schuschnigg returned to Vienna, but instead of submitting he cast around for some device to deflect his slavering neighbour. He came up with a plan to hold a referendum that would enable Austrians (over the age of twenty-five) to express their view of whether the country should remain independent. When the dodge was announced on 9 March, with polling set to take place just four days later, Hitler was furious. He ordered the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, to prepare an invasion before the vote could be held. While the Wehrmacht scrambled into action, Hitler issued an ultimatum to Schuschnigg to call off the referendum and resign in favour of Seyss-Inquart. During 11 March, as uniformed Austrian SA and SS men took to the streets, Schuschnigg’s resolve collapsed. Seyss-Inquart took his place as chancellor and immediately called in the German army to ‘restore’ order.⁵

Even before the first motorized units of the Wehrmacht, much depleted by breakdowns, arrived in Vienna, the Austrian SA and SS had taken control of the streets. A reign of terror descended on the city’s Jewish inhabitants that exceeded anything experienced by Jews in Germany. In the words of the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, ‘That night all hell broke loose. The netherworld had opened its portals and spewed out its basest, most horrid, and filthiest spirits. The city changed into a nightmare painting reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch … What was being unleashed here had nothing to do with the Machtergreifung, the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, which at least externally seemed to proceed legally and was witnessed by parts of the population with displeasure and skepticism or with simpleminded national idealism. What was being unleashed here was the revolt of envy; malevolence; bitterness; blind, vicious vengefulness – all other voices were condemned to silence.’⁶

Around 176,000 Jews lived in Austria’s capital, comprising 90 per cent of the country’s Jewish population. Although Jews had dwelled in Vienna for centuries, the bulk of the community had arrived quite recently. The first wave of migration came from the provinces of the Austrian Empire, mainly Bohemia and Moravia, after 1867, when Jews in Austria gained civil rights. The Great War and its aftermath saw a second influx, mainly war refugees from the eastern borderlands of the Austrian Empire, in particular Galicia. These Jews enjoyed spectacular social mobility. It was not unusual for Jewish men whose fathers or grandfathers had pursued traditional Jewish occupations in the countryside to become lawyers, physicians or writers. Jews dominated the free professions: they constituted over two thirds of the capital’s lawyers and nearly half of all its doctors. Yet, while Vienna boasted a large and sophisticated Jewish middle class (typified by Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud), in the inner-city districts there was a substantial concentration of less well-off Jewish craftsmen, shopkeepers and traders. A significant section of the community were Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jews. Some 30 per cent of Viennese Jews were in receipt of welfare. In addition, thousands of German Jewish refugees had entered Austria over the previous five years, many of whom lived on aid from the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), the central communal organization. While the leaders of the IKG had not harboured much affection for Chancellor Schuschnigg, his right-wing Catholic politics or his neo-fascist Fatherland Front, they nevertheless appreciated that he was a patriot and, more to the point, their only shield against Hitler. The IKG had made a generous donation to Schuschnigg’s referendum fighting fund. The Austrian Nazis knew this and it was pay-back time.⁷

George Gedye, the Vienna correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, had a ringside view of the ensuing drama. From the window of his office he could see up and down Vienna’s main shopping street and towards the alleys that led into the historic Jewish quarter. As soon as the appointment of Seyss-Inquart as chancellor was announced, he saw SA and SS men, along with hordes of Nazi Party members, now sporting the lapel badge that proclaimed their allegiance, invade the districts where Jews lived. They smashed up shops, ransacked apartments, and stole cars belonging to Jews. The permissive atmosphere was such that Nazi activists would not only steal cars from their Jewish owners, but demand ‘petrol money’ from them. Policemen just watched. William Shirer, now attached to American radio network CBS, was down on the Graben amongst the mob. He noticed that many police officers were already wearing makeshift swastika armbands. No one lifted a finger to stop the wanton destruction. ‘Young toughs were heaving paving blocks into the windows of Jews’ shops. The crowd roared with delight.’ Gedye witnessed pillaging on an industrial scale. ‘Outside a big Jewish store stood a string of lorries into which the storm troopers were pitching all kinds of millinery goods as they took them from the shop. Police stood by to see that they were not interfered with.’⁸

Hitler’s triumphal entry into Vienna on the afternoon of 14 March and his speech on the Heldenplatz the following morning drew vast crowds onto the streets. Ruth Maier, a Jewish schoolgirl who had just turned eighteen, recalled the scenes in her diary. ‘All the Austrians were celebrating and jumping about in excitement. Flags were hoisted, people hugged and kissed each other in sheer joy.’ The obverse of this euphoria was an outpouring of hate for the capital’s Jews. The presence of German troops made no difference. They were impressively well disciplined, but held aloof from the mayhem. Gedye recorded that ‘day after day, Nazi storm troopers, surrounded by jostling crowds, jeering and laughing mobs of “golden Viennese hearts” dragged Jews from shops, offices and homes, men and women, put scrubbing brushes in their hands, splashed them well with acid, and made them go down on their hands and knees and scrub away for hours at the hapless task of removing Schuschnigg propaganda. All this I could watch from my office window overlooking the Graben.’⁹

The brutality inflicted on Vienna’s Jews was not random and nor was it simply revenge for the support they had given to the deposed chancellor or their attachment to the Austrian Republic. Gedye noted a pattern of ritual degradation. The Austrian Nazis targeted well-dressed Jews, especially women. They were forced to engage in tasks that were socially as well as politically symbolic. SS men seized Jews and took groups, fifty at a time, to clean the latrines at the SS barracks. Crowds that gathered to watch Jews perform these labours jeered ‘“Work at last for the Jews” … “We thank our Führer for finding work for the Jews.”’ Where Jewish shops and stores were not wrecked, they were subjected to a throttling boycott. Aryans who purchased at the wrong place could find themselves pilloried. In organizing these displays, Austrian Nazis, many drawn from the lower middle classes and the unemployed, were venting years of envy towards the Jews who they perceived as the idle rich or business competitors. They relished the reversal of roles: now the Jews were the ones performing menial tasks. The crowds of Viennese Nazis were symbolically marking the end of a regime that had protected Jews, demonstrating the complete vulnerability of this minority. It was also a terrifying message to the remaining Austrian loyalists and the tens of thousands of working-class Viennese who had supported the labour movement.¹⁰

After a week of untrammelled violence and plunder Heydrich ordered the German security forces to impose order. Contrary to appearances at the time, and the common interpretation of historians subsequently, the explosion of anti-Semitism in Vienna was not the fulfilment of Nazi goals or even the culmination of the hatred Hitler claimed to have learned in the city three decades earlier. It was actually the result of the Germans not being in control. As events unfolded over the next week it became clear that the new management had not anticipated how the Austrian NSDAP would behave. Nor did they approve. The disgraceful scenes that were reported around the world fuelled ‘atrocity propaganda’, although this was not what bothered Heydrich or his masters in Berlin. The incoming Germans were alarmed that if the plunder continued there would be nothing left for them individually or for the Reich.¹¹

Although Hitler had long dreamed about combining Austria and Germany, it was characteristic that he had given little thought to the practical details of how this was to be accomplished. Would Austria become part of a confederation or be absorbed into the Reich, and if the latter to what extent would it preserve its regional identity? The day after Hitler arrived in Vienna he announced to a frenzied crowd in the Heldenplatz that Austria would be annexed to the Reich. Initially the territory would be ruled from Berlin through a Reich Commissar. Josef Bürckel, who had overseen the reincorporation of the Saarland, was named to the post of Reich Commissar for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich. Subsequently the Ostmark more or less disappeared as a distinct territorial unit, replaced in 1942 by the two Reich regions of the Alps and Danube. Before then the Austrians were given the chance to register their enthusiasm for annexation by voting in a plebiscite.¹²

The Reich security apparatus was quicker off the mark. For Himmler and Heydrich the occupation of Austria offered an opportunity to prove their worth and extend their powers. They were amongst the first Germans to arrive in Vienna on 12 March. Later, Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, was brought in to set up a local office subordinate to Berlin. In due course, he handed over to Franz Stahlecker. The first task of the SD and the Sipo, security police, was to arrest political opponents. However, Heydrich soon realized that the greed and indiscipline of the local Nazis was almost as much of a liability to the Reich as deliberate opposition. On 17 March he advised Bürckel that unless the depredation and random violence was brought under control, the security police would start arresting Austrian NSDAP activists. Four days later the Interior Ministry in Berlin issued a similar call to Bürckel. The ‘foreign domination’ of the economy would be tackled through the law once the plebiscite and elections to the German Reichstag were held on 10 April.¹³

Imposing control from Berlin did not end the terror or thieving. It simply became better organized and more purposeful. Shirer lived with his heavily pregnant wife in a rented apartment next to the Rothschild Palais, home to the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family. The SS requisitioned the building to serve as their headquarters (Eichmann was given an office there). But no sooner were the guardians of order installed as his neighbours than Shirer saw SS officers ‘carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm.’ Gedye chanced upon a vehicle park packed with cars that bore the SS sign hastily stencilled on their mudguards. The ritualized abuse of Jews continued. Two weeks after the occupation Shirer reported, ‘On the streets today groups of Jews, with jeering storm troopers over them and taunting crowds around them on their hands and knees scrubbing the Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalks. Many Jews killed themselves. All sorts of reports of Nazi sadism.’ Both Shirer and Gedye reported that at the Seitenstettengasse Synagogue, which also served as a community centre in the heart of the Jewish district, Orthodox Jews were forced to clean toilets while wearing tefillin (phylacteries), which were customarily donned for morning prayer.¹⁴

While his colleagues in the security police were hunting down political opponents, Adolf Eichmann was deputed to deal with the Jews. The template for his operation was the extension of Judenpolitik into Upper Silesia in May 1937. His immediate objectives were to arrest the Jewish leadership, suppress the assimilation-oriented communal organizations, seize their records and send the papers back to Berlin for analysis. His long-term goal was to implement the SD policy of engineering Jewish emigration. In this respect he found his work was hindered by the chaos that enveloped the Jewish population. Without leaders, official guidance, or institutions, Jews who wanted to emigrate were forced to scurry from one government and municipal office to the next with only a dim idea of what was needed to leave the country let alone any inkling of where they could go. They were forced to queue outside embassies and consulates for hours, presenting an inviting target for abuse and violence. If they managed to get into official buildings, Austrian officials often delighted in sending them away empty-handed. When Leo Lauterbach, a senior executive in the World Zionist Organization, visited Vienna in mid-April he found a situation ‘characterised by confusion, uncertainty and a state of flux’. There seemed to be ‘no established authority from whom the official policy could be reliably ascertained and whose intervention solicited’. This was the exact opposite of what the SD wanted to achieve.¹⁵

In a bid to re-establish order and get emigration moving Eichmann summoned the Jewish communal functionaries who were still at large and told them what the SD wanted. When the terrified Jews grasped that the security police were primarily interested in emigration they explained what was needed and sought their help to get communal agencies up and running again. Eichmann, in turn, realized that he could harness the willingness of Jewish officeholders to his own ends. He arranged for the release of key administrators from detention and interviewed several until he found the right type to do his bidding. Dr Josef Löwenherz, a member of the IKG executive, appealed to him as the kind of energetic, forceful personality needed to get things done. He gave Löwenherz a pencil and some paper and told him he had twenty-four hours to outline exactly what was required to enable the community to resume functioning. Then he sent him back to his cell. When they met the next day, Löwenherz handed Eichmann a list of essential offices and personnel. Eichmann then obtained the approval of Heydrich for the re-establishment of the IKG, the Palestine Office and the Zionist Association, all with the sole aim of assisting Jews to emigrate. Crucially, the Jewish organizations would operate under the supervision of the SD.¹⁶

Eichmann thereby achieved a dramatic accretion to the power of the Sipo-SD. He had been sent to Vienna with modest executive powers that extended little further than organizing the arrest of some Jews. But through the guise of furthering Jewish emigration he ended up controlling the destiny of the entire Jewish population. Probably without even realizing it he showed how Heydrich and the security apparatus could create a domain over which they ruled unchallenged simply by gaining the right to implement SD policy. The Jews may even have contributed to this forward leap by embracing cooperation with the SD, if only on the grounds that Eichmann seemed genuinely interested in establishing order and helping them to escape the madhouse that the Austrian Nazis had created.

The Anschluss led to another unforeseen development that was soon to have fateful consequences. Within Hitler’s inner circle Göring had been the most bullish about taking over Austria, which he saw as a valuable source of raw materials, labour and financial assets. It was, therefore, infuriating to see the Austrian Nazis siphoning off Jewish wealth for personal gain, destroying the stock of Jewish enterprises, and appropriating businesses in an uncontrolled bonanza. By mid-April around 7,000 Jewish-owned enterprises had been ‘Aryanized’ by semi-official ‘commissions’ of local Nazis using the threat of a beating or imprisonment to get their way. Usually they acted on their own authority and were doing little more than putting a rival out of business or lining their own pockets by purchasing a commercial concern at a knock-down price and then selling it on for a rather more realistic one. This was intolerable to the Nazi leadership in Berlin.¹⁷

On 11 April, Göring met with Hans Fischböck, the minister for trade in the transitional government in Vienna, Walter Funk, the Reich economics minister, and other officials to review the incorporation of Austria into the German economy. When the question of Jewish-owned property came up for discussion the delegation from Vienna proposed to register all Jewish assets in the Ostmark. This amounted to taking out an option on everything that was left and sticking on it a notice saying ‘Hands Off, Property of the Reich’. The idea appealed to Göring, who immediately resolved to apply a similar measure in Germany. On 13 April, Seyss-Inquart issued the ‘Law Concerning the Appointment of Commissarial Administrators and Supervisory Personnel’ with the intention of finally curbing the ‘wild commissions’. Two weeks later Göring published a decree for the registration and disposal of Jewish assets in the whole of the Reich, explicitly empowering the Office of the Four-Year Plan to ‘undertake measures in order to guarantee utilization of the registered property in the interest of the German economy’.¹⁸

Fischböck and his colleagues had unwittingly made a breakthrough in Judenpolitik and established a model that would be replicated again and again. Control of the German economy was already centralized in the hands of Göring and bureaucrats at the Office of the Four Year Plan, but as yet they lacked a coherent set of policies or tools for use against the Jews. There were no laws to enable Jewish enterprises to be taken over or dissolved; there was not even a definition of a ‘Jewish enterprise’. Jewish-owned businesses might be driven to the wall or their proprietors forced to sell out, but this was most commonly the result of local action by NSDAP party bosses. Occasionally, Aryanization took the form of a hostile takeover by a financial institution or a corporation. The developments in Vienna opened Göring’s eyes to the possibilities of comprehensive legislation to eliminate Jews from the economy in an orderly fashion, maximizing the benefits to the Reich and the preparations for war.¹⁹

Thus the occupation of Austria and the despoliation of the Austrian Jews was not a linear development of Nazi Judenpolitik. The one did not lead to the other. On the contrary, by accident Vienna turned into a laboratory for the implementation of radical new ideas that, once tried and tested, were imported back into Germany.

The following month, a Property Transfer Office was set up in Vienna to evaluate Jewish-owned firms officially and ensure that the change of ownership was legal even if it was nowhere near fair. By August, 23,000 concerns of various sizes had ceased to exist or been placed under new management. Great uncertainty still remained over the status of property that had been seized before the new legislation. That was only solved retrospectively in October and the authorities had to accept that they would get only a fraction of the total wealth robbed from Jews in the first chaotic weeks. The veneer of legality and subsequent claims that the new rulers had deliberately set out to rationalize the Jewish sector of the economy were, at best, ex-post-facto justifications for larceny and extortion.²⁰

The sudden imposition on Austrian Jews of the accumulated German anti-Jewish legislation of half a decade also had unintended consequences. On 15 March all state officials wishing to remain in post were required to take an oath to Adolf Hitler. Jews were forbidden to swear allegiance to the Führer and were therefore dismissed. The Ministry of Justice summarily sacked all Jewish and half-Jewish judges and lawyers. There were no exceptions for those who had performed military service. Jews were no longer allowed to practise any form of law. The universities first announced that no Jews would be admitted, then expelled Jews who were already taking courses. All Jewish teaching staff were dismissed within the month. Jews were sacked from newspapers, theatres, orchestras and the opera houses. Since they had played a disproportionate part in Vienna’s cultural life the effect was devastating. The same was true of their presence in the medical profession. Suddenly thousands of families had no breadwinner and Jewish men had no prospect of earning a living. When Eichmann permitted the resurrection of the IKG, Löwenherz stressed that it was essential to allow the community to organize welfare services. Bizarrely, at the same time as Eichmann collected a huge fine from the Viennese Jews as a punishment for supporting the Schuschnigg referendum, the German authorities had to lend the IKG 600,000–700,000 Reichsmarks to get its relief operation going. Soon the IKG was providing free meals to about 15,000 Jews every day. Less than 5 per cent of Jews of working age any longer had jobs.²¹

The impoverishment of the community threatened to work against emigration. In May, Eichmann gave the IKG and the Palestine Office a target of sending 20,000 Jews abroad. But few countries were prepared to accept penniless refugees. Before long, Bürckel and Fischböck realized that they faced the prospect of ruling a city with an immovable mass of destitute Jews. While Nazis puzzled over this dilemma, the IKG came up with a solution: Jews in Britain and America would fund their emigration. With Eichmann’s agreement, Löwenherz arranged for the JDC and the Council for German Jewry to pay $50,000 per month into a special account. Only the IKG could access the account and the money could be used only for emigration costs. There was a further twist to the scheme. When rich Jews exchanged local currency for dollars, the rate of exchange was so skewed that the transaction generated extra income for the IKG. This revenue covered its running costs and augmented the funds needed to finance emigration by the poorest section of the Jewish population.²²

However, obtaining the necessary papers to emigrate was still long drawn out and sometimes perilous. Jews had to sell property, settle all debts, clear any outstanding bills, pay municipal and state taxes, and get numerous documents to qualify for an exit visa. Officials were often unhelpful or malicious, turning Jews away or inventing obstacles. It was not unusual for a Jew to get a time-limited entry visa to another country only to see it elapse before he or she had completed the paperwork to leave. Whether Eichmann recognized that the entire process could be accelerated if the necessary offices were brought together under one roof or whether the initiative came from Jewish functionaries is not clear. But once again he ordered Löwenherz to draw up a plan. The result was the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Eichmann submitted the proposal to Bürckel, who consulted with Berlin before agreeing.²³

The Central Office for Jewish Emigration opened for business on 20 August 1938, with Stahlecker as the nominal head and Eichmann as the day-to-day manager. Superficially it was intended to expedite Jewish emigration, but its creation had more far-reaching implications. By subordinating all Jewish organizational activity to the furtherance of emigration and subordinating control of emigration to the Sipo-SD, Eichmann effectively gave the security apparatus a controlling interest in all Jewish matters. The Zentralstelle was a decisive step towards placing the fate of the Jews in the hands of the most radical element of the Nazi power structure. It also inaugurated the system by which the Sipo-SD could dramatically expand its operations at no extra cost and with the minimum of additional manpower. The Jews did the work and the overheads were covered by money squeezed from them. The emigration office was, amongst other things, a ferociously efficient means of stripping Jews of their assets. As well as paying regular taxes, Jews applying to emigrate had to pay a flight tax and an ‘atonement tax’; they had to liquidate their property and exchange their wealth for a relatively tiny proportion of its true value in the form of foreign currency. To the delight of Göring and the Finance Ministry, this foreign currency was not even coming out of Germany’s own reserves: it was supplied by Jews abroad. Eichmann’s enterprise was so successful that it was soon taken up as the model for the removal of the Jews from the Old Reich.²⁴

The imposition of German rule over Austria was so sudden and brutal it gave Austrian Jews almost no time to adapt. Unlike Jews in Germany they were not able to equip institutions gradually to cope with the onslaught. Overnight all points of reference disappeared. Jewish children in school were suddenly ostracized. Philipp Flesch, a teacher in a state school, recalled that a teacher who had been dismissed for violent Nazi activism was brought directly from prison to be the school’s new headmaster. Ruth Maier was forced to move to an overcrowded Jewish school to continue her education. It was run by Orthodox and Zionist Jews with whom she had nothing in common. Jewish ex-soldiers put on their medals when they ventured into the streets in the belief that decorations for valour would offer a degree of protection from the anti-Semitic mobs, only to be mocked and abused. An ex-officer who was blinded during the war found a chest full of ribbons of no avail when he appealed against the confiscation of his business. A Nazi official told him, ‘you can shove that Habsburg stuff up your ass. Shove off, and don’t come back …’ Private property was no longer secure and the home no longer a sanctuary. Baruch Zuckerman, a representative of the World Jewish Congress who was based in Trieste, wrote to Nahum Goldmann that Jews were ‘constantly taken out of their homes and forced to clean and scrape slogans from the walls and sidewalks’. The number of Jewish funerals rose from three or four per day to 140. Zuckerman drily informed Goldmann that ‘suicides and heart failures are the majority’.²⁵

As the world of Austrian Jews collapsed, hundreds succumbed to despair and took their own lives. George Gedye found this quiet surrender in the fragile privacy of their homes even worse than the assaults and humiliation that he witnessed outdoors. ‘Much more terrifying was the acceptance of suicide as a perfectly normal and natural incident by every Jewish household. It is quite impossible to convey to anyone outside Austria in how matter-of-fact a way the Jews of Austria to-day refer to this way out of their agony.’ His Jewish friends ‘spoke to one of their intention to commit suicide with no more emotion than they had formerly talked of making an hour’s journey by train’. Many of those arrested and sent to concentration camps died in custody, even though they were fit young men, and were cremated without ceremony. It was common to hear that a family received a curt note informing them that ‘Your Jew is dead. Pick up the urn.’²⁶

Reactions to the mayhem in Austria

Newspaper readers around the world were well informed about the grotesque scenes enacted on the streets of Vienna. Reporters like William Shirer went to great lengths to get the story out. Denied facilities to broadcast from local studios and distrustful of the prospects in Berlin, he flew to Amsterdam and thence to London, where it was nearly midnight when he finally transmitted his account of Austria’s extinction. Descriptions of the atrocities agitated public opinion, but the governments of the democracies seemed at a loss for a response.²⁷

However, it would be impossible to avoid the tidal wave of refugees set off by the Anschluss. The president of the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC) in Britain warned the Home Office that it could not support an influx of Austrian Jews on top of those Jews it was already maintaining (although only 11,000 German Jews had entered and remained in England, many of whom came with assets). In view of the looming crisis the Cabinet Committee on Refugees convened for the first time since 1933. The Home Office, fearing that Jews would arrive from Austria posing as tourists and then seek to stay, recommended the imposition of visas. The committee, worried by high levels of anti-Semitism in Britain, agreed to this. As a result, British consuls in Austria were inundated with applications that they had to vet. Male applicants were scrutinized most closely. It was considered easier to screen women who were applying to come to Britain to work as domestic servants. Over half of those admitted, some 20,000 before September 1939, were female. To ease the burden on staff in its Aliens Department, the Home Office delegated the vetting of professionals to specialist refugee committees. Hundreds of doctors and psychiatrists reached the UK thanks to their efforts. Sigmund Freud, who arrived in London on 6 June, was the most famous refugee to reach Britain. It took Herculean efforts involving supporters from several countries to extract him and his family. Few Viennese Jews were fortunate to have such assistance. They were reduced to sending letters to relatives pleading for a financial guarantee or an offer of employment in an acceptable occupation, usually menial labour or domestic service.²⁸

Only about 600–700 Austrian Jews were able to enter France. Since its election, the Popular Front government had struggled to reconcile humanitarian impulses with policy designed to appease workers and professionals who remained implacably opposed to immigration. While the police continued to deport fresh illegal immigrants, the government tried to make it easier for German Jews already in the country by getting them recognized refugee status and easing the procedures for naturalization. Nevertheless, most of the 8,000–10,000 German Jewish refugees continued to eke out a miserable existence, living in terror of a visit from the immigration police. At the time of the Anschluss, a centre-right government succeeded the Popular Front administration and tightened border controls even further.²⁹

President Roosevelt was the only world leader to grasp the urgency of a coordinated, international response. But he was boxed in by Congress which reflected public opinion in its hostility to any relaxation on immigration controls. When he met his cabinet on 18 March he went as far as he believed was possible to offer a helping hand to ‘political refugees’. The most immediate, practical step was to merge the immigration quotas for Germany (25,557) and Austria (1,413), allowing Austrians to take unused places on the German quota. Consular officials were also instructed to be more flexible regarding documentation and to take cognizance of the difficulties Jews faced in even reaching a consulate. Although many US diplomats continued to regard the importuning Viennese Jews as an irritant, the quota for the fiscal year 1939 (1 October 1938 to 30 September 1939) was the first to be entirely filled.³⁰

If he could not prise open America’s doors any further Roosevelt hoped that he might encourage other countries to be more generous and by acting in concert contribute towards solving the refugee problem. His cabinet backed his proposal to initiate an international conference to discuss the crisis. Two weeks after the German army crossed into Austria, Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued the invitations. George Messersmith, now at the State Department, told Hull that in the meantime he had warned American Jewish leaders to keep their heads down. With pro-German and isolationist voices growing ever stronger they needed little encouragement to pursue a policy of discretion.³¹

After several years working for the New York Times, James McDonald found himself drawn back into refugee work and returned to his self-appointed mission of shaking American Jews out of their complacency. Now his jeremiads rang true. At a meeting in New York in March 1938 he admonished the audience, ‘The attitude of many people, who are otherwise presumably intelligent, is that to crush a Jew is no more unworthy or reprehensible than to step on vermin and crush the life out of such creatures. The war that the Nazis are waging is not a war against the Jews of Germany, but against all Jews, whose influence must be obliterated and who themselves should either be exterminated or driven out of all civilized lands. But if you think because you live in the United States you are immune you are very foolish.’ In mid-May he was invited to the White House to learn about a committee being set up to follow through the results of the international conference, now scheduled to take place in July at Évian in France. Subsequently, McDonald was elected chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees and had a key role coordinating the efforts of pro-refugee groups and American Jewish relief agencies.³²

‘Only the complete destruction of Jewish life’

International disquiet over the treatment of Austrian Jews had little impact in Germany. Hitler’s popularity soared in the wake of the Anschluss. Even those who thought of themselves as opponents of the regime, like Joachim Fest’s father, could not suppress a surge of admiration. The fact that the Fests were Catholics and Hitler had brought Catholic Austria into the Reich amplified their ambivalence. ‘Why does Hitler succeed?’ Fest senior asked plaintively.³³

The patriotic euphoria did not leave Jews untouched. Willy Cohn admitted, ‘Perhaps we Jews in Germany should not join in this welling up of national emotion, but one does so nevertheless.’ Victor Klemperer, on the other hand, was sickened. ‘The last few weeks have been the most wretched of my life so far.’ He reeled at the ‘immense act of violence’ that accompanied the annexation and gasped at the ‘defenceless trembling of England, France’. Klemperer could not believe that the nations of Europe would allow Germany to get away with such conduct. The more he was convinced that Hitler and anti-Semitism were rooted in the German people, the more he invested his hopes for change in some external shock, probably a war. In the meantime, he felt utterly adrift. ‘How … unbelievably I deceived myself my whole life long, when I imagined myself to belong to Germany, and how completely homeless I am.’³⁴

The flag-waving was succeeded by another burst of anti-Semitism. As on previous occasions it was whipped up by Streicher and Der Stürmer. Since the marginalization of Schacht and the change of policy towards the Jewish sector of the economy there was no holding him back. In his Nuremberg stronghold the boycott was revived with a vengeance at the onset of the Christmas shopping season. Jewish shops were marked and vandalized; employees and customers alike were intimidated.³⁵

The pusillanimous international response to the Anschluss and the imperative of gearing up for war gave Göring the impetus to accelerate the elimination of Jews from the German economy. The decree of 26 April 1938 for the registration and potential sequestration of Jewish property on behalf of the Four-Year Plan supplied the warrant the regime needed in order to press ahead. When Luise Solmitz and her husband learned that Jews who owned property, businesses and assets had to complete a four-page questionnaire and return it to the authorities they immediately suspected ‘this means expropriation’. Freddy lodged an appeal on the grounds that he was a wounded combat veteran and got an exemption. Klemperer was not so fortunate. As the deadline approached he pored over the list of his meagre assets. ‘What is the point of this inventory?’ he wondered. From his observations, the British consul-general in Breslau had no doubts about its purpose. He reported that ‘even the most tenacious, optimistic and stubborn among the Jews, of whom there have been quite a few in this district, have come to realise that only the complete and total destruction of Jewish life and enterprise will satisfy the National Socialist programme’.³⁶

The ‘inventory’ was in itself an incitement to Aryanization. The SD Head Office purred with delight that since the order was promulgated, Jews were selling their assets in fear of imminent expropriation. Large corporations, trading houses, and banks that had formerly held aloof from the process now began to initiate the takeover of Jewish-owned enterprises. Some were driven by apprehension lest competitors pick off the juiciest businesses; others intended to get a fair deal for the Jewish proprietors, frequently people they had done business with for years. The casualties included over twenty private banks, one of which was M. M. Warburg. Max Warburg had finally given up any hope of amelioration from the regime and was no longer able to assist distressed Jewish clients. He emigrated to the United States.³⁷

Between January and November 1938 nearly 800 firms changed hands, including 340 factories, of which the majority were producing leather goods or clothing. The Berlin fashion district ceased to exist, as almost every Jewish clothing manufacturer, wholesaler or retail outlet either closed down or entered new ownership. Almost 300 wholesalers were sold across Germany. The state economic agencies used the control of raw materials to strangle Jewish-owned factories, compelling the proprietors to shut or sell out. Jewish importers were denied access to foreign currency while firms dependent on overseas markets were prevented from accessing export credits. According to the Reichsvertretung, between 4,500 and 5,000 enterprises of all types were Aryanized over this period.³⁸

A string of supplementary regulations to the Reich Citizenship Law prohibited Jews from practising medicine, law, and a host of other professions. A small proportion of Jews were allowed to continue working, but only to serve Jews and in a deliberately humiliating capacity. Of 3,152 Jewish physicians just 709 were licensed to treat Jewish patients; they were obliged to describe themselves as Krankenbehandler, carer for the sick. Of 1,753 Jewish lawyers, just 10 per cent were permitted to act for Jewish clients as legal consultants or Rechtskonsulenten. Jewish cattle traders were denied licences. Jews were no longer permitted to operate as travelling salesmen or pedlars. Since thousands of men who had been previously dismissed from work, forced to surrender their businesses, or lost their shops were now scraping a living by travelling from place to place selling from suitcases or their cars, this was a crippling blow.³⁹

On top of the suppression of Jewish economic activity, the regime hacked away at the ligaments of communal existence. In March, the corporate status of Jewish communities was revoked. This meant that the Gemeinde was no longer exempt from taxation. Faced with heavy property taxes, many backdated, dozens of communities filed for bankruptcy. As a result, soup kitchens, schools, and old people’s homes had to close, rendering Jewish life unviable in one town after another. Jewish families lost any remaining tax breaks or benefits, driving many into penury. But Jews who were forced to seek aid from the state were now required to work for it, cleaning the streets or performing other menial tasks assigned by the municipality.⁴⁰

Local Nazi Party bosses, mayors, police chiefs and even council officials responded to the signals emanating from Berlin that it was open season on the Jews. In villages and towns across Germany, Jewish families were forced to abandon not just their livelihood but their homes. The district governor of Upper and Central Franconia reported that ‘In Feuchtwangen, the last Jewish family left the town on 1 March 1938.’ After ‘the last Jewish-owned stores were transferred to Aryan ownership’, the NSDAP District Leadership in Königshofen-Hofheim, in Franconia, exalted that ‘In the year 1935, the Jews were still behaving like lords … Today the Jews have not only disappeared completely from public life, but Adolf Hitler Square is also “judenrein,” and the former Jewish houses and stores all over Königshofen are now without exception in Aryan hands.’⁴¹

The regional offices of the Centralverein could only log the instances of expulsion and file away pathetic letters such as the one from ‘Alfred’ in Schopfloch, who informed the CV branch in Württemberg that ‘on Friday we received the so-called expulsion order. The local head of the Nazi party literally said: If you Jews don’t disappear soon, we’ll make an awful mess.’ Just what sort of a mess could be gauged from events in Aschaffenburg, near Munich, where even the district governor was concerned by the wanton vandalism against synagogues and private homes. In Böchingen in the Palatinate, explosive devices were used on the house of a Jewish resident. The gendarmerie in Hösbach reported that the homes of four Jewish cattle dealers were wrecked. With no hope of protection from the police or succour from cowed Jewish organizations, dozens of Jews made their exit through suicide. Each self-inflicted death was a triumph for Nazi officials determined to make their areas free of Jews one way or another and, therefore, worthy of record. Why else would the district governor of Lower Bavaria and Upper Palatinate go to the trouble of informing his superiors that ‘A Jewish cattle dealer in Schwandorff killed himself by hanging’?⁴²

In the tortured language that was typical of their expatiations, the SD Referenten, or experts, were pleased to note that ‘As a result of these drastic measures, the last hope among Jews for remaining in Germany has disappeared, so that the desire for emigration has been significantly strengthened.’ It was also evident to them that a burgeoning proportion of the Jewish population was impoverished and that communal support networks were collapsing. This raised the spectre of a mass of unemployed, indigent Jews unable to emigrate because they lacked the wherewithal. The SD was coming face to face with a new conundrum arising from Judenpolitik. A report for April–May reflected that ‘given sufficient foreign currency, a substantive emigration can be achieved despite the growing difficulties in the major countries of immigration.’ Unfortunately, German Jews were broke and it was dangerous to rely on financial aid from Jews abroad. Once again, the Nazis had painted themselves into a corner thanks to uncoordinated and poorly planned policy. For the SD the way out of this dilemma was to exert even greater pressure on the Jews.⁴³

In mid-summer, joblessness in the Third Reich suddenly became a terrifying condition. With the economy at full stretch and a growing labour shortage, Himmler saw that the concentration camp population controlled by his SS was a potential gold mine. Prisoners could be forced to work for a pittance supplying raw materials such as granite for prestige construction projects. Or they could be hired out to industrial concerns, bringing income to the SS. In June 1938, on the orders of Heydrich, the criminal police (Kripo) began a systematic round-up of 10,000 men considered asocial or work-shy. These categories embraced men with a prior criminal record who had served a custodial sentence, the long-term unemployed, and the homeless. The Kripo dragnet swept beggars, vagrants and Gypsies into Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Amongst the internees were 2,600 Jews.⁴⁴

The treatment meted out to the Jewish detainees was significantly different. To begin with the police were instructed to scoop up any Jews convicted of an offence, no matter how trivial. The number affected was larger than in any previous anti-Jewish action. On 15 June alone, 600 Jews were dispatched in one massive transport of 1,000 asocials from Berlin to Dachau. The inclusion of elderly Jewish men who were incapable of work suggested that there were other reasons for seizing them than to augment the workforce. Indeed, those who were able to emigrate were released, some quite quickly. The work-shy action was intended to spread terror through the Jewish population and jolt those who were still dithering over emigration. The stories that emerged from the camps with those who were released had the required effect. They told how Jewish prisoners were routinely abused and beaten, how they lived in overcrowded quarters and performed senseless labour in striped uniforms bearing a black triangle superimposed over a yellow one. Up to 200 were killed, died, or committed suicide. The pretext that the victims were criminals or social parasites was too flimsy to conceal the fact that the German government had ordered and carried out a mass arrest of Jews just because they were Jews. A fundamental line had been crossed. It was no longer sufficient for Jews to keep their head down and stay out of trouble: it was now a crime to be a Jew in Germany.⁴⁵

Over the same period the security apparatus struck at the Jews in Austria. In the wake of the Anschluss dozens of Jews known for their political activity, journalists, and Jewish communal leaders were arrested and sent to Dachau. These focused arrests were followed by several round-ups that were indiscriminate except insofar as the victims were Jewish: the victims were seized off the streets and dragged out of cafes. The scale of the Judenaktion was unprecedented. Jews were assembled and dispatched in a series of big transports: 601 on 31 May, 595 on 3 June 1938. In all, 2,000 were seized, although this was actually less than the target of 5,000 set by the SD office in Vienna. Unlike Germany, where police guarded the trains carrying internees, the Austrian transports were guarded by SS men and were accompanied by unprecedented brutality. In one transport at least twelve Jews died en route to the camps. When they arrived they were subjected to a brutal induction, shoved into inadequate accommodation, and assigned back-breaking, pointless work. Heydrich appears to have stopped the mass arrests because of adverse foreign publicity and most of the men were released within twelve months so they could emigrate. As in the Old Reich, the round-ups were transparently an adjunct to the policy of forced emigration.⁴⁶

During the summer, violence and intimidation escalated to heights unseen for years. On 16 June, SA and SS units alongside other Nazi Party organizations launched a Judenaktion in Berlin. Over the next fortnight, shops and offices belonging to Jews were picketed and marked. Hugh R. Wilson, an American diplomat, noted that the disturbances were ‘significant as being the first attempt since 1933 to revive organised marking and picketing of Jewish shops’. He was struck by the sight of onlookers enjoying the spectacle and by the participation of Hitler Youth. The presence of high-spirited and ill-disciplined youngsters contributed to the extensive vandalism and looting, although the bland SD report merely mentioned that ‘there was some destruction and plundering of Jewish shops, as well as physical assaults’.⁴⁷

Bella Fromm and a friend took the risk of walking through downtown Berlin to see for themselves. ‘The entire Kurfürstendamm was plastered with scrawls and cartoons. “Jew” was smeared all over the doors, windows, and walls … It grew worse as we came to the part of town where poor little Jewish retail shops were to be found. The SA had created havoc … Windows were smashed, and loot from the miserable little shops was strewn over the pavement and floating in the gutter.’ The two women were inside a small jewellery shop when it was invaded by Hitler Youth armed with knives. While some of the youngsters wrecked the place one ‘crouched in a corner of the window, putting dozens of rings on his fingers and stuffing his pockets with wrist watches and bracelets’.⁴⁸

The outrages in Berlin were coldly calculated. They were designed to eviscerate any hope remaining to Jews in the capital, and throughout the Reich, that they might be able to continue living in Germany. They were also intended to send a message to the international community, which the Nazis believed took its orders from the Jews, that it had to make more of an effort to remove them.⁴⁹

Following President Roosevelt’s initiative, the international conference to address the refugee crisis assembled at the Hotel Royal in Évian-les-Bains between 6 and 14 July 1938. Roosevelt selected Myron Taylor, a Quaker steel magnate who was subsequently appointed the president’s ‘peace ambassador at the Holy See’, to lead the delegation and chair the meetings. James McDonald, who went along as his adviser, warned in advance against ‘exaggerated expectations’. He knew that the US quota was fixed and to avoid it being questioned the very invitation to the conference stated that participants would not be expected to admit more immigrants than their laws already permitted. The principal French delegate, the restriction-minded Henry Bérenger, opened the conference by proclaiming that France had already done much to solve the refugee problem and could do no more.⁵⁰

Nor was Great Britain inclined to lead the way. The Foreign Office approached the conference almost with dread. Whitehall feared that any concession on immigration controls would encourage Poland and Romania to step up their efforts to force Jews out. Behind the suffering of Jews in Germany and Austria stood the spectre of four million impoverished Jews in eastern Europe facing boycotts, discrimination and intermittent violence. Stephen Wise, speaking on behalf of the World Jewish Congress, demanded that the international community face up to this challenge by rescuing German Jews while admonishing other states against persecuting their Jewish citizens. But it was in vain to expect the conference to sanction any form of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign powers. Nor could Wise wish away the global economic crisis, which had worsened after a period of recovery, or the intensification of anti-Jewish feeling. William Shirer, who reported on the conference, privately noted that ‘The British, French, and Americans seem too anxious not to do anything to offend Hitler. It’s an absurd situation. They want to appease the man who is responsible for their problem.’⁵¹

The only concrete outcome of the Évian Conference was the creation of the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees. It resembled the League’s High Commission for Refugees in that it had no funds and no powers, although its remit was broader and encompassed the Jews of Austria and eastern Europe. Unlike McDonald, George Rublee, the American appointed as its head, was authorized to negotiate with the Germans to allow Jews to emigrate and cajole other countries into letting them in.⁵²

The Nazis seized on the desultory outcome of the Evian Conference as evidence that the Jews were unpopular everywhere. They derided expressions of sympathy for the plight of Jews in Germany emanating from countries that would not deign to offer Jews a refuge. At the same time, the regime maintained the pressure for emigration as if to persuade the democracies that they had no choice but to offer homes for the Jews. The SD Head Office reported that ‘Along with the familiar measures through laws and ordinances, the steps taken by the police against the Jews especially in Berlin in the last few months are worthy of mention. The instructions from the head of the police in Berlin pursue the aim of rendering it so difficult for the Jews to stay on in Germany that despite the difficult financial situation new impetus will be given to their wish for emigration.’ Writing in his diary on 24 July, Goebbels reported Hitler saying that in ten years the Jews would be driven out of Germany.⁵³

Anti-Jewish measures in other countries

The reluctance of France, Britain and the USA to admit Jewish refugees was a response to both domestic pressure and anxiety about ominous developments in other countries with large Jewish populations. Across eastern and south-eastern Europe Jews were assailed as the quintessential aliens, potential agents of foreign influence. To observers in the west these anti-Jewish gestures resembled little more than a cynical bid to curry favour in Berlin. The spread of fascism added to the appearance of a homogenous anti-Semitic wave. Fascist parties certainly agreed on the need to reduce the alleged influence of Jews and appropriate their wealth for ‘the people’. But the anti-Jewish policies that were put in place during 1938 in one country after another had their own aetiology and were essentially local initiatives.⁵⁴

Romania had a Jewish population of around 757,000 out of a total population of 20 million. One third of the Jews resided in the Regat, the core of the country which had gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. From its inception, the men who led Romania saw the country as a Christian state and were ambivalent about including Jews in the nation as full citizens. They did so only under international duress. Romania was on the winning side in the Great War and was rewarded with extensive territories that held large Jewish communities, notably in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania. The Jews in these new regions were regarded with even greater suspicion. Economic and social friction added to religious and ethnic antagonism. Around half of the Jews in Romania were engaged in commerce and around 15 per cent in manufacturing; they dominated the bourgeoisie of Bucharest and comprised between 40 and 50 per cent of the urban dwellers in Bessarabia and Moldavia. Only a tiny fraction lived on the land. Although the majority of Jews were actually quite poor, Romanians noted their preponderance in the professions, in commerce, and the existence of a few fabulously wealthy families who controlled financial or industrial enterprises. Anti-Semitism pervaded intellectual life and cloaked baser antipathies with a veneer of respectability.⁵⁵

Throughout the 1920s anti-Semitic parties demanded the reduction of alleged Jewish influence and the expropriation of Jewish wealth. The National Christian Party, led by Octavian Goga and Alexandru Cuza, advocated the ‘Romanization’ of the economy and revoking the citizenship of the inhabitants of regions bolted onto Romania in 1919. The fascist Iron Guard movement, founded in 1927, characterized the Jews as the enemy of the nation and sought to achieve similar goals – if necessary through violent revolution. In the mid-1930s the Romanian Front government adopted a policy of ‘proportionality’, limiting Jewish participation in the economy to their proportion of the population. Elections at the end of 1937 resulted in a minority government led by Goga and Cuza that lasted long enough to enact a ‘review’ of citizenship to determine whether Jews who had become Romanians in 1919 or who had been naturalized in old Romania before that date deserved legal equality. As a result, over 70,000 lost their civil rights, residence rights, and licences to work or trade. Other measures were pushed through for ‘Romanization’ of the economy and purges of the cultural sphere.⁵⁶

One of the early victims of the anti-Jewish laws was Emil Dorian. Born in 1893 he had served as a medical officer in the Romanian army during the war and combined a medical practice with writing belles lettres and translating. On 14 January 1938 he reported curtly in his diary, ‘I have been dismissed from my position with the state medical services because I am a Jew.’ Disgusted by the pusillanimous response of the Jewish leadership, he formed a Jewish organization to oppose the review of citizenship.⁵⁷

Although the anti-Jewish measures in Romania emerged from indigenous traditions and gratified local aspirations, the Goga-Cuza regime also used them to align the country with Nazi Germany even while Romania was formally allied to the western democracies. At first glance it looked as if increasing proximity to the Third Reich was driving the introduction of anti-Jewish laws in Hungary, too. But the fate of Hungarian Jewry was equally rooted in local conditions.

The Jewish population of Hungary numbered 444,567 in 1930, and comprised just over 5 per cent of the country’s inhabitants. They were divided between a modernized, Neolog community and the Orthodox who formed about a third of the total. The two communities were quite distinct, with their own welfare structures and representation. Most Orthodox Jews lived in the regions or in the densely packed central districts of the capital where Yiddish-speaking Jews from Galicia had settled between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the Great War. Around the turn of the century, Jews had come to form over 10 per cent of the capital’s inhabitants. They dominated segments of economic and cultural life, constituting 55 per cent of Hungary’s lawyers, 40 per cent of its doctors, and 36 per cent of its journalists. Around 40 per cent of the country’s commerce was in the hands of Jewish merchants, retailers and traders. Jews owned 70 per cent of the largest industrial concerns. Yet half the Jews in Budapest were too poor to pay taxes and the typical Orthodox communities in small towns and cities in the regions enjoyed quite modest lifestyles.⁵⁸

Between 1867, when they achieved full civic equality, and the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Jews played a leading role in the industrial, commercial and cultural development of the country. Many were honoured for their contribution, but success bred resentment. Anti-Semitic agitators cultivated a myth of Jewish wealth, claiming that Jews prevented genuine Magyars from benefiting: the country would be rich and happy if only the Jews were expropriated. These voices were marginal until economic slowdown and defeat in the Great War propelled them to the centre of politics. In 1918–19 revolution swept away the ‘dual monarchy’, culminating in a short-lived Hungarian Soviet republic. The leader of the communist regime, Béla Kun, was a Jew, as were several other of its leading lights. Even though the revolutionaries were unrepresentative of the Jews in Hungary, the Moscow-backed dictatorship led to the irreparable association of Jews with Bolshevism. Kun’s regime collapsed after a Romanian invasion, and was followed by a ‘White Terror’, during which hundreds of Jews were killed in massacres and pogroms.⁵⁹

In 1920, Admiral Miklós Horthy became regent, or head of state. Conservative-nationalist parties dominated the political scene. During his first year as regent the government introduced a numerus clausus (quota) limiting the number of Jews allowed into higher education. Right-wing agitators demanded more extreme restrictions. The main goals of the Hungarian National Independence Party, led by Gyula Gömbös, were recovering the territories lost by Hungary under the post-war treaties and reducing the alleged power of the Jews. The Arrow Cross movement, founded by Ferenc Szálasi, aimed at entirely eliminating Jewish influence from society and redistributing the fabled wealth of the Jewish population. Even respectable figures such as Béla Imrédy, president of the National Bank, contemplated legal measures to reduce the preponderance of Jews in finance, commerce and culture.⁶⁰

In February 1938 the prime minister, Kálmán Darányi, announced that his government intended to reach a ‘solution on systematic and legal lines’ for Hungary’s Jewish problem. Legislation to impose a 20 per cent quota on Jewish participation in the professions and the economy passed through the lower house of parliament with a big majority. Imrédy, who had meanwhile replaced Darányi as prime minister, piloted the anti-Jewish law through its final stage in the Upper House. The ‘first Jewish law’, as it became known, defined Jews by a mixture of religion and descent; tellingly it refused to recognize as Christians Jews who converted to Christianity after 1919, the year of the Soviet Republic. The Jewish population responded by lobbying, public appeals and declarations of loyalty. At this point they enjoyed support from Hungary’s embattled liberal, cultural elite. However, a public protest signed by artists and intellectuals, including the composers Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, achieved nothing. Hungarian Jews finally swallowed the law because it was infinitely less harsh than the treatment being meted out to Jews in neighbouring Austria and because they saw Imrédy as the only thing standing between them and the Arrow Cross fanatics.⁶¹

With Germany rampant, the Hungarian political leadership realized that the only hope of recovering the land lost in 1918 was through an alliance with the Third Reich. In November 1938, a second Jewish law was announced that was intended to signal alignment with Nazi anti-Jewish policy. The law, guided through parliament by Prime Minister Pál Teleki (who replaced Imrédy after it was revealed that he was part-Jewish), tightened the definition of a Jew and struck even more harshly at the economic basis of the Jewish population. Jews, now defined in racial terms, lost all their political rights. They were dismissed from state employment and prevented from practising in journalism, the arts and several professions. Licences to trade, essential to shopkeepers and market stall owners, were rescinded. The number of Jewish employees in private enterprises was limited. It is estimated that up to 70,000 Jews lost their jobs as a consequence, while 40,000 were deprived of permits to earn their living through commerce. In all, 200,000 Jews were affected and most were thrown onto the charity of the Jewish communities. The second Jewish law shattered the economic basis of Jewish life in Hungary while encouraging Jews to emigrate.⁶²

The next country to introduce anti-Jewish legislation was Italy. A census in August 1938 revealed that there were 37,241 Italian Jewish citizens plus approximately 9,400 foreign Jews resident in the country, including refugees from Germany. Although Jews had dwelt in the Italian peninsula since antiquity, they never formed more than a tiny proportion of the overall population. Jews had enjoyed civic equality in Piedmont and Tuscany since the mid-nineteenth century and had become well integrated into the new Italian polity in the decades after unification, serving in government posts and the armed forces in numbers that reflected their intense patriotism. Overwhelmingly urban, middle class and comfortably off, a large proportion of the community had supported fascism since its early years. By 1938, 6,900 Jews were members of the Italian Fascist Party – nearly 30 per cent of the Jewish male population over twenty-one years of age.⁶³

However, anti-Jewish currents persisted in Italian society and culture. As well as nurturing traditional religious odium towards the Jews, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church lumped Jews in with the secular liberal and left-wing opponents of the clergy. Vatican publications adopted the language of ‘race’ to differentiate the Jews and adverted to a malign ‘Jewish power’. Italian fascism was a broad spectrum and the party contained elements that had always regarded the Jews as foreign, inclined towards radicalism, and out of place in a Christian country. Mussolini himself had a chequered record. Early in his political career he inveighed against ‘the great Jewish bankers of London and New York, linked by race with Jews in Moscow as in Budapest who seek revenge against the Aryan race’. But under his leadership the Fascist Party never adopted an official anti-Jewish stance and, on the contrary, admitted Jews to its highest ranks. In the early 1930s Mussolini dismissed racial anti-Semitism as ‘nonsense’. When James McDonald met him in May 1934, he expressed nothing but contempt for Der Stürmer.⁶⁴

Mussolini’s ambivalence gave way to hostility over the course of 1934–7. The prominence of Italian Jews in anti-fascist groups operating inside Italy and abroad annoyed him. He detected ‘international Jewry’ behind the campaign of sanctions against Italy that followed the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–6. To escape diplomatic isolation and to solidify their shared interest in supporting General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, in November 1936 Mussolini formed the Rome–Berlin Axis with Hitler. At around this time, anti-Semitic articles began to appear with regularity in the fascist press. However, this was not the first expression of racist thinking and racial anti-Semitism in official quarters. Racism and race laws emerged organically in the Italian colonies in North Africa and were codified with the proclamation of the Italian Empire. In 1937 the categories of race were imported back into Italy and established as operating principles for new government agencies tasked with demographic monitoring of the Italian population.⁶⁵

Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law, reflected this vacillation in his diary. In early September 1937 he reported that Mussolini ‘hurled abuse against America, country of blacks and Jews, disintegrating element of civilization’. Nations were liable to be ‘destroyed by the acid of Jewish corruption’. Three months later, however, Ciano responded indignantly to criticism that Italy colluded with Germany in anti-Jewish measures. ‘Neither do I believe it would be in our best interests to unleash an anti-semitic campaign in Italy. The problem does not exist here.’ But Ciano then cynically observed that there were ‘many other pretexts’ for persecuting Jews.⁶⁶

In February 1938 the Italian state began to move in just that direction, at first by innocuously requesting information about the number of Jews in ministries and universities. In April and May foreign-born Jews were sacked from government employment and the tempo of anti-Jewish propaganda was stepped up. Finally, in July 1938, Mussolini summoned experts to hammer out a statement on the ‘problem of race’. According to Ciano, whose aggrandizement of his father-in-law makes him a less than reliable witness, ‘He is studying measures where marriages of Italians are prohibited with people of other races, including the Jewish race.’⁶⁷

For Mussolini, harsh anti-Jewish measures were intended to harden the Italians, especially the young, and promote the construction of the new, fascist man. He told Ciano that ‘we must instil in our people a higher racial concept, which is indispensable to proceed with the colonisation of the Empire’. Italians, he believed, were going to have to take race seriously and toughen up.⁶⁸

On 6 October 1938, the Fascist Grand Council published a declaration on race, setting out the basis for legislation. Its definition of a Jew was even stricter than that prevailing in Germany, with less flexibility for ‘half’ or ‘quarter’ Jews. The legislation that was promulgated at the end of the year deprived Jews of full civil rights, excluded them from swathes of economic activity, and banished them from cultural life. Foreign Jews were given a few months to leave the country or face internment. Mussolini encountered some dissent, but he was in no mood to compromise: ‘Anti-semitism is now injected into the blood of Italians’, he told his son-in-law. ‘It will continue to circulate and develop on its own.’ When King Victor Emmanuel objected to the penalization of Jews who had fought for Italy, Mussolini poured scorn on ‘people with weak backs’. He personally insisted on the expulsion of Jews from the Fascist Party and dismissed calls from the Vatican to exempt converts. According to Ciano, ‘The Duce rejected such a request which would transform the legislation into a confessional, rather than racial law.’⁶⁹

Ordinary Italians took the message to heart. Officials applied the laws with zeal and Jews who sought to evade them faced denunciation. There was no lack of buyers for Jewish-owned businesses or properties. As in Nazi Germany, Jews were threatened with the prospect of becoming stateless paupers. In a bid to avert this, at the start of 1939 the United States Ambassador, William Phillips, delivered a letter from President Roosevelt to the Duce asking for Jews to be allowed to take enough assets from the country to enable them to emigrate and settle elsewhere. Phillips was left in no doubt that Mussolini was in deadly earnest. The envoy was ‘impressed by his apparently genuine antagonism to the Jews’. There was, according to Mussolini, ‘no room for the Jews in Europe, and eventually, he thought, they would all have to go’.⁷⁰

Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten crisis

William Shirer had squeezed his coverage of the Évian Conference between trips to Prague to report on the international crisis provoked by Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia. The occupation of Austria had placed Czechoslovakia in an unenviable strategic position, exactly as Hitler had hoped in his memorandum on the Four-Year Plan. He now used the ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland, the region on the Czech–German border, in the same way that he had wielded the Austrian Nazis. For several years representation of the German-speaking minority had been monopolized by the Nazi-affiliated Sudeten German Party, led by Konrad Henlein. He routinely agitated for regional autonomy, incurring the wrath of the Prague government and spasmodic repression. Hitler, who often referred to the suffering of the Sudeten Germans, now took up their cause aggressively. In late March 1938, he instructed Henlein to demand autonomy for the region. Predictably, the campaign invited a crackdown by the Czech authorities that, in turn, gave Hitler the pretext for threatening action in defence of his fellow Germans across the border. On 20 May he ordered the German army high command to prepare a plan for the ‘lightning’ conquest of Czechoslovakia. As rumours abounded that the German and Czech armies were mobilizing, the British and the French governments issued a warning that they would not stand by in the event of hostilities. This had the desired effect of making Göring and the army chief of staff General Ludwig Beck apply the brakes to Hitler’s militancy. But Hitler was not to be deterred and in August Beck resigned. Meanwhile, the British lost their nerve and in a flurry of diplomatic exchanges over the following weeks indicated that they would not go to war to prevent the ethnic Germans gaining autonomy. Abandoned by its allies, the Czech government was obliged to concede Henlein’s demands. However, this was no longer enough for Hitler. He believed he had a window of opportunity to conquer Czechoslovakia before British and French rearmament made it possible for them to pose a serious military threat to Germany’s western frontier. Hitler told Henlein to up the stakes by demanding secession, and on 12 September, at the Nuremberg rally, threatened that if the Sudetenland was not granted self-determination there would be war.⁷¹

Military preparations were accompanied by a ferocious propaganda campaign. Germans were treated to endless stories of atrocities against their brothers and sisters who languished under the thumb of semi-civilized Slavs. There was, indeed, some skirmishing between Sudeten Germans and the Czech security forces. Fear and repression resulted in numbers of Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, crossing the border as refugees. The escalating belligerency and popular indignation in Germany discharged itself against the Jews. The Hitler Youth who smashed up the jeweller’s shop while Bella Fromm looked on were screaming, ‘To hell with the Jewish rabble! Room for the Sudeten Germans.’ In Vienna, on the eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement, dozens of Jewish families were turfed out of their apartments by SA men to make way for Volksdeutsche refugees. Ruth Maier heard that they demanded bed linen and clothing from the very Jews they had displaced.⁷²

As war loomed, German Jews were gripped by panic. On 23 July the government decreed that they had to obtain new identification papers. When they collected them they found a ‘J’ stamped on the front. This was intended to make it harder for Jews to evade detection inside Germany and to assist the border protection agencies of those countries reluctant to allow entry to Jews in case they applied for asylum or went underground as illegal immigrants. As an added humiliation, on 17 August, the Interior Ministry required all Jews to adopt a ‘Jewish’ first name – Israel for men and Sarah for women – and inscribe it on all their official documents by January 1939. Now even the redoubtable Bella Fromm gave up the fight to stay and joined the queues outside the American Consulate General.⁷³

Those who could not or would not make for the exit subsisted in a state of permanent anxiety. When Victor Klemperer did not hear from friends for several weeks he confessed ‘the silence around me is frightening’. Freddy Solmitz was so distressed by the thought of having to take a Jewish moniker that he wrote to Frick, the Reich minister for the interior, asking for an exemption. His wife, Luise, confided to her journal that ‘There is nothing worse than being homeless in one’s own home … It’s a kind of war, and we find ourselves in it without any defences, without weapons, without the remotest possibility of defending ourselves by legal means or protest.’ In one of his last dispatches from Berlin, André François-Poncet warned the French Foreign Office that since the Anschluss anti-Semitism had attained a new ferocity. Over the final days of his ambassadorship, as he walked through the park between his residence and the embassy he observed, with disgust, benches marked ‘Only for Aryans’ or ‘Only for Jews’.⁷⁴

The turbid atmosphere in the late summer and early autumn was punctuated by countless incidents of violence against Jews. According to the Jewish desk in the SD Head Office, ‘Under the impress of events abroad, the mood of animosity against the Jews in the population has intensified.’ An example of what this entailed in practice comes from the SD branch in Wiesbaden, which reported that in Rauenthal two Jews were dragged from their beds by ‘the people’ and whipped down the road in their nightclothes. One may surmise that this couple included a terrified, half-dressed woman.⁷⁵

Synagogues, always the target of casual vandalism, were now the objects of sustained, destructive fury. In Hanau, Nazi zealots bricked up the door of the prayer house. When a member of the community tried to remove the obstruction they had him arrested. The SD reported that ‘Unfortunately, the proceedings ended with the acquittal of the Jew who was however taken into protective custody.’ In Nuremberg, Streicher convened a mass rally at which he announced that the main temple in the city would be demolished. A crowd of thousands watched Streicher give the signal that started the work of destruction. In Kaiserslauten and in Albersweiler, in the Palatinate, the municipality ‘purchased’ the synagogue so that it could be knocked down. At the end of September, in Mellrichtstadt in central Franconia, a crowd entered the synagogue and wrecked it. After a rash of such incidents, the district governor of the Palatinate explained that ‘The population desires the departure of the Jews from the villages, and seeks to avenge itself in this way for the insolent behaviour of the Jews during the critical period in September.’⁷⁶

The Sudeten crisis reached its climax that month. After Hitler rattled the sabre at Nuremberg, Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, flew to Germany and met Hitler for one-to-one talks at Berchtesgaden. Chamberlain hoped that by meeting in private he could persuade Hitler to moderate his demands. Instead, Hitler sensed that the British prime minister was desperate to avoid war and reiterated his demand for secession of the Sudetenland. He was right. Instead of standing shoulder to shoulder with the Czechs, Chamberlain and the French government persuaded their erstwhile protégé to give the Germans what they wanted. Chamberlain returned to Germany on 21 September to convey Czech agreement to the surrender of the Sudetenland, but to his astonishment Hitler demanded even more. He insisted that the Czechs pull out their forces by 1 October, making way for German troops to occupy the region. Chamberlain flew back to London and consulted his cabinet. This time they withstood Hitler’s bullying. For several days it looked like war was inevitable: the British Home Fleet put to sea and French forces began to mobilize. At the eleventh hour, Mussolini responded to British overtures and offered to mediate. On 29–30 September, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, convened in Munich. The two democratic powers signed away the Sudetenland, over the head of the Prague government, in return for promises from Hitler that Germany had no further territorial designs. As a last act, Chamberlain obtained Hitler’s signature on a pledge of peace between the two countries.⁷⁷

Europe collectively exhaled in relief, but Leopold Schwarzschild unflinchingly denounced the outcome as a terrible defeat for the democracies. Power had shifted fundamentally in favour of Germany. He was unsparing in his criticism of Chamberlain, who demonstrated an ‘absolute lack of understanding of the nature and role of the man he is dealing with’. Hitler had broken every single pledge he had ever made. Indeed, Hitler was less than happy with the outcome. Although he obtained the Sudetenland without a shot being fired, he was denied the chance to conquer Czechoslovakia and fight Britain and France when he felt Germany was the stronger. His resentment would soon have catastrophic effects on the Jews in Germany and Austria.⁷⁸

Jews like Victor Klemperer had pinned their hopes on a coup by the army high command to prevent a war, or a Franco-British victory. It seemed inconceivable that Hitler could succeed and when he did they were plunged into despair. ‘And truly it is indeed an unimaginably huge success,’ Klemperer wrote. ‘Hitler is being acclaimed even more extravagantly than in the Austria business … something tremendous really has been achieved. But we are now condemned to be negro slaves, to be literally pariahs until our end.’ For the first time he contemplated suicide.⁷⁹

Raymond Geist gave George Messersmith, who was now at the State Department, a vivid impression of the emigration psychosis that swept German Jews. ‘During September we had to deal with thousands of desperate people, who stormed the Consulate General day after day. At times it seemed that we could not control the situation any longer; but we kept our heads and finally brought the applicants under control and now everything is going smoothly again.’ There were 125,000 applications for 27,300 quota places, which meant that fresh applicants were doomed to wait three to four years before their number came up. ‘This is a desperate situation for many, who are sure unless they can effect their emigration to the US, they cannot survive. We can only be sympathetic and kind; in most cases little practical help can be given.’⁸⁰

Klemperer rued his failure to seek emigration earlier. He recalled the friends who had made it to safety and reflected bitterly, ‘All these people have made new lives for themselves – but I have not succeeded in doing so, we have been left behind in disgrace and penury, in some degree buried alive …’⁸¹

Ruth Maier, in Vienna, set down the humiliations that Jews were now subjected to from anyone who had the good fortune to be an Aryan. One day in early October, she was in a queue outside the tax office in Porzellangasse: ‘It was raining. We had been standing there in the rain, soaked to the bone and freezing cold, since seven o’clock that morning. A street sweeper appeared with his broom and bellowed at us, waved his hands in the air, shouted. He was foaming at the mouth: “If you don’t go away you bastards, I’ll drag you all away.” How delighted he was, the street sweeper, that he could take out all his fury on us, the inferior race.’⁸²

The Viennese Nazis hardly needed the encouragement provided by the anti-Semitic exhibition ‘The Eternal Jew’ which opened in the city. During October there were repeated invasions of Jewish residential districts, accompanied by the forcible eviction of Jews from their homes. On Sunday 16 October 1938, Ruth began her diary entry ‘Pogroms!’ She continued, ‘The temple [synagogue] is being destroyed. They’re cutting the beards off old men. They’re bashing the women. They’re smashing windows.’ In the evening it started all over again in the narrow lanes of the Jewish quarter. ‘It’s gruesome … medieval … they want to murder me because I am a Jew.’⁸³

This sort of frenzied, fanatical violence was exactly what Hitler wanted. He had been disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm for war during the Sudeten crisis. On 10 November he praised a gathering of 400 German journalists for their part in the psychological war against Czechoslovakia, overcoming the unreadiness of his own citizens. He complained that the succession of bloodless victories had induced a sense of complacency and softness. ‘It was only out of necessity that for years I talked of peace,’ he told them. ‘But it was now necessary gradually to re-educate the German people psychologically, and to make it clear that there are things which must be achieved by force if peaceful means fail.’ The people had to believe unquestioningly that they would triumph in any conflict and that the leadership was correct, notwithstanding defeats or mistakes.⁸⁴

Hitler was implicitly referring back to the reasons for the German collapse in 1918, and signalling his determination that in the coming war the people would follow their leaders to victory or annihilation. In his vision, there was no room for squeamishness or humanitarian impulses. What better way to inure the population than by exposing them to violence and destruction in their own towns and cities? Repeated assaults on the Jews reinforced their sense of superiority and invulnerability. It taught them to quell compassion for those designated racial outsiders or the enemy. Of equal importance, it educated them in the importance of being on the right side of that distinction.⁸⁵

Over the next weeks the regime instigated a wave of arrests, internments, deportations and expulsions. This was not an innovation. Since the Anschluss some 3,870 Jews had been expelled from the Burgenland, the border district of eastern Austria, into Hungary and Slovakia. ‘A cleansing was undertaken of functionaries with foreign nationality in Jewish organizations, in order to prevent the formation of an intelligence network hostile to Germany’. However, the regime was about to make a quantum leap: targeting the 70,000 Polish Jews in the Reich. This step was triggered by the government in Warsaw, which had passed legislation enabling it to strip émigré Poles of their citizenship. Denaturalization would render the Polish Jews in Germany stateless and make it much harder for them to emigrate. In order to avoid being saddled with tens of thousands of despised Ostjuden, the Gestapo, possibly with encouragement from the Foreign Office, took steps to arrest and deport 17,000 Jews of Polish nationality in a nationwide operation commencing on 27 October 1938.⁸⁶

Josef Broniatowski was a Polish-born Jew living in Plauen, a city in Saxony near the old Czech–German border. At 1 a.m. on the night of 28 October, police rang his doorbell and handed him a letter informing him that he was to be deported. He was taken to the local police station where he found seventy-five other Polish Jews, ranging in age from infants to grandfathers. The following day they were bussed to the city of Chemnitz and loaded onto a train that took them to Dresden. There they were added to a throng of Jews numbering about 8,000 who were entrained and transported to Beuthen. Over this period Josef was not given anything to eat or drink and was under constant SS and police guard. At eleven o’clock at night the train stopped in open countryside. They were taken out of the railway carriages and marched across open fields for two miles until they reached the waterlogged ditch that marked the German–Polish border. Some people collapsed and a few died during the trek. The SS guards ‘stole everything the people had quickly packed’. The Jews were then forced to scramble across the barrier into Poland while the guards screamed at them. No sooner were they on Polish soil than Polish border troops chased them back. Shots were fired. By 8 a.m. the next morning, the bedraggled crowd was back on the German side of the ditch. The SS men herded them towards a regular crossing point, where Polish officials grudgingly allowed them through. Eventually they were transported to Katowice, where the local Jewish community received them with food and medical aid. Broniatowsk recalled that Polish miners who saw the wretched Jews arrive wept at the sight.⁸⁷

In the wake of the round-up Mally Dienemann telephoned the families of Ostjuden she knew in Offenbach – only to find that almost all the menfolk were gone. She immediately set about assisting the wives and children left behind, while communal networks of Polish Jews in Leipzig and Dresden did what they could to alleviate the suffering of those deported and those remaining. The few Polish Jewish men not picked up appealed to the Polish consul for help, without success. Shortly afterwards fifty to sixty families, mainly women, children and the elderly, were transported to Beuthen and the border. They were given just fifteen minutes to pack.⁸⁸

Of the 16,000–17,000 Polish Jews who were expelled, some ended up back in Germany, some were admitted to Poland, and some were trapped in no-man’s-land for days enduring terrible weather until the outcome of negotiations between the Polish and German governments. Having initially refused entry to the deportees, the Polish authorities relented and allowed the majority across the border, where they were gathered into makeshift camps. The largest was at Zbaszyn, west of Posen. Here 6,000–7,000 wet, cold and starving Jews were quartered in a town with a population numbering less than that, including seven Jewish families. Hundreds sat and slept on the damp ground in stables and Polish army barracks provided by the authorities. Around 2,000–2,500 were taken into the homes of kindly Poles. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee rushed aid to the town, distributing food and dry clothes and even setting up a field hospital. The AJJDC also established a nursery for the 300–500 children. After several days, supplies and funds also began to arrive from the Jewish communities in Lodz and Cracow.⁸⁹

The November pogrom

The mass expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany represented a dramatic escalation of anti-Jewish measures. But governments and the public in other countries scarcely had time to register the shockwave. On 7 November, an illegal Jewish immigrant in France, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot a young official called Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan had been born in Germany in 1921 but, like most Polish Jewish immigrants and their offspring, he had Polish nationality. When he was fifteen he illicitly entered France in search of education and work, but without the necessary papers he was at the mercy of officialdom. As French policy towards refugees became ever harsher, he was driven further into a marginal existence. On 3 November he received news that his mother and father, along with two younger siblings, were amongst the Polish Jews deported from the Reich. His sister told him that they were stranded in Zbaszyn, homeless and miserable along with thousands of others. Grynszpan snapped. He obtained a gun and set off for the German Embassy, allegedly with the intention of assassinating the ambassador. Instead he fired at the first German he encountered, a humble third secretary. Grynszpan was soon disarmed and arrested by the French police while the wounded diplomat was rushed to hospital.⁹⁰

Goebbels was informed of the shooting and immediately blew it out of all proportion, rather like his treatment of the Reichstag fire. The work of one deranged individual became the tip of a global Jewish conspiracy to engineer war between Germany and France. According to him, the Jews were aiming for the ‘extermination’ of National Socialism; but it was they who would be ‘called to account’. In personal terms, if for no other reason, the assassination attempt was a gift to the minister for propaganda. Hitler was annoyed with him for conducting an affair with a Czech actress, LÍda Baarová. Normally, Hitler cared little about his minions’ peccadilloes but he was fond of Goebbels’ wife and had no affection for Czechs of any kind. Goebbels saw the response to the Paris shooting as an opportunity to reaffirm his fealty and demonstrate his worth to the Führer by inflicting misery on the Jews, something that always pleased Hitler. The following day he ramped up the campaign. The German press hurled imprecations against warmongering Jewry while Rath was depicted as a flawless martyr. Hitler helped by promoting Rath so as to escalate the gravity of Grynszpan’s crime and sent his personal doctor to the victim’s bedside. The Berlin police chief, Count Helldorf, ordered Jews to surrender all weapons and the Gestapo punitively shut down the remaining Jewish newspapers published in the capital. During the evening sporadic anti-Jewish violence occurred, most seriously in Hesse.⁹¹

Throughout 8 November, as Rath lingered between life and death, the Nazi Party leadership assembled in Munich for the annual events to commemorate the heroes of the movement who fell in the abortive 1923 putsch. It was an unforeseen but combustible conjunction. In the evening Hitler delivered his traditional speech at the Bürgerbräukeller. He did not mention the latest martyr of the NSDAP, concentrating instead on the international scene and hinting that war with France and Britain was unavoidable. Yet the imminence of war (in Hitler’s mind) is germane to understanding his actions over the next few hours. In contrast to the constraints he was under when Wilhelm Gustloff was killed, he no longer felt inhibited by diplomatic niceties or the fluctuations of international trade. Soon there would not be any trade at all, and what other countries thought of Germany would be immaterial. This time he could indulge his passion for revenge against the Jews.⁹²

The next day was taken up with the commemorative ceremonies, but Hitler had time for several conversations with Göring and Goebbels. During the afternoon they were informed that Rath had died. They also learned that the news had triggered disturbances in Dessau, where Jewish shops were looted and the synagogue burned. That evening Hitler joined the party elite for the customary dinner in the Old Town Hall. Usually he made a speech there, too, but on this occasion he left early. Before departing he spoke in whispered tones to Goebbels. At 9.30 p.m., when Hitler was back at his apartment, Goebbels addressed the hundreds of Gauleiters, party bosses, SA officers and rank and file in the hall. By this time most of them had eaten well and drunk a lot. Everyone knew about Rath’s passing and the atmosphere was heavy with alcohol fumes, cigarette smoke and vengefulness. In his diary Goebbels described his role: ‘I go to the party reception in the Old Town Hall. A gigantic event. I describe the situation to the Führer. He decides: let the demonstrations continue. Withdraw the police. For once the Jews should feel the rage of the people. This is correct. I issue corresponding instructions to the police and the party. Then I speak briefly to the officials of the party. A storm of applause. They all rush to the telephones. Now the people shall act!’⁹³

The inebriated, inflamed party men crowded around public telephones or hastened back to their hotel rooms to instruct their local branches and SA units. What ensued was not the spontaneous ‘rage’ of the people, but nor was it a well-planned, centrally executed operation, either. Hitler and Goebbels triggered a nationwide pogrom without any clear goals and no thought for the methods that were to be employed. According to the authoritative analysis by Alan Steinweis the operation was characterized by ‘hasty and improvised organisation’ that resulted in ‘messiness and miscommunication’. The result was murder, rape, looting, destruction of property, and terror on an unprecedented scale. The extent of the desolation stunned the population and rocked the regime. Within days, the Nazi leadership responded with far-reaching decisions about Judenpolitik that arose from the November pogrom, but did not share the same roots. The onslaught against the Jews on 9–10 November 1938 was an exponentially aggravated continuation of the violence that had been erupting sporadically since the start of the year, but it led to a fundamental rupture in Nazi thinking. Afterwards, the regime would begin to employ new ways of dealing with the Jews in Germany and it would never again stage anti-Jewish violence on German streets. Instead, the violence would be exported or disguised.⁹⁴

Contrary to what he wrote in his diary, Goebbels never sent instructions to the police. Although Himmler and Heydrich were in Munich, they only seem to have learned of Hitler’s intentions during a meeting with the Leader before a midnight wreath-laying ceremony. The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, transmitted the first orders to the Gestapo at five minutes to midnight. As a preface he explained that the party was to carry out an action against synagogues. The task of the Gestapo was to seize Jewish communal archives from these buildings, presumably before they were burned to a cinder, and ‘prepare the arrest’ of 20,000–30,000 Jews, especially those who were wealthy. Heydrich added detail in a telex to the Sipo-SD issued at 1.20 a.m. The security police were to prevent looting and protect Aryan property. Elderly or infirm Jews were excluded from the round-ups that Müller had already ordained. Heydrich added that Jews taken into custody should not be mistreated. Also in the early hours, Himmler briefed SS leaders in Munich and told them to keep their men out of the affray. However, the lack of coordination meant that many SS personnel did join in and some committed theft or murder. Even before he knew about how much property was destroyed and the scenes of lawlessness, Himmler was livid. It was Vienna all over again. At three o’clock in the morning, he composed a memo recording his suspicion ‘that Goebbels – in his hunger for power, long since evident to me, and his blockheadedness – has given the start signal for the action’. The uniformed police, commanded by Kurt Daluege, didn’t get any orders until dawn, when they were instructed to prevent fires being set.⁹⁵

By that time, around 1,000 synagogues and prayer rooms had been gutted or smashed up. In some places explosives were used to demolish the buildings. Approximately 7,500 shops, out of about 9,000 remaining in Jewish hands, had been wrecked. Display windows had been shattered, shop fittings ripped out, and stock looted or scattered in the streets outside. The authorities calculated that 39 million Reichsmarks’ worth of property had been damaged. Over ninety Jews were killed and several women raped or abused. While it seemed well coordinated – the perception of Jews and onlookers at the time that is embodied in most historical accounts – it was in fact a disorderly, improvised, and chaotic episode. What made it so terrifying for the victims, and also for ordinary Germans, was the lack of control. The party leaders, SA men, security police, SS, and regular police all got instructions at different times, often saying different things. They got phone calls and teletype messages in the late evening or early hours when they were either drunk, half-asleep, or both. It was relatively easy to mobilize the party branches and SA because they had congregated for local commemorations of the 1923 putsch but, as in Munich, that entailed a hearty dinner and large quantities of beer. Whole units of the SS joined in, mostly in mufti or wearing coats over their uniforms, even though Himmler wanted them to stay clear. The SD were eventually roused from their slumbers to get documents from buildings that were often in flames. When the security police went to arrest Jews at their homes, they often found their quarry had been chased away by mobs or gone to ground to escape the pandemonium. It was, in this sense, a typical Nazi operation that gained coherence and purpose only in retrospect.⁹⁶

In dozens of localities, the assault took the form of a ‘degradation ritual’ directed at Judaism as much as at Jews. Despite years of propaganda distinguishing racial anti-Semitism from Christian Jew-hatred, crowds enacted scenes that would have been familiar to a visitor from the Middle Ages. In Bensheim local Jews were forced to dance around the blazing synagogue. In Laupheim Jews were collected together, marched to the flaming building and forced to kneel in front of it. In Gailingen and Beuthen Jews were compelled to stand and watch as their synagogues burned. Torah scrolls and prayer books were removed and desecrated, torn apart or kicked around, often by youths. Rabbis were picked out in numerous towns, dragged to their synagogues and made to look on while the incendiaries went to work. In Vienna numerous rabbis had their beards cut off.⁹⁷

Jews were systematically humiliated. In Gütersloh they were marched through the city streets in their nightclothes. In Neustadt and Emden, Jewish homes for the elderly were emptied of their frail residents, who were then paraded around in pyjamas. Jewish men in Düsseldorf were driven barefoot across ground covered in shards of glass. Age and infirmity offered no protection. As well as the old-age homes that were targeted, Jewish orphanages were invaded and ransacked in Dinslaken and Königsberg. The patients were herded out of the Jewish hospital in Nuremberg with such ferocity that several died. Over 200 Jews arrested in Regensburg were marched through the streets on their way to Dachau concentration camp led by one man carrying a placard declaring ‘Exodus of the Jews’.⁹⁸

There was also a strong economic aspect to the pogrom. Looting was widespread, especially before Heydrich ordered the security police to prevent it. The SD in Bielefeld reported twenty-one robberies. In Wolfersheim and other places, rioters took care to destroy ledgers recording mortgages and debts owed to Jews. Extortion flourished under the guise of carrying out Aryanization and rendering localities Jew-free. In Munich, SA men went to the home of the art collector Paul Bernheimer and threatened him until he made out a cheque to the Hitler Youth. The NSDAP district officer in Garmisch-Partenkirchen reported that Jews in the winter resort ‘submitted a declaration of their intent to leave the district immediately and never to return, and to give up their land and residential property by selling it to new owners’. By the afternoon of 10 November ‘all Jews departed from the district’.⁹⁹

Gender was no defence, either. The SD in Bielefeld reported that an eighty-four-year-old woman died after she ‘fell down the stairs’. The wife of the rabbi in Mossbach was sentenced to four weeks in jail for trying to shield her husband and eighty-six-year-old father from Brownshirts who came to arrest them. Many women who later gave testimonies or wrote memoirs recalled the violation of domestic space by drunken, thuggish men. The invaders smashed up furniture, broke ornaments, shattered crockery, and used their daggers to slash furnishings, including pillows and mattresses. For these women the pogrom was represented less by broken glass and more by flying feathers. Their experiences wrench attention away from buildings and public places such as synagogues and shopping streets which are inanimate and impersonal, back to the most private spaces in which the victims were totally vulnerable, forced to stand in nightdresses and pyjamas with their children huddled around them while everything secure and familiar was disrupted and soiled.¹⁰⁰

In more than a few places (the true extent will never be known) the rioters indulged in sexual violence. Four SA men were tried and expelled from the Nazi Party for rape and sexual assault. One abused a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl in Duisberg. In Lichtenfels a Jewish woman was found dead outside town; it is likely that she was raped and her body dumped. Uniformed SA men assaulted several other women in the town during the night. Two Austrian Brownshirts in Linz forced a Jewish woman to undress and molested her in her own home. In Brigittenau, the inner-city district of Vienna that was heavily populated by poor Galician Jews, 200 women were forced to dance naked in a basement for the amusement of a Nazi gang. One woman who refused to provide sport for the onlookers was tied to a table while other women were compelled to spit on her.¹⁰¹

At least ninety Jews were murdered or died. This was not because homicide was intended. If that had been the case the casualty rate would have been astronomical. Rather, it was a symptom of the half-baked way the pogrom was initiated, the poor chain of command, and indiscipline. Indeed, historians know so much about the November pogrom because it was the subject of disciplinary proceedings by the Nazi Party. Although Jews were fair game, and the atmosphere was distinctly permissive, there were no orders to kill anyone. Nor were there any instructions to wreck Jewish commercial premises. Since the spoliation in Vienna and the obsession with husbanding resources for the war effort, the regime had become intensely protective of Jewish-owned wealth to which it had staked a claim. Heydrich specifically instructed the security police to prevent looting.

Instead, the law had been breached on such a prolific scale and so blatantly that the authority of the state would be compromised if no action was taken against at least some of the miscreants. To preserve the notion that Germany was still a Rechtsstaat, a law-governed state, conservative figures in the government, such as Johannes Popitz, the finance minister for Prussia, demanded that Göring punish those responsible. Göring deflected Popitz by asking him sarcastically, ‘Do you want to punish the Führer?’ But the public’s unease was not so easily assuaged. Unlike the murderous rampage of 30 June–1 July 1934, which had a measure of support as the termination of a public nuisance, not to mention the just-credible accusation that the SA was planning a coup, the pogrom had no plausible defence. It was one thing to admit to ordering a revenge action against the Jews, but another to condone the killing of old ladies and the wholesale looting of private homes. Hence the Gestapo, police and public prosecutors initiated investigations and began to make arrests. However, Heydrich could not allow this to go too far. In many cases the offenders were let off if they handed over the loot. In more serious cases, jurisdiction over the investigations was switched from the Ministry of Justice to the party’s own courts. Eventually thirty men were arraigned before the highest tribunal of the party, in Munich, between December 1938 and February 1939.¹⁰²

These trials brought to light the murder of a doctor and his wife in Lesum, a small town on the outskirts of Bremen in north Germany. The commander of the SA storm unit there had been dragged out of bed at 3 a.m. by an official from the town hall who told him that the commander of the SA in Bremen wanted to talk to him on the phone. The officer informed him that the SA had been instructed to get rid of the Jewish population; Lesum was his responsibility and he should jump to it. The Sturm leader collected his men and told them they had been ordered to dispatch the Jews. When asked by his unit what this meant he tried to get clarification from the Bremen HQ, but was left none the wiser. He assumed it was time to kill the Jewish inhabitants on their patch, yet when his men inquired if they should use clubs or pistols he was unable to say. In the end they armed themselves with their pistols and got as far as the home of one Jewish family, where they shot a seventy-eight-year-old doctor and his sixty-five-year-old wife. That was enough for the Brownshirts; they abandoned the escapade and headed off for a stiff drink.¹⁰³

In Aschaffenburg, a small city in western Bavaria, men of an SS unit decided to kill two Jews in revenge for the death of Rath. Their victims were not chosen arbitrarily: both were known for their wealth, and local Nazis resented the fact that they were still there. The first was attacked in his home, the other seized and driven to the edge of town for administration of the coup de grâce. Unfortunately for the SS the execution-style killings were botched. Both victims survived multiple bullet wounds, although one died several days later in hospital. Not only had these SS men failed to get the correct instructions in time, but they were clearly also ill prepared for what they assumed to be their job on the night. In 1938 the average SA and SS man was not familiar with the mechanics of execution on a small, let alone a large scale.¹⁰⁴

The incompetence of the pogromists did nothing to diminish the horror they inflicted. It possibly made things even worse, since Jews were confronted by ‘a horde of drunken animals in uniform’ whose actions could not be predicted, making it harder to palliate them if the chance arose. Their terror, and the anguish of the following weeks, was captured in hundreds of testimonies penned by refugees in 1939 and 1940. Within the Reich and outside, Jews knew that an epochal event had occurred, that crimes had been committed on a vast scale, and that history would one day judge the guilty even if justice did not catch up with them. The Central Information Office, set up in Amsterdam by Alfred Wiener to chronicle Nazi crimes (and later moved to London), obtained dozens of eyewitness reports from refugees while the events were still fresh in their memory. Another recording project was initiated by Edward Hartshorne, a young academic at Harvard University, working with the sociologist Gordon Allport. In 1939 they offered a prize for the best essay on ‘My Life in Germany Before and After January 30, 1933’. Initially publicized in the New York Times, the competition elicited 155 responses in the USA, 31 from Britain, 20 from Palestine and 6 from Shanghai. The majority of the writers were Jews who had fled Berlin and Vienna after November 1938.¹⁰⁵

Rudolf Bing, a lawyer and veteran of the Great War, was woken at three in the morning by a crowd outside his apartment. When he phoned the local police station to express his concern, he was asked ‘Are you an Aryan?’ When he said ‘No,’ the receiver at the other end was put down. Soon he heard cries and screams coming from his Jewish neighbours and when this was succeeded by hammering on his own door he decided to make a getaway. Thinking quickly, the sixty-year-old attorney tossed a mattress out of a back window and leapt onto it. For the rest of the night Bing hid in a garden shed. In the morning a compassionate family who lived nearby helped him. He later recalled: ‘A deep feeling of depression and shame clearly gripped the public. For the first time, some of the population dared to show sympathy with us.’ When he got back to his home he found that his office and the living rooms were all smashed to pieces; even his clothes had been slashed. A few months later, he emigrated to Palestine.¹⁰⁶

Hugo Moses, aged forty-two, had worked for the Oppenheim bank. At 3 a.m., SA and SS men, ‘blood-thirsty savages, brutal creatures’, broke into his apartment. They wrecked the place, then left. In the morning uniformed policemen came to his home, surveyed the damage, and declared, ‘It’s a disgrace.’ But in the evening, another officer arrived to arrest him. The officer did not hide his sympathy for Moses and he was relatively well treated while he was held in the police station. From there he was taken to a prison where he joined about 800 Jews. Conditions were poor, but no one was maltreated. He was released on 19 November. When he arrived home he found that German neighbours were helping his wife. They protested, ‘This is worse than Russia,’ and worried that their church might be the next target. But the pogrom had the required effect on Moses. ‘Up to that point I would have found it very difficult to leave the old homeland and my parents’ house …’ No longer. He obtained an affidavit from his wife’s uncle in the USA and emigrated with his family.¹⁰⁷

Luise Solmitz observed the pogrom in Hamburg through the eyes of a Christian married to a Jew. November 10 was ‘a terrible day’. She went into the city to do shopping and saw crowds of people milling around, blocked roads, and the smashed windows of Jewish-owned stores. As she walked she heard ‘An incessant rattling and clinking from the splintered windows on which glaziers were working. I’ve never heard such a clattering in all my life.’ In the early evening the radio announced that the Führer had ordered a halt to the demonstrations, although new laws pertaining to the Jews would soon follow. ‘This means our fate is relentlessly approaching doom’, she wrote. ‘I always thought, now we have reached the worst point. But now I see it was always just a prelude to the next thing. Now the end is near.’ Two days later the Gestapo visited her husband Freddy, but Heydrich had already decided that elderly Jews and those with wounds from the trenches should be released from custody. So, on account of his war record, they left him alone.¹⁰⁸

Children were not spared the frightfulness. Toni Lessler, a teacher at a Jewish school in the Grunewald neighbourhood of Berlin, recalled how distressed children arrived in the morning with stories that the temple in Fasanenstrasse was on fire. Shortly afterwards, another group arrived bearing news that the synagogue on Prinzregentstrasse was alight. Then tearful children trickled in from the neighbourhood saying that ‘our little temple in Grunewald is burning and the fire-fighters are standing around without intervening’. It was impossible to accomplish anything with classes full of trembling children so they were sent home in groups, each accompanied by a teacher. The school remained closed for ten days and when it reopened the roll was much reduced. Many children had already left the country with their families; over ninety had fathers in concentration camps.¹⁰⁹

The violence was, if anything, more pronounced in Vienna. Over forty synagogues were destroyed and twenty-seven Jews were beaten to death. Siegfried Merecki, a lawyer in his fifties whose family had migrated to the city from Galicia, watched the demolition of his synagogue, tears streaming down his face. ‘Every little thing that was still inside was taken out and smashed … The people seemed to have superhuman strength; their faces were distorted.’ His apartment was raided by SA men and ruined. They cut up his clothing and then forced him to wear it on his journey to the local police station where he was abused and beaten. Whereas in the Old Reich, policemen tended to divide into decent older types and younger Nazified zealots, in Vienna they all seemed to take pleasure in tormenting Jews. Merecki was interrogated and repeatedly asked if he had sexual relations with Aryan women. When the police had finished, the Jews were shipped off to a riding school converted into a detention centre. After a few days he was released because he already had emigration papers. He was amongst the lucky ones.¹¹⁰

Ruth Maier was looking forward to celebrating her eighteenth birthday on 10 November. Her reveries about impending womanhood were interrupted by the news that Rath had been shot by ‘a Polish Jew. My God!’ Like other Viennese Jews she suspected what this could mean. ‘No Jew goes outside. We’re scared that they’ll beat us up because a Polish Jew wanted to kill a German.’ Her fears were soon realized. ‘We’ve been attacked,’ she wrote on the 11th. ‘Yesterday was the most awful day of my life. Now I know what pogroms are. I know what human beings are capable of.’ Ruth was at her Jewish school when warning came that trouble was brewing. The children were dismissed and she hurried home through streets that looked ‘like an abattoir’. It was ‘as if war had broken out’. She saw a lorry packed with Jews ‘standing up like livestock on its way to the slaughterhouse! I’ll never forget this sight – I must never forget it.’ People stood and stared while crowds went about the work of destruction ‘with desire and pleasure’. Unlike in the Old Reich, huge numbers of apartments were seized, nearly 2,000, and the Jewish occupants summarily evicted. Ruth saw Jews expelled from homes in the provinces arriving in Vienna. All their belongings were piled in ‘removal lorries, massive and simple lorries full of bed linen, crates, rocking chairs, coffee mills – everything in a heap: a Jew’s home, just a Jew’s home’.¹¹¹

Rather like the boycott of April 1933, the only other nationwide anti-Jewish action staged by the party, the November pogrom was ill thought out and counterproductive. It provoked the wrath of Göring and Himmler, neither of whom had been included in the planning, and resulted in a backlash at home and abroad.

Some of the anger displayed by members of Hitler’s inner circle was synthetic, motivated by hostility for Goebbels and a desire to keep him in his box. Yet the pogrom also aroused the genuine annoyance of Heydrich and the SD thinkers who despised attacks on the Jews that were not coordinated with the policy of emigration. Eichmann, in Vienna, was apoplectic when he arrived at the IKG offices in the early hours to find broken typewriters littering the courtyard. The membership files of the community were still in the blazing synagogue next door. To prevent their work being further disrupted he placed the Jewish workers at the Zentralstelle under his protection and stationed a guard outside the Rothschild Palais where the emigration office was located. ‘This whole “Night of Broken Glass” was fully opposed to our wishes and our goal,’ he later told an interviewer. ‘Neither the SD nor the Gestapo had anything to do with it; on the contrary they were infuriated, because they had, in accordance with the instructions of the Reichsführer-SS [Himmler], through the most painstaking detailed work, built up organizations and offices which were ruthlessly attacked and shattered.’ A report on the overall impact of the pogrom by the SD Head Office in January 1939 lamented that ‘Valuable archival material and art treasures were destroyed as a result of the imprudence or ignorance of those involved.’¹¹²

On 10 November, Goebbels and Hitler met over lunch at the Osteria restaurant in Munich to take stock of their handiwork. By now they had information on the dimensions of the destruction, but they also had the first intimations that it was less than applauded by other members of the National Socialist hierarchy. They agreed to end the physical assaults immediately while promising to intensify the cold pogrom through legislation. Specifically, Hitler wanted to expropriate all Jewish businesses and impose a fine on the entire Jewish population as further atonement for the death of Rath. Goebbels wanted to make the Jews pay the clean-up costs, including the insurance bill. In the afternoon, the Deutsches Nachrichten Büro, the government news agency, announced ‘A strict order … to the entire population to desist from all further demonstrations and actions against Jewry, regardless of what type. The definitive response to the Jewish assassination in Paris will be delivered to Jewry via the route of legislation and edicts.’ Goebbels sent a special message to Gauleiters requiring that ‘anti-Jewish actions be halted with the same speed with which they originated’. For good measure Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, signalled all NSDAP branches that ‘On the explicit order of the very highest authority setting fire to Jewish shops or similar actions may not occur under any circumstances.’¹¹³

The lacklustre popular response to the threat of war during the Sudeten crisis and now the recoil from the pogrom may explain the speech that Hitler made to journalists later in the day regretting that Germans still lacked a warlike spirit. Goebbels not only had to rebut the atrocity stories that were all over the international media, but had to use the German press to justify the pogrom to his own people. A press conference at the Ministry of Propaganda on 17 November issued elaborate guidelines for articles to appear over the following days that would explain to the population the conspiratorial and parasitic nature of the Jews.¹¹⁴

Opinion reports collected by the SD offer a fine-grained impression of public reactions. Four days after Hitler ended the pogrom, the SD sent out a questionnaire seeking data about Aryanization, criminal acts committed on the night, whether weapons were discovered, the amounts of valuables or cash seized, and the scale of insurance claims. Question 14 asked: ‘How does the population view the operation. Impact on popular mood.’ Respondents were asked to reply carefully and truthfully, ‘without whitewashing’. Although it suited the SD to exaggerate the extent of public disquiet (especially concerning the ruination of property) in order to embarrass Goebbels, the feedback from their informants is corroborated by other contemporary sources.¹¹⁵

The city authorities in Minden reported that the action was ‘expressly applauded by many’ although the next day in the market square ‘individuals here and there were especially reserved in their remarks’. Several weeks later the district governor added that there was ‘an embarrassed silence, as if by common agreement regarding the operation ordered by the Party on 9–10 November’. He regretted that the local authorities had not been properly notified, otherwise senseless destruction, arson and ‘anarchistic’ behaviour could have been avoided. As a result, there was a mood of ‘depression’. The mayor of Lemgo, in Westphalia, catalogued the devastation of the Jewish community. However, ‘a portion’ of the population could not understand why the synagogue was destroyed when ‘the building could have been put to good use’. The mayor of Amt Borgentreich, a town in Westphalia, wrote that ‘In many instances, the population had no understanding for the operation, or better, did not wish to understand it. The Jews were also the object of pity.’ The inhabitants of Atteln, a rural community, had no objection to the arrest and removal of the Jews. ‘In general’, according to the mayor, ‘the only thing the population took exception to was the material destruction.’¹¹⁶

The county commissioner in Halle, in Westphalia, gave a very detailed and totally detached account of the events based on reports from several locations. ‘Generally’, the mayor of Versmold stated, ‘the population was noticeably quiet in its response.’ They endorsed the idea of a reprisal but dissented from the ‘destruction of public property of the German Volk’. In Brockhagen the small crowd that gathered to watch the house and stables of a Jewish cattle-dealer being consumed by flames stood in silence. In the small town of Werther, ‘A large part of the population does not approve of this operation, most especially of the manner in which it was carried out.’ The police there were angry that they had been alerted so late because initially they had tried to restrain the arsonists, only to be ignored. This had caused ‘damage to the reputation and authority of the police’.¹¹⁷

Bielefeld’s lord mayor discerned a ‘definite understanding for the need to struggle against Jewry. It is likewise generally recognised as self-evident that if Jews are to be disposed of, extremely severe measures will have to be employed.’ On the whole, there were few objections to the demolition of the synagogue. ‘But the manner in which the Jewish shops, or the displays in Jewish shop windows were attacked – have generally not met with approval.’ People were cynical about the claims of spontaneity. The Gestapo in this medium-sized industrial city confirmed that ‘In general, the operation of 10 November 1938 has had a rather unfavourable impact on the public mood.’¹¹⁸

The rural population in the area around Koblenz manifested a blend of profiteering and pity. Many were ‘engaged in large purchases of furniture and household goods from the Jews’, presumably from those who were about to leave. Other peasants, who were influenced by the Churches, felt sympathy for them. The rural police in Muggendorf, a little town in Upper Franconia, likewise reported that the population was divided between those who felt the action was justified and a ‘far larger’ proportion who looked on it as ‘improper and unwarranted’.¹¹⁹

Foreign observers confirm the divergent responses of the German population. Edwin Kemp, US consul general in Bremen, was quick to transmit the information that fifty Jews in the city had been arrested on the morning of 10 November and paraded along the street under SA guard. ‘It was curious to note the lack of public enthusiasm at the spectacle. The parade was greeted with complete silence. The crowd viewing the broken shop windows also had nothing to say.’ By contrast, when twenty-five Jewish community leaders in Stuttgart were led away, the US consul-general, Samuel Honaker, reported that ‘bystanders cursed and shouted at them’. Honaker also observed that much of the damage to Jewish shops was caused by young men, often out of sight, in side streets off the main shopping avenues. ‘These actions have caused a great part of the population to feel very uneasy and quietly to give expression to their lack of enthusiasm with such practices.’ Only about 20 per cent of the people, by his estimate, were happy with the pogrom. Hugh Wilson, based at the embassy in Berlin, remarked that ‘a surprising characteristic of the situation here is the intensity and scope among German citizens of a condemnation of the recent happenings against Jews’.¹²⁰

The British consul in Frankfurt-am-Main, Robert Smallbones, identified several distinct phases to the pogrom there. It started with attempts to set fire to the city’s three main synagogues. These were not terribly successful and the fires had to be reignited. Then the attack moved to shops and offices, whereupon there was widespread looting. Later, the Hitler Youth joined in and the onslaught spread to private residences, proceeding from the poorer Jewish neighbourhoods in the east end of the city towards the wealthier west end. By the time lorries drove up to collect the Jews arrested in the morning, ‘a large crowd had gathered, which hurled abjective [sic] and abusive insults at every convoy as it arrived’. Smallbones also reported that Jewish refugees from small rural communities arrived in the city bearing tales of violence and destruction. In a later account sent to Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy, Smallbones groped for reasons why peace-loving Germans whom he generally admired could behave so awfully. ‘The explanation of this outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, and in particular homosexuality, are very prevalent in Germany. It seems to me that mass sexual perversity may offer an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable outrage.’¹²¹

One report after another emphasized the unease of the Catholic population or its overt sympathy with the Jews. Catholics and Confessing Christians in Bielefeld ‘cautiously criticised the burning of the synagogues’ and some said ‘the churches would be next in line’. The county commissioner for Höxter in Westphalia, with a population of around 30,000, recalled that the initial welcome for the arrest of the town’s Jews evaporated when its inhabitants saw ‘these more or less miserable looking individuals’. He contended that ‘the population harboured no sympathy for this operation. The population was in a serious mood and depressed. There were clear signs here and there of pity.’ Catholic residents asked: would the church be next? Such reservations were not simply attributable to religious scruple. The ‘preponderant majority’ of the rural citizenry did not ‘consider such an operation to be compatible with the reputation and dignity of the Germans’. The mayor of Bad Lippspringe, north of Paderborn, admitted frankly that ‘The overwhelming proportion of the population failed to understand the operation against the Jews and condemned it, saying that such a thing should not be allowed to happen in a civilized society.’ The county commissioner for the district of Paderborn stated bluntly that the Catholic population ‘rejects the operation against the Jews. These circles, which are, as a matter of fundamental conviction, especially opposed to the National Socialist state due to their political-ecclesiastical ties, are particularly angered by the fact that the “houses of worship” of the Jews were set on fire.’ They stubbornly treated the Jews as a religious group, not a race, and feared that other religions could suffer persecution. In a few places, clergymen were taken into custody for articulating sympathy for the Jews in the form of sermons or leading prayers for their welfare. Others got into trouble for insisting on the value and efficacy of baptism.¹²²

The pogrom drew criticism from certain social groups for moral reasons. The SD District Office in Gotha, an industrial city in Thuringia, sent Berlin news of the ‘immense satisfaction’ felt by the population when over fifty Jews were arrested (of whom twenty-eight were sent to Buchenwald). Yet it noted expressions of sympathy from the ‘better circles’. People in Ebermannstadt, a village in Upper Franconia, approved the fine on the Jews but not the destruction, ‘because the consciousness of what is lawful began to waver’. The convoluted prose of the district officer adverted to popular outrage against the incidence of looting and ‘selfish acts’ such as the forced cancellation of debts owed to Jews and the transfer of property under duress. ‘Such infractions of the established limits have transformed the purpose and value of the measures of retaliation into their very opposite.’ In other words, citizens were appalled that some of the rioters used the occasion for their own benefit and were more interested in profit than principle. Honest folk, though not necessarily friendly to the Jews, wondered where the infringement of property rights would stop and how the law would be respected if it could be waived in the case of one, arbitrarily selected group. The president of the district court in Trier formulated the dilemma succinctly: ‘The upshot of non-interference by the police is a new general feeling of insecurity regarding law and order. They say that what happened to the Jews can also happen at any time to other groups in the population, people who have made themselves the object of dislike because of some event or other.’²³

The involvement of children and youths added to the discomfort of both the ‘better circles’ and more humble Germans who shared a prudent concern about the correct upbringing of the young. To the consternation of adults, in a number of places schoolchildren were released from classes on the morning of 10 November to spectate or to help tear down synagogues. In the usually tranquil spa town of Baden-Baden they were assembled to watch eighty Jewish men, who had been arrested by the SS earlier in the morning, paraded towards the synagogue where they were forced to sing the ‘Horst Wessel’ song. After the Jews were loaded onto trucks and driven off to Dachau, the synagogue was set on fire. In Großen-Linden, the main assault was delivered by 200 students who were transformed from budding scholars into a howling mob. The county commissioner of Halle reflected the disapproval of the role taken by youth, remarking that ‘locally it is possible to discern an undeniable brutalization among young and certain other elements’.¹²⁴

In its final overview, circulated on 7 December, the Jewish desk at the SD Head Office admitted that ‘the civilian population participated only to a very limited extent’. No fewer than 14,000 Germans were made unemployed by the devastation of thirty-one department stores, thousands of smaller outlets, and numerous manufacturing concerns. The SD estimated the final cost of the damage at 990 million Reichsmarks. ‘The attitude of the population to the actions, which initially was positive, changed fundamentally when the extent of the material damage inflicted became generally known.’ They deplored the setback to the Four-Year Plan and feared the impact it would have on Germany’s foreign relations. ‘There was a particular condemnation by members of the armed forces of the methods against the Jews.’ In Catholic areas the ‘clear rejection of the entire operation’ proved that ‘internal political adversaries are exploiting this mood’.¹²⁵

The November pogrom exposed deep fissures within the putative Volksgemeinschaft, between generations, between confessional groups, and between those with pre-Nazi political allegiances and those socialized under the Third Reich. One of the things that most appalled middle-aged conservative figures like the former German Ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, was the involvement and enthusiasm of youth. On 25 November he confided to his diary, ‘I am writing under the crushing emotions evoked by the vile persecution of the Jews … Not since the world war have we lost so much credit in the world.’ Apart from his brazen fib that that the pogrom was spontaneous Goebbels was ‘shameless enough to mobilise school classes’. Hassell feared that ‘the lowest instincts have been aroused; and the effect, especially among the young, must have been bad’. Weeks later he visited Berlin and detected ‘a deep sense of shame which has weighed heavily on all decent and thoughtful people since the hideous events of November. There is talk of little else.’¹²⁶

Young people, by contrast, threw themselves into the pogrom when they had the chance and expressed few misgivings afterwards. Karl Fuchs was a twenty-one-year-old at the University of Würzburg where he was training to become a teacher. His father had joined the National Socialists as far back as 1923 and Karl was marinated in Nazi ideology. He joined the Hitler Youth, performed his Reich Labour Service, and had recently completed national service collecting the harvest. In a few months he would enter the army. He was the very incarnation of the Volksgemeinschaft. In a letter to his parents he recalled his part in the pogrom. ‘My God, you should have been in Würzburg during this Jewish mess. I don’t know if things were as hectic in Nuremberg but we made a clean sweep here. I can tell you that the authorities didn’t miss one of those pig Jews. You should have seen the insolent behaviour of these Jews! Several times for instance, some of these old Jewish hags spat right in front of young girls! At any rate, it is significant that the whole world with the exception of old England, is turning against these scoundrels today. From now on, these Jewish gentlemen will think twice before firing on a German citizen abroad in order to hurt our entire nation. The people here were really upset.’¹²⁷

Melita Maschmann, who was working in the press and propaganda office of the Bund deutscher Mädel in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, attended a demonstration outside the town hall on 9 November. The next day she travelled to Berlin where she saw the shattered windows of Jewish stores and shops. ‘I said to myself: The Jews are the enemies of the new Germany. Last night they had a taste of what this means. Let us hope that Western Jewry, which has resolved to hinder Germany’s “new steps to greatness” will take the events of last night as a warning. If the Jews sow hatred against us all over the world, they must learn that we have hostages for them in our hands.’ This was the Volksgemeinschaft in action.¹²⁸

Jews into the concentration camps

The violence and robbery that typified the pogrom did not end after it was suspended. Rather, the terror moved to more discreet locations where it could be applied more precisely and according to a plan of sorts.

During the course of 10 November, the Gestapo and the security police attempted to carry out Hitler’s orders, transmitted by Heydrich and Müller. The intention was to arrest and hold 30,000 Jews, mostly affluent, until they agreed to liquidate their businesses and emigrate. Heydrich carefully discounted Jews who were customarily spared the effect of anti-Jewish measures: men with distinguished war records or wartime wounds, plus the elderly and the sick. But the security police were unprepared and lacked sufficient strength to carry out this mission in one sweep. Nor did they have anywhere to hold the detainees. So it was necessary for the SA to help out, with the result that often Jews who were supposed to be excluded from the arrest category were taken away. The unfortunates were held in police cells, prisons, and makeshift detention centres such as cellars and empty buildings. Policemen and prison wardens were usually businesslike towards the Jews in their charge, but the inmates of temporary sites were guarded by ill-disciplined Brownshirts who used the opportunity to torture, humiliate and rob them. Philipp Flesch was arrested in Vienna and held with 2,000 other men in a cellar until he had an opportunity to show an SS officer his medal certificate proving that he had served in the trenches. He was then freed. Even as some men were being let out, others were being arrested. In Hamburg, many of the intended victims had gone into hiding when the pogrom started so the hunt for Jews went on for days.¹²⁹

Those who were not immediately released were taken to railway stations and transported to Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. There were no facilities to cope with them in the camps, either, so they were crammed into tents or improvised barracks. The overcrowding, lack of sanitation, inadequate food, and bad weather added misery to the systematic brutality of the SS-Totenkopf guards. Almost all the survivors recalled the beating they received en route from the disembarkation point into the camp. This vicious induction was followed by the ‘Appell’ (roll call) that went on for hours despite the cold, rain or time of day. Such treatment was standard practice, but the Jewish men were utterly unprepared for what befell them. They were predominantly middle-aged and middle-class, transported from domestic calm into a hellish environment within a matter of hours.¹³⁰

Around 11,000 Jews flowed into Dachau, transforming the camp population. The Jews were segregated and held in an area called the ‘small camp’ where conditions were far worse than in the long-established barracks. By February 1939, 187 had died. In Buchenwald the influx of just under 10,000 Jewish men was accommodated in a cluster of hastily erected tents labelled the Sonderlager, or special camp. The first arrivals were put to work building makeshift huts while further transports poured in. These primitive constructions had no floors and offered barely more protection against the elements than the tents they replaced. Cases of sickness soon multiplied, obliging the camp administration to convert the laundry into a hospital. It is estimated that 222 died in the special camp. Approximately 6,000 Jews were transported to Sachsenhausen, where about 100 perished. Overcrowding, malnutrition and exposure were responsible for the first epidemics to afflict the camp population. The massive inflow brought more than just disease; many new arrivals arrived with cash that they managed to keep in their possession or were sent money, tobacco and food. The sudden expansion of numbers, combined with the availability of money or goods for exchange, created a vibrant black market and stimulated corruption amongst the prisoners and the guards alike.¹³¹

However, the majority of Jewish men did not have to endure the camps for very long. Already on 16 November, Heydrich ordered the release of several categories. His instructions reflected both cynicism and public disquiet. Those with emigration papers, Jews who were ready to sell their businesses, and the lawyers needed to assist them were amongst the first to be let out. Elderly men and combat veterans followed suit. Finally, men over fifty years old and teenagers were released. By early 1939, only about 2,000 were left behind the wire. No matter how short the stay, though, the experience was traumatic and numbers of men never recovered from incarceration either physically or psychologically.¹³²

Karl Schwabe, a forty-seven-year-old shopkeeper in Hanau, was arrested on 10 November and held with other Hanau Jews in a gymnasium. The elderly and ill were sent home following medical examinations by police doctors, but Karl was amongst those marched to the railway station. As they passed groups of spectators he noticed ‘a few laughed, but sympathy and dismay could be seen on many faces’. Although the police who escorted them were friendly, once they arrived at Weimar the mood and tempo of events shifted dramatically. They were beaten from the trucks that unloaded them all the way until they were inside Buchenwald. The days that followed were marked by thirst, hunger, roll calls, and constant arbitrary violence. After ten days the SS started releasing men: the old, the young, decorated veterans. Food parcels and mineral water began to arrive in the camp; Karl got a package of clothing and a blanket from his wife. ‘The days went by, and it was always the same thing. Dirt, diarrhoea, boredom and the constant waiting strained our nerves.’ A month after his arrest, he was set free and driven back to the station in Weimar. There he was led to a room where Jewish women were serving coffee and white rolls. ‘The coffee and rolls tasted unbelievably good. The friendliness with which they were given also did us good, and it was amazing how well the ladies worked together with the police.’ After disposing of all their assets and paying the necessary taxes, Karl Schwabe, his wife and two children travelled to England and from there emigrated to America.¹³³

Hans Reichmann, the doughty champion of Jewish interests, had been living from day to day in expectation of a visit from the Gestapo. For all the brutality of the welcome, when he finally arrived in Sachsenhausen he felt a kind of relief. The path had ‘come to its pre-determined end’. Life settled into a routine of privation, abuse, pointless labour, and humiliation. During the moments of peace, in the packed barracks, the Jewish men comforted one another and discussed their situation. Each man knew that ‘Outside our wives will be fighting to free us, but will they be able to do it on their own? The lawyers are here with us …’ Eventually Hans Reichmann’s formidable wife Eva was able to extract him from the camp; in April 1939 they reached England.¹³⁴

It was a period of extraordinary stress and anxiety for the women: wives, mothers, sisters and daughters raced against time to obtain the necessary papers to guarantee that fathers, husbands, brothers or sons could emigrate once released – if they lived that long. Hertha Nathorff’s husband, a physician, was arrested on 10 November when he returned to his apartment from the Berlin clinic where he had been treating Jews injured during the night. Two days later she was at the American Consulate amidst a throng of women all trying to get entry visas for the USA that would qualify their husbands for release. ‘Pale, aggrieved women from Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau all bore the same pain and they stood quietly, acting on behalf of their husbands and weeping in their hearts – a women’s crusade.’ It took a month for Hertha to get the necessary documents; her husband returned on 16 December. They emigrated to the United States early in 1939.¹³⁵

Mally Dienemann, in Offenbach, went to the local police station with a medical certificate to show that her sixty-three-year-old husband, detained on 10 November, was unfit to remain in prison. She was told that only the Gestapo could approve his release. At dawn the next day she watched as her husband and other Jews were driven off in a bus: their destination was Buchenwald. Over the next days Mally pleaded with officials on behalf of her husband. Then she heard that prisoners were being freed if they had emigration certificates for Palestine, so she telegraphed her children, who were already there, and told them to get one for their father. But this was only the start of a different ordeal. ‘And now a series of offices awaited me. The official emigration office in Frankfurt, the Gestapo, the police, the finance office, a petition to Buchenwald, a petition to the Gestapo in Darmstadt’. It took over a week to get the paperwork done. Rabbi Dienemann was reunited with Mally in Offenbach on 29 November. They emigrated to Palestine early the next year, but he never recovered from his incarceration. A few months after arriving in the Holy Land, Rabbi Dienemann died.¹³⁶

A meeting at the Air Ministry

The detention of Jewish men in concentration camps was the fulfilment of SD Judenpolitik and marked a step-change in treatment of the Jewish question. Nationally coordinated and (more or less) carefully prepared actions covering the entire Jewish population, combining intimidation with legal measures, now came to the fore.¹³⁷ The accidental outcome of the November pogrom was a more coherent and strategic multi-agency approach, typified by greater centralization of planning and inter-ministerial conferences. This new era was marked by the first great ‘conference’ on Judenpolitik, convened by Göring in the imposing new Aviation Ministry building.

The conference on 12 November 1938 opened at eleven in the morning and lasted nearly four hours. It was chaired by Göring and attended by the major players in economic and domestic affairs: Goebbels; Frick, the minister for the interior, and his senior civil servant Wilhelm Stuckart; Gürtner, the justice minister; Funk, the minister for economics; Schwerin von Krosigk, the finance minister; Ernst Woermann, representing the foreign office; Kurt Daluege, head of the uniformed police; and Heydrich, chief of the Sipo-SD. Bürckel and Fischböck attended to speak for interests in the Ostmark and to provide their experience of implementing Judenpolitik in conditions less hamstrung by vested interests and legislative niceties. Representatives of the insurance industry were present, ex officio. Their spokesman was Eduard Hilgard, director of the Allianz company and head of the Reich Group of Insurers. With the addition of other ministerial delegates, assistants and experts there were around a hundred people in the room. All those present sensed that it was a momentous gathering, and if they had any doubts they were put right by Göring in his opening remarks.¹³⁸

He began by announcing that Hitler had personally given him the task of bringing together all the different strands of Judenpolitik and coordinating them in one, concerted drive to settle the Jewish question, ‘one way or another’. Göring then referred back to previous, failed attempts to formulate and push through policy to eliminate the Jews from the German economy. It was, he declared, essentially an economic question though it would need legal measures to achieve a solution and propaganda to explain why. The public needed to understand that rioting was no panacea. ‘I have had enough of demonstrations! They don’t harm the Jew, but me, who is the ultimate authority for co-ordinating the German economy … It’s insane to clean out and burn a Jewish warehouse then have a German insurance company make good the loss. And the goods which I need desperately … are being burned … I may as well burn the raw materials before they arrive.’ Yet this was secondary: ‘the fundamental idea in this programme of the elimination of the Jew from the German economy is first, the Jew being ejected from the economy transfers his property to the State’.¹³⁹

Göring then outlined how he envisaged the takeover or closure of Jewish shops, stores, manufacturing enterprises and factories. Still smarting from the gold-rush in Vienna, he set out rough guidelines for a trustee office that would value Jewish concerns and arrange for their transfer to suitable owners at a reasonable price, while also trying to favour deserving and competent party members. Factories that were not necessary to the economy would be shut down; but every effort would be made to protect German employees. He also stipulated that the interests of foreign Jews would have to be respected, a gesture to the Foreign Office. Göring continued, saying that although they were to be deprived of their livelihoods Jews would not benefit directly from the sale of their property; they would be compensated with bonds that would generate enough income for them to live off.¹⁴⁰

Funk was anxious whether Jewish-owned stores would be reopened. What would happen to their stock, much of which had not been paid for by the store-owner? What would happen to the employees? Instead of resolving these difficult matters, Göring got sidetracked into exchanges about the extent of the damage to synagogues – which provided an opportunity for Goebbels to jump in. He advocated the razing of surviving synagogue structures, obliterating any memory of their existence. With his peculiar astringency he then went on to propose measures for driving Jews out of the public sphere entirely. They should be banned from attending cinemas, theatres and concerts; limited to one, designated carriage on trains; and prohibited from all except a few places of open-air recreation such as resorts, beaches, woods and parks. Those specific sites, even park benches, should be marked as only for Jews and strictly segregated. Finally, he demanded the expulsion of those Jewish children remaining in the state school system.

At this point, Eduard Hilgard was called in to give a presentation on the insurance question. As the Allianz director was making his way through the crowded room, Göring mentioned that the regime had contemplated imposing an atonement fine on the Jews after the assassination of Gustloff. This time they would do it, but the tantalized audience had to wait for details. With Hilgard in position, Göring reverted to the subject at hand and explained the dilemma they had regarding insurance payments. What could the Jews claim? What measures could be taken to stop them benefiting? In a fascinating disquisition that has been overlooked by historians, Hilgard enumerated the different causes of damage. There had been fire, smashed glass, and theft. Jews were insured against fire and theft; but the plate glass was commonly insured by the building owner, usually Germans. When Göring heard this, he groaned: ‘It doesn’t make sense. We have no raw materials. It is all glass imported from foreign countries and has to be paid for in foreign currency! One could go nuts.’¹⁴¹

Hilgard then moved on to the matter of theft. Far from treating the pogrom as state-sanctioned vengeance on the Jews, he characterized it as an outbreak of mass criminality. Göring tried to reclassify the depredations as ‘rioting’ in the hope that this would deflect the insurance claim, but Hilgard would have none of it. As an example he cited the sacking of the Margraf jewellery store on Unter der Linden that resulted in losses amounting to RM1.7 million. Again, Göring was incensed. Addressing Daluege and Heydrich he commanded them to recover the stolen goods: ‘You’ll have to get me this jewellery through raids, staged on a tremendous scale!’ Daluege responded that police investigations had already begun and 150 people had been arrested. Heydrich added that there had been 800 cases of looting across the Reich. Recovering the stolen property was no simple matter because much stock had been tossed into the street where it had been picked up. ‘Even children have filled their pockets, just for fun.’ In a telling confession, he told the meeting that in view of their bad behaviour the Hitler Youth would be held back from such actions in the future.

The embarrassment deepened when Hilgard moved on to the question of compensating foreign companies and citizens. There was no way to avoid this without compromising Germany’s commercial standing in the world. Nor was there a way to avoid paying out to Jews if the claims were legitimate: otherwise trust in German insurance companies would evaporate. Since such an outcome was unpalatable the meeting digressed into a technical discussion of how insurance payments could be made without the Jews actually benefiting. It was eventually agreed that the claims would be met, but the payments would never reach the German Jewish claimants. As Heydrich put it, ‘That way we’ll save face.’ However, while the Allianz director assumed that Göring would let the insurers recover the money they paid out, the head of the Four Year Plan arbitrarily announced that the state would confiscate it. Hilgard fumed at this blatant larceny, but he was unable to respond on the spot. Instead, he spent months bargaining with the regime to reduce the liability of the insurance companies.¹⁴²

When Heydrich pointed out that the state would also lose sales taxes, taxes on property and taxes on income from 7,500 stores and shops, Göring could not conceal his exasperation: ‘I wish you had killed 200 Jews, and not destroyed such values.’ Heydrich did not disagree, but pointed out that only thirty-five Jews had died. It was of course far more across the Reich and in Austria, yet the death toll was not the real issue and he knew he was safe from Göring’s ire: he had not started the pogrom.¹⁴³

Göring became even more bad-tempered and abusive when discussion moved back to compensating foreign property owners. He was indignant that ‘every dirty Polish Jew’ who suffered damages had legal rights. After Woermann, presenting the Foreign Office point of view, warned that the United States might retaliate if foreign-born Jews were not properly compensated, Göring expostulated that German businessmen should sell up and get out of ‘that country of scoundrels’, that ‘gangster state’.

Funk then wrenched the meeting back to the outstanding dilemma regarding the reopening of Jewish shops and department stores. Here Fischböck intervened with a detailed report on Austria. According to a carefully researched plan based on what the local economy required, 12,000–14,000 of the 17,000 Jewish-owned enterprises in Vienna were to be shut down, and only about 3,000 transferred to new owners. Fischböck explained how the scheme was designed to eliminate fraud and corruption, placing businesses in competent hands. At last, Göring heard something that pleased him. ‘I have to say this proposal is grand. This way the whole affair would be wound up in Vienna, one of the Jewish capitals, so to speak, by Christmas or the end of the year.’ Funk seized his chance and told the meeting that the Economics Ministry had prepared a law to achieve something similar in the Reich. From 1 January 1939, Jews would be forbidden to conduct any business. But Fischböck wasn’t finished. He asked the meeting for its agreement to requisition thousands of apartments in Vienna owned by Jews and to expropriate their equities. The victims would be compensated in the form of a low interest payment on the notional debt accrued to the state through the purchase. That way the state would not actually have to pay more than a fraction of the true cost of the assets. Again, Göring liked the idea.

By now, several hours had passed. Perhaps sensing that the meeting was drawing to a close, Heydrich made a decisive intervention. ‘In spite of the elimination of the Jews from economic life, the main problem, namely to kick the Jew out of Germany, remains. May I make a few proposals to that effect?’ He then sketched the work of the Central Office for Emigration in Vienna, run by Eichmann, and bragged that it had secured the emigration of 50,000 Jews (he used the term ‘eliminated’) from Austria while over the same period only 19,000 had been ‘eliminated’ from the Old Reich. This caught Göring’s attention: ‘How is that possible?’ Heydrich then explained how rich Jews were fleeced to pay for the emigration of ‘the Jewish mob’. Göring retorted, ‘Have you ever thought that this procedure may cost us so much in foreign currency that in the end we won’t be able to hold out.’ Having reassured him that the Jews could only take out a limited amount of foreign currency, Heydrich asked permission to set up a similar emigration office in the Old Reich. He envisaged an emigration rate of 8,000–10,000 Jews per year for eight to ten years. Even so, this would still leave behind a great mass of Jews who, because of the economic restrictions, would be unemployed and indigent. ‘Therefore, I shall have to take steps to isolate the Jew so he won’t enter into the normal German routine of life.’ As a means to this end he proposed marking the Jews, including those who were foreign-born.

His suggestion sparked an exchange that reveals a great deal about Judenpolitik at this stage and illuminates the foundations on which later initiatives rested. Göring was alarmed that ghettos would result from what Heydrich was proposing. Heydrich was quick to correct this misapprehension: he agreed that closed ghettos were a bad idea because his police would not be able to monitor the Jews within. It was better that they should be surrounded by ‘the watchful eyes of the whole population’. ‘The Jew’ would be barred from certain areas and limited to places where he could buy food and services from his own kind. Göring interjected, ‘One moment. You cannot let him starve.’ If Jews were allowed to have shops and businesses on certain streets they would be back to square one – a sort of ghetto. Ultimately, both Göring and Heydrich agreed, in effect, to residential segregation. Funk observed, as though the matter was settled, that it would involve overcrowding and starvation. Undeterred, Heydrich went on to enumerate numerous other restrictions he wanted to impose on Jews: the confiscation of driving licences and car ownership permits, prohibition from spas and resorts, ejection from hospitals and the creation of Jewish-only health services.

In the closing minutes, Göring recurred to the notion of a fine. When everyone assented, he started drafting the decree out loud: ‘that German Jewry shall, as punishment for their abominable crimes etc., etc., have to make a contribution of one billion. That’ll work. The swine won’t commit another murder. Incidentally, I’d like to say again that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.’

Bringing the meeting to an end, Göring warned that ‘If, in the near future, the German Reich should come into conflict with foreign powers, it goes without saying that we in Germany should first of all let it come to a showdown with the Jews.’ In other words, the Jews were hostages and if a conflict were to break out they would pay the price. However, foreign governments could lift the threat by helping to remove them. To this end Hitler was trying to induce other countries to assist the solution of the Jewish question. Göring specifically cited the ‘Madagascar project’, the suggestion made by the French government in 1937, and revived in 1938, to settle Jewish refugees on the island off the coast of east Africa. Thus in the dying moments of the conclave Göring previewed two of the main planks of future German policy towards the Jews, reiterating the fundamental nexus between foreign policy, war, and Judenpolitik.¹⁴⁴

At 2.30 in the afternoon, the meeting dispersed. Presumably those of the participants who were not compelled to return to their offices, or other business, went off in search of a late lunch. They had accomplished a great deal: a plan for eliminating the Jews from the German economy that would be centralized and implemented under Göring’s authority; agreement to establish a central emigration office for the Old Reich, under the management of the security police and SD, intended to emigrate 100,000 Jews in ten years; a neat solution to the problem of settling insurance claims in the wake of the November riots; and a massive fine to be levied on the German Jews to help pay for war preparations. The tone and style of the meeting was almost as important. The language was intemperate, callous, abusive and violent. Jews were discussed in terms of a problem and a danger that had to be dealt with ruthlessly. No one was inhibited by compassion or concern with civil or legal rights. Where necessary, decrees would bring the law into line with what they wanted to do to the Jewish population. Not even the conservatives still in the government, like Krosigk, objected to this. Ultimately, the Jews would be driven out of Germany and any that remained would be segregated, monitored and closely controlled. They were pawns in a geo-strategic game. Foreign powers were now expected to help solve the Jewish question, but if they chose not to do so the Jews would suffer. If war broke out, there would be a ‘showdown’. The format of the meeting established a model for future discussion of ways to solve the Jewish question and fixed the personnel, more or less. Göring was now firmly in control of Jewish affairs; Heydrich was his executive arm. Other ministries and agencies were subordinate, although they would always be able to assert their prerogatives; otherwise they would have to butt their way in and justify a leading role. Judenpolitik had reached a turning point and it was not long before Jews felt the consequences.

The total exclusion of Jews from society and the economy

Before the day was out, Göring had promulgated the first Decree on the Exclusion of the Jews from German Economic Life. Jews were henceforth prohibited from earning a livelihood through selling goods or services wholesale, in fixed retail outlets, by mail order, at markets and fairs, or by peddling. Those still in employment were dismissed and they were forbidden to run firms. Other ministers hastened to pass similar ordinances concerning their domains; no one wanted to appear soft on the Jews. On the contrary, there was competition to show who could be the most punitive. Goebbels followed up his threats by prohibiting Jews from access to places of public entertainment. Heydrich revoked the driving licences held by Jews and, for good measure, invalidated their car ownership permits. The last Jewish children still attending state schools were told not to return to class. Jews were banned from all sporting and recreational activity. The surviving Jewish newspapers were suppressed and replaced by one gazette, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt. Its function was primarily to inform Jews of official measures against them. A week later, the Decree on Public Welfare imposed on municipal and local welfare offices a uniform policy towards Jewish supplicants. It curtailed any remaining benefits to which Jews were entitled. A few thousand, including disabled war veterans, continued to receive state relief; but most of those who were now made unemployed or cut off from a living were thrown on the resources of Jewish aid agencies.¹⁴⁵

At the start of December 1938, the Decree on the Utilization of Jewish Assets brought to the whole of the Greater Reich the methods pioneered in Austria to Aryanize Jewish businesses. It mandated the compulsory sale of Jewish-owned enterprises, the proceeds to be paid into special accounts that were controlled by the authorities. The decree also obligated Jews to move all their securities into blocked accounts. Thereafter they would need permission to realize even small portions of their assets in the form of shares or bonds. In an address to Gauleiters on 6 December, Göring made it absolutely clear that he would not tolerate individual banditry or the senseless destruction of Jewish property. Only the ravenous German state would benefit from the wealth accumulated by Jews through decades of hard work.¹⁴⁶

The forced sale of Jewish businesses was more strictly regulated than in Austria, but it triggered a bonanza nonetheless. Julius Lippert, mayor of Berlin, reported a ‘flood of inquiries’ to the trustees appointed to oversee the transfer process. He was in the happy position of being able to gratify these supplicants, selecting worthy applicants with the Reich economics minister. Their criteria were wide open to cronyism and corruption: ‘Preference should be given to long-time and deserving party members who had suffered an injury during the period of struggle.’ Next in line were party members with some commercial experience who wished to go into business, Berliners displaced by urban redevelopment, and, lastly, ‘long-time employees of Jewish firms, as long as these persons are not “Jew lackeys”.’ Lippert presided over the liquidation or sale of 976 tailoring establishments, 364 furriers, 268 hat-makers and milliners, 181 shoe-makers, 114 watch-makers, and 49 gold- and silversmiths. Throughout Germany by April 1939, state-nominated trustees had liquidated 15,000 of the 39,000 Jewish businesses in existence a year before and were in the process of selling 17,000 to new, Aryan owners.¹⁴⁷

A further decree on 21 February 1939 commanded Jews to surrender jewellery and precious metals to the state in exchange for cash. The order embraced items such as brooches, necklaces, candelabra, silverware and ritual objects often associated with the practice of Judaism and celebrations of the life-cycle. Jews were required to take their valuables to state pawnshops where the managers naturally paid out the lowest conceivable amount and took no account of antiquity or rarity, let alone sentimental values. In Breslau, an eighty-year-old Jewish man named Leo Bernstein pleaded with the authorities to be allowed to keep two sabbath candlesticks, a silver kiddush cup, and a few other items that he and his wife had used annually on Jewish festivals over the course of fifty years of married life. Abraham Ascher, the historian of Breslau Jews, comments that ‘the pawnshop did not generally honour such requests’. Wedding rings were exempted.¹⁴⁸

Jewish labour was also perceived as a potential resource for the omnivorous war economy. At the end of 1938 Göring demanded plans to mobilize Jews so as to free up German workers for the munitions industry. It was taken for granted that this new labour force could not be allowed to operate alongside Germans. Jewish workers were to be segregated and strictly monitored.¹⁴⁹

Around the same time, and again following the ‘Vienna model’, city authorities across Germany began to compile registers of Jewish residences. The implications of this survey were realized at the end of April 1939 with the announcement of the Law on Renting to Jews. Under this legislation Jews lost any protection against eviction. Conversely, municipal authorities could order a Jewish home owner to rent space to another Jew or an entire Jewish family. The means were thus created to herd Jews together in apartment blocks or houses, often adjacent to one another or on the same street. They were known as Judenhauser, Jew-houses, and were a short step away from ghettos.¹⁵⁰

Finally, after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, the bank accounts of Jews in what became the Protectorate were frozen and access to safety deposit boxes was controlled. A few months later this practice was extended into the Reich. The expropriation of the German and Austrian Jews was now total. Access to whatever wealth and property they retained was on the sufferance of Nazi officials and awaited confiscation whenever the regime desired.¹⁵¹

The intensification of anti-Jewish measures inevitably brought the status of Mischlinge into sharp relief. This offered an opportunity for Frick to exert his much-depleted authority in Jewish affairs. On 16 December 1938 he convened his own conference to determine the fate of part-Jews. Representatives of the party, the Finance Ministry, regional officials, Heydrich and the Berlin police chief attended. In imitation of Göring, Frick commenced by announcing that he had obtained Hitler’s permission for a series of new contrivances. Having established his mandate, he explained that after due consideration Mischlinge were to be excluded from the hail of persecutory legislation: there were simply too many – estimated at 700,000 – to alienate. The main thrust of Judenpolitik was to be the forced emigration of the Jewish population; the Jews left behind would be concentrated in Jew-houses and subjected to compulsory labour. But the Führer had ruled out marking them or the creation of ghettos. Subsequently, Göring proclaimed a new category of ‘privileged Jew’ intended to cover Jews married to Aryans. The aim of this bewildering set of regulations was to preserve the offspring of mixed marriages for the German people and to insulate them, for the time being, from expropriation. Thus, a mixed-race couple with children who were being raised as Christians would be allowed to retain their home and pass on wealth to their offspring. But if the couple were childless they would be treated as Jews, could forfeit their property and be forced into a Jew-house. The same applied if they had opted to bring up their children in the Jewish faith. If an Aryan chose to divorce their spouse, the Jewish half of the couple lost his or her privileged status.¹⁵²

Both Göring and Frick at their respective meetings emphasized that the regime prioritized systematic Jewish emigration. On 24 January 1939, Göring ordered Heydrich to establish a Jewish emigration office for the entire Reich modelled on the prototype in Vienna. With its creation, the Sipo-SD acquired unrivalled power over the fate of the Jews in Germany. Just as Eichmann had reshaped the IKG to serve as an instrument of emigration, at the same time as holding the Jewish population under his control, in February the Interior Ministry commenced the reconfiguration of the Reichsvertretung into the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. This wholly Nazi-appointed body was streamlined to facilitate emigration while maintaining the minimum level of services for the remaining Jews, such as education for the young, health care, relief for those with no means of support, and care for the elderly.¹⁵³

Foreign reactions

While Göring and the German leadership were devising ever more inventive ways to extrude and exploit Jews, governments and citizens around the world looked on aghast. However, the international response did not translate into practical aid to the victims. Local anti-Semitism, domestic politics and diplomatic priorities negated the exercise of compassion. Furthermore, governments in western Europe were apprehensive lest German action, which had already inspired a spate of anti-Jewish legislation in Italy, Romania and Hungary, might engender a wave of expulsions. Any willingness to take in German Jewish refugees on German terms might be read as an invitation by other countries to rob their Jews and kick them out.

The British press reported the November pogrom in excruciating detail, eliciting editorials and letters that were universally damning. The Daily Telegraph, on 11 November, commented that ‘Racial hatred and hysteria seems to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people.’ Even advocates of appeasement buckled. In The Times the following day the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, wrote, ‘there are times when the mere instincts of humanity make silence impossible. Would that the rulers of the Reich could realize that such excesses of hatred and malice put upon the friendship which we are ready to offer them an almost intolerable strain.’ Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the arch appeaser, wrote to his sister Ida, ‘I am horrified by the German behaviour to the Jews.’ Though he viewed the events chiefly as a stumbling block to the improvement of Anglo-German relations, he could not conceal his dismay. ‘It is clear that Nazi hatred will stick at nothing to find a pretext for their barbarities.’¹⁵⁴

The British government came under considerable pressure to alleviate the plight of Jews attempting to flee the Reich. Eleanor Rathbone, an independent MP for the combined English universities, set up a Parliamentary Committee on Refugees to coordinate the efforts of members in all parties, including Victor Cazalet and Harold Nicolson, who were responding to considerable grass-roots concern. In cabinet on 14 November, the home secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, warned that there were ‘signs the House of Commons and the country might get out of hand’. Chamberlain himself received a deputation from the Council for German Jewry comprising Viscount Samuel, Lord Bearsted, Lionel de Rothschild, the Chief Rabbi and Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization. The Jewish leaders conceded at the outset that Britain could not open its doors to unlimited immigration but asked that it provide temporary refuge for German Jewish children. They also asked the prime minister to persuade dominion and colonial governments to offer settlement opportunities. Lionel de Rothschild spelled out the financial implications of evacuating the bulk of the German Jewish population and asked for the government to underwrite the £30 million he estimated it would cost. Chamberlain doubted that homes could be found for Jews in Britain or the empire, but promised to see what could be done.¹⁵⁵

The pressure was not only domestic. At the next cabinet meeting, Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, urged his colleagues to do something to mollify opinion in the United States, which was increasingly irritated by the restrictions Britain was imposing on Jewish immigration into Palestine. However, Hoare told them that British Jews were ‘averse from allowing very large numbers of Jews to enter this country’ and feared an ‘anti-Jewish agitation’. Ministers concurred with the home secretary who told the House of Commons during a debate on the refugee crisis that there was an ‘underlying current of suspicion and anxiety rightly or wrongly, about alien immigration on any big scale. It is a fact that below the surface there is the making of a definite anti-Jewish movement.’¹⁵⁶

Nevertheless, Britain became the only country to ameliorate its immigration rules as a direct response to the unfolding tragedy. Whereas Jewish women applying for jobs as domestic servants had previously been obliged to go through the Ministry of Labour, the Home Office now took responsibility for processing applications and farmed it out to the Jewish refugee agencies. Soon 400 applicants a week were being churned through the system, enabling roughly 14,000 women to reach the UK. Speaking in the House of Commons on 21 November, Sir Samuel Hoare also announced that Britain would admit refugees awaiting migration elsewhere, training for emigration, and unaccompanied minors. Consequently, while only 11,000 German Jews had arrived in the period up to March 1938, in the following nineteen months around 50,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews poured into the country. This included roughly 9,000 below the age of seventeen on special chartered trains known as the Kindertransport. The number was further swollen by the unofficial actions of British consuls and passport control officers. Frank Foley, who was actually a spy based in the British Embassy in Berlin, used his position as a PCO to issue visas to desperate Jews with only the flimsiest of guarantees from persons in the UK. He worked closely with Wilfred Israel who was struggling to secure the emigration of the remaining Jewish employees after the forced sale of his family’s business.¹⁵⁷

News of the November pogrom was a page one story in the New York Times for three days and received similar treatment in newspapers across America. At a press conference on 14 November, President Roosevelt declared: ‘The news of the past couple of days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States … I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.’ The president announced that he had instructed the State Department to recall the American Ambassador for consultations. But, he told reporters, there would be no change to the immigration quota. This did not preclude helpful gestures. At a subsequent cabinet meeting he seized on a proposal by Francis Perkins, the Secretary for Labor, to extend the stay of Germans who were already in the USA on temporary visas. He also urged the State Department to work energetically to encourage South American governments to make land available for Jewish settlement projects. Indeed, Roosevelt became almost obsessed with the notion of creating Jewish settlements in undeveloped parts of the world and summoned experts to the White House to review the possibilities. The president probably wanted to do more, but he was restrained by the State Department and chastened by his party’s poor performance in the recent mid-term elections. There was no political risk in asking other countries to take Jewish refugees. He also tried to bounce the British into adopting a more generous approach to immigration into Palestine, which may have encouraged Chamberlain to give the green light to the child-rescue scheme. In cabinet, Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, had thrown his weight behind it specifically because it would gratify the Americans.¹⁵⁸

Like the president, US diplomats and State Department officials were pulled this way and that. On 5 December, Raymond Geist wrote privately to George Messersmith, ‘The Jews of Germany are being condemned to death and their sentence will be slowly carried out, but probably too fast for the world to save them.’ In reply, Messersmith cautioned against ‘hysterical action’. J. P. Moffat, though not lacking sensitivity, was irritated by Jewish lobbying. He confided to his diary: ‘The pressure from Jewish groups all over the country is growing to a point where before long it will begin to react very seriously against their own best interests.’ He acknowledged that Jews were enduring a terrible time and admitted that any reasonable person would wish to help, but added menacingly, ‘no one likes to be subjected to pressure of the sort they are exerting and the American public does not like pressure in favour of one particular population or group’.¹⁵⁹

These cross-currents help explain the fate of an American bid to emulate the Kindertransport scheme. In February 1939, Robert Wagner, a Democratic senator for New York, and Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican congresswoman, came up with the idea of circumventing the immigration quotas by passing special legislation to allow the entry of 20,000 German refugee children over a limited period. The Wagner–Rogers Bill garnered extensive support, but was just as vigorously opposed by the restrictionists. One cynical argument against the proposed measure was that it sanctioned the splitting up of families, which offended Christian values. More prosaically, the State Department baulked at the prospect of processing thousands of extra visas. With polls showing that over 80 per cent of Americans were against any liberalization of immigration controls, Roosevelt declined to give White House backing to the bill. By spring it had perished in committee.¹⁶⁰

The French government, which was in the throes of negotiating a statement of Franco-German friendship, remained mute about the pogrom. The foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, actually accused French Jews of sabotaging good relations with Germany by harping on about the suffering of their co-religionists. The interior minister ordered the border police to turn away Jews even if they had a valid visa to enter France. As an alternative, Henry Bérenger, the principal French delegate at the Évian conference, breathed life back into the proposals to settle Jews in Madagascar. This time it was the Germans who took notice. In early December 1938, Ribbentrop sent a note to Hitler reporting that the French wanted to send 10,000 Jews to the island. The notion evidently appealed to the Nazi hierarchy since Hitler adverted to it in a speech a month later.¹⁶¹

In the Neues Tagebuch, Schwarzschild drew political as well as moral conclusions from the international reaction. He maintained that the cynicism and brutality with which Germany treated its Jews mirrored its conduct of foreign policy. Conversely, the failure of the international community to offer succour to the Jews (by evacuation if necessary) reflected its supine response to German aggression. Both were manifestations of moral enfeeblement. ‘People have never understood the extent to which the method the Third Reich employed in the matter of the Jews was symptomatic of the method it employs in general, in all matters. A whole host of mistakes in foreign policy could have been avoided if people had been capable of relating the Nazis’ procedure in the matter of the Jews to their procedures in general.’ Schwarzschild marvelled that the USA, Russia and Europe with a combined population of 600 million could not absorb 600,000 Jews. He warned that it might soon be too late, in any case. ‘Is it even certain today that the Nazi Reich, with its shortage of manpower, will be willing to let these people leave? Are their plans not heading in another direction, towards using them as slave labour, perhaps even, occasionally, as shooting targets?’¹⁶²

Fleeing the Reich

In the months after the pogrom, the closure of the Centralverein and the detention of communal leaders left the terrified Jewish population of Germany and Austria directionless, with almost no institutional support or functioning networks. Acting individually, Jewish men and women struggled to find ways to escape by legal or illegal routes. As their choices narrowed they found themselves exploring ever more unlikely options.

Victor Klemperer had escaped the worst horrors of the pogrom because he was in hospital getting treatment for a bladder infection. Nevertheless he was arrested and briefly detained by the police after a search of his house revealed a weapon: his old wartime sabre. Once he was back home he was consumed by ‘the struggle to emigrate’. He tried to get information about obtaining a visa for Cuba, which he heard was willing to accept German Jews, at a price. He even looked into the possibility of emigration to Rhodesia or Alaska.¹⁶³

On 30 March 1939, Heinz Hesdörffer and his brother Ernst crossed the frontier into the Netherlands. Heinz was a bright sixteen-year-old, bespectacled but good-looking and full of charm. He was born in the spa town of Bad Kreuznach, where his father owned a sweet factory. The family, which was religious by German Jewish standards, lived well. As a result of anti-Semitic abuse Heinz was transferred to a Jewish school in Frankfurt-am-Main, where he lived with an aunt. During the November pogrom SA men wrecked the sweet factory and the business was wound up. His mother (his father had died) tried to get visas for emigration to the United States, but this proved impossible. Instead Ernst and his brother took advantage of a scheme under which 2,000 unaccompanied minors were admitted to the Netherlands into the care of the Jewish community. They were not allowed to work and had to live in a refugee camp, but at least they were safe.¹⁶⁴

Thousands of others illicitly entered neighbouring countries, chiefly France. They saved themselves from Nazi persecution, but immediately faced other dangers. Their passports were stamped with a red ‘J’ that might as well have been the mark of Cain. It left them at the mercy of the local police, who were empowered to arrest and intern illegal immigrants. Without papers entitling them to work, these Jews were condemned to eke out what money they brought with them or risk taking a badly paid job in a workshop liable to be raided at any time by the immigration police.¹⁶⁵

Ernest Heppner, like Heinz Hesdörffer, came from a religious Jewish family. He was born in 1921 in Breslau, where his father, a decorated war veteran, operated a factory making unleavened bread (matzoh) for the Passover festival. After the Nuremberg Laws Ernest was expelled from school. Nevertheless, his mother and father shared the view that ‘anti-semitism was directed primarily towards the immigrants, the Polish Jews … German veterans and their families had nothing to fear.’ The November pogrom ruined this illusion and ended any hope that things in Germany would improve. Although his father evaded arrest, Ernest’s brother was sent to Buchenwald. He contemplated crossing into Poland illegally until he learned from the Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland that it was possible to enter Shanghai without any visa. While this seemed miraculously simple, the vista was hardly inviting. ‘Shanghai, China. What we heard was not comforting: the Japanese, who were allies of the Nazis, had bombed and razed Chinese cities … there was a war raging in the coastal areas. There would be no way for us to make a living in Shanghai and no assurance that we would be able to survive there.’ But such was their trepidation about the future of Jews in Germany that even this option now seemed attractive. At the last moment they were able to secure berths on a liner sailing from Genoa. Ernest’s father hurriedly sold his factory and their apartment; his mother acquired the necessary papers. These included a new passport with the ‘J’ stamp. The Heppners discovered what this signified when British customs officials stopped them disembarking at Port Said, on the Suez Canal, to see the sights. Border police around the world understood that anyone carrying such a passport was probably a refugee and liable to become an illegal immigrant if given half the chance. They continued on the long journey to their distant and dubious haven.¹⁶⁶

In Vienna the IKG, under the direction of Benjamin Murmelstein, assisted thousands of would-be emigrants each week. The staff swelled to over a thousand as paid workers and volunteers struggled to complete the paperwork and fund the emigration in the face of escalating German demands and extortion. Nearly 100,000 Austrian Jews, most from Vienna, departed in the eighteen months following the Anschluss – getting on for 50 per cent of the entire Jewish population. Priority was accorded to orphans and children whose fathers were in concentration camps. Zionist emissaries from Palestine, led by Moshe Agami and Ehud Avriel, assembled groups of young pioneers who were ready to attempt illegal emigration to Palestine in defiance of the British blockade. On the very margins of the emigration effort were the people smugglers. The most prominent and successful was Berthold Storfer, a Jewish-born Viennese businessman, who developed a close working relationship with the SD on the basis of their mutual desire to get Jews out of the country, by fair means or foul.¹⁶⁷

In her diary, Ruth Maier logged the people she knew who ‘secretly vanished’ from Vienna, heading illicitly to Palestine, Bombay, Shanghai. Thanks to help from a former English teacher, she anticipated going to Britain to work as a domestic servant. While she waited for confirmation of the job and a visa, she observed the deteriorating scene. ‘When I first saw “For Aryans Only” on the benches, or “No Jews” in the cafes, the broken windows, I could hardly believe it. Now I just pass by and scarcely notice.’ She heard that two Jews committed suicide, leaving behind a note reading ‘This is how you get over the border in 24 hours.’ She also witnessed the night-time departure of the first Kindertransport from Hütteldorf Station on the outskirts of Vienna. ‘The Jewish stewards lit up the platform with torches. Boys and girls with rucksacks and suitcases. Endless kisses. One more kiss, a final one. Next to me a woman was crying; not just discreetly to herself; she was wailing, groaning, sighing deeply. Her whole face was shaking … Small four year old children were screaming. Madness! They had to be carried away. And the mothers! The fathers of the young ones were in Dachau …’ In January 1939, Ruth got a three-month permit to visit Norway, where an employee of a telegraph company, an active socialist, offered to guarantee her until she moved on to England.¹⁶⁸

The Kindertransport that Ruth Maier watched was one of dozens that carried around 9,000 unaccompanied, mainly Jewish (and non-Aryan Christian) children from Berlin, Vienna and Prague to the Netherlands, where they transferred onto ferry boats that brought them to the United Kingdom. This operation was virtually the only successful attempt at the mass evacuation of Jews from Germany and the territory it controlled. Ironically, it was made possible by Britain’s refusal to consider increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine.¹⁶⁹

During the meeting at 10 Downing Street on 15 November, Weizmann asked Chamberlain to allow 10,000 Jewish children to enter Palestine under an established scheme run by Youth Aliyah. Chamberlain would not allow that, but his imagination was taken by the notion of evacuating thousands of imperilled youngsters. The next day he obtained cabinet consent to admit unaccompanied children under the age of seventeen into the UK on a temporary basis. Instead of requiring individual visas and guarantees, the refugee organization would receive block visas on condition that they select, place, maintain and supervise the children appropriately. The scheme was a genuine breakthrough, although it was deeply equivocal in spirit and implementation. The government was prepared to allow refuge for children, but not for adults who might enter the labour market. And, eventually, the young people would be expected to move on. As the historian Louise London comments, ‘Admission saved the children’s lives. Exclusion sealed the fate of many of their parents.’¹⁷⁰

While the Kindertransport operation produced genuine heroes, it was marred by a slapdash approach. Wilfred Israel risked the unwanted attention of the Gestapo by returning to Germany to lay the organizational groundwork. The German Jewish youth worker Norbert Wollheim suspended his own emigration to begin assembling the children in Berlin. Although Viscount Samuel broadcast an appeal for funds on the BBC on 25 November, there was never enough money for guarantees and maintenance, nor were there sufficient Jewish homes once the influx began. The first train left Berlin on 1 December 1938, followed by one from Vienna a week later. A third centre was activated in Prague, initially to deal with Jews displaced from the Sudetenland and, later, imperilled Czech Jews. Once they reached England the children were housed in unused summer holiday camps near Harwich and Lowestoft. Those fortunate to have found a foster home went direct to Liverpool Street Station to meet their guardians. A far larger proportion were picked by kindly folk who visited the camps. During these visits the children were lined up for inspection, something they termed the ‘cattle market’. Inevitably, the young, cute ones were taken first. Siblings were often sundered, to remain apart for years and, in some cases, never to meet again. The Refugee Children’s Movement was criticized at the time for not paying sufficient attention to the children’s cultural or religious backgrounds. There was no kosher food at the Dovercourt camp at Harwich. Jewish children from Orthodox backgrounds frequently ended up with non-Jewish families who did not have a clue about their needs.¹⁷¹

The effort in Prague was led by Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker, who aborted a skiing holiday at the request of a friend who was assisting Czech refugees. Winton came from a family with German Jewish origins, but practised Christianity. He saw no problem in cooperating with the Barbican Mission, a conversionist organization that was ‘touting for business’ in Prague. When the Mission offered to find homes for around a hundred Jewish children, as long as they could be baptized, he jumped at the opportunity. Such pragmatism outraged the Chief Rabbi who set up his own operation, the Chief Rabbi’s Emergency Committee, under the management of his son-in-law Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld. This buccaneering enterprise succeeded in bringing to the UK a couple of hundred young Orthodox Jews, mainly from Poland, who would otherwise have been neglected by the RCM.¹⁷²

Hitler makes a prophecy

On 30 January 1939, Hitler addressed the first Reichstag of the newly proclaimed Greater German Reich, including representatives from areas recently incorporated into the empire. His lengthy speech vaunted the Nazis’ achievement in reuniting the German people. He attributed their rapid success to the turn away from parliamentary democracy and towards a system whose leaders expressed the unified will of the Volksgemeinschaft. Yet much work was still needed to make all Germans aware of their racial unity and create leaders who would put the interests of the Volk before intellectual, cultural or legal scruples. Such racial awareness and unity were essential ingredients for victory in the struggle facing Germany. This was the battle for economic self-sufficiency that, in turn, necessitated the acquisition of Lebensraum. In a version of his memorandum on the Four-Year Plan he explained why the German people could not permanently export their way out of food and raw material shortages. Ultimately, economic security required external security. Building up the armed forces diminished the productive capacity that could be used for generating exports but there was no alternative to rearmament. Hitler then attacked the democracies, Britain and the USA, for allegedly threatening war on Germany. He attributed their purported bellicosity to Jewish agitators and the Jewish-controlled press. The German people had to understand this dynamic and the need to fight back, just as in Germany ‘we brought the Jewish world-enemy to its knees’. In his mind, conflict with the USA, especially, was already connected with a solution of the Jewish question.

Hitler ridiculed the hypocrisy of the democracies for condemning Germany’s treatment of the Jews while refusing to accept Jewish immigrants. Once again harking back to the Great War, he refused to be lectured about humanity by the powers that had imposed suffering on the Germans after 1918. Germany was determined to remove the Jews; other nations should play their part in resolving the issue. A solution to the Jewish question was a key to peace in Europe. The Jews, too, would have to play their part and adapt to constructive labour elsewhere in the world. Otherwise they ‘will succumb to a crisis of unimaginable proportions’.

In the midst of his peroration Hitler made a pronouncement that he believed would be memorable: ‘I was often a prophet in my life and was usually ridiculed for it. At the time of my struggle for power, it was chiefly the Jewish people who laughed at my prophecies that I would one day assume in Germany leadership of the state and the entire Volk, and would then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to a solution. I believe, however, that the Jews in Germany have already choked on the uproarious laughter of those days. I wish to be a prophet again today: should international financial Jewry in and outside of Europe succeed in plunging the nations once again into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ It was a transparent threat that the Jews would be punished if the democracies, which he believed did the bidding of world Jewry, went to war with Germany.

Yet this was neither the end nor the climax of his speech. Hitler went on to defend the National Socialist record on the treatment of religion. He maintained that Christianity flourished in the Reich and depicted Germany as the defender of civilization against Bolshevism. He also lauded Mussolini, Italy and the ‘Japanese Volk’ who stood with Germany in resisting Bolshevization. The threat to peace came only from the Jewish-controlled press. He again threatened reprisal against this alleged Jewish ‘smear campaign’ and averred that Germany only wanted peace with its neighbours, England and the United States.¹⁷³

Hitler’s menacing oration was prophetic but not programmatic. If it had any concrete application it was in the immediate here and now. As the historian Hans Mommsen has argued, Hitler could not really predict what might or might not occur in three or four years’ time. Rather, he was making a ‘rhetorical gesture designed to put pressure on the international community’ to expedite the mass emigration of the remaining German and Austrian Jews. Klemperer, who listened on the radio, was left in no doubt: ‘Hitler once again turned all his enemies into Jews and threatened the annihilation of the Jews in Europe if they were to bring about war against Germany.’ Some days later he wistfully noted advertisements in the sole official Jewish publication, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, for emigration to Shanghai.¹⁷⁴

At the start of 1939 there were roughly 200,000 Jews left in Germany and under 100,000 in Austria. Due to the skewed effect of emigration more than half of the German Jews were aged over forty-five and there was a preponderance of women. Almost all were without a livelihood. The better-off drew income in small, regulated amounts from sequestered assets. Most subsisted on welfare from the Jewish community which, itself, relied overwhelmingly on infusions of cash from the Council for Germany Jewry and AJJDC. Increasingly, they were forced out of their homes and into shared accommodation in Jew-houses. Although a few individuals managed to maintain social and business contacts, on the whole Jews were totally isolated. A ‘sense of fatalism’ gripped the communities and all but the most stubborn and wealthiest were fixated on emigration.¹⁷⁵

A Nazi Party cell leader in Herne, in the Ruhr, explained the National Socialist thinking behind the eviction of Jews from their homes. First, Aryans with large families needed more spacious accommodation and Jews frequently possessed such apartments. Furthermore it was necessary for the realization of the Volksgemeinschaft: ‘This means that the tenants should, among themselves, nurture the spirit of National Socialist community. But a house community can only be formed by German-thinking persons of Aryan descent. It is impossible to include individuals of Jewish origin.’ Along with evictions and emigration, impoverishment increased the housing stock. The SD Head Office noted with satisfaction that ‘As a result of their rapidly progressing pauperization, the Jews are conforming to the will of the lawmaker to restrict them to the smallest possible living space; several Jewish families are now often renting a larger apartment jointly, with each family occupying a single room.’¹⁷⁶

In May 1939 the SD Head Office also took note of the first compulsory labour of unemployed and indigent Jews. A month later, ‘The deployment of Jews as conscript labour, ordered due to the growing shortage of German workers, is now in high gear.’ However, few of the Jews were young or fit for work. It was also necessary to segregate them, which required special arrangements for lockers and lunch. In view of the objections of German workers, the SD considered that labour camps for Jews would be preferable where they were needed for big projects in larger numbers.¹⁷⁷

The regime also tightened the pressure on Aryan spouses in mixed marriages. This segment of the population bulked ever larger, since they were less willing to emigrate and hence stood out increasingly amongst the diminished Jewish population. On 6 July 1938 the marriage laws were amended to make it easier for someone to divorce a partner who was deemed unhealthy, incarcerated in a concentration camp, or without a livelihood. By now most Jewish men fell into one of the last two categories and the Gestapo made a point of harassing non-Jewish husbands or wives to encourage them to break their wedding vows. As Richard Evans observes, ‘It took a good deal of courage, loyalty and love to maintain a mixed marriage in such circumstances.’¹⁷⁸

Ominously for Lilli Jahn, at just this time her husband developed a wandering eye for other women. After a disastrous summer holiday in 1939, when the family were turned away from a hotel that would not admit Jews, Ernst began an affair with his locum. Lilli was now pregnant with their fifth child and was hardly able to compete with the attractions of this young, carefree woman.¹⁷⁹

All but a small fraction of the Jews now existed in a state of penury. Klemperer was forced to surrender his wife’s jewellery, and was thrown back on the meagre state pension he still received as an erstwhile state employee who was a war veteran. A British visitor to Breslau in June 1939, Michael Mitzman, wrote that the Jews there were ‘absolutely poverty stricken’. Mitzman, an envoy for a refugee agency, recalled that the leaders of the community ‘implored us to get their children out … I cannot describe the terror in the people’s faces and their absolute despair at not knowing where to go and to whom to turn.’ The situation there was typical: 150–200 wealthy Jews were able to draw income from blocked accounts; a handful of lawyers were allowed to serve other Jews; there were 40–50 doctors and 15 dentists tending the Jewish community; 50–100 people were employed in commercial enterprises, such as cobblers servicing a purely Jewish clientele; and no less than 1,360 worked for the Jewish community itself. While in some rural areas a few Germans stubbornly continued to trade with Jews, almost everywhere else Jewish economic life had come to a standstill. The SD office for the Upper Division East boasted that ‘the Jewish Question has, for the first time since the takeover of power, reached a decisive phase in the report period. In regard to excluding the Jews from the various spheres of life, it has entered a final phase.’¹⁸⁰

As the circumference of Jewish life constricted and living conditions deteriorated, with little hope of escape or alleviation, large numbers of elderly Jews opted to die by their own hands. Suicide was a consequence of despair, not a gesture of resistance. Often it testified to a sense of rejection by the Nazis, rather than a rejection of Nazism. On 28 November 1938, Hedwig Jastrow wrote, ‘I am leaving this life as someone whose family has had German citizenship for over one hundred years and has always remained loyal to Germany … I don’t want to live without a fatherland, without a homeland, without an apartment, without citizenship rights, ostracized and reviled.’¹⁸¹

Officials paid close attention to the suicide rate; to them it was a benchmark of success rather than failure. In mid-December 1938 the gendarmerie in Bad Reichenhall recorded the fate of a sixty-seven-year-old Jewish woman whose house had been adorned with anti-Jewish placards. She took an overdose of veronal, but the local Aryan doctor refused to treat her, and she died. The gendarmerie officer concluded, ‘The cause for this act was a nervous breakdown as a consequence of the measures taken against her as a Jewess.’ A few months later, the SD office for southern Germany remarked that the stream of anti-Jewish legislation did ‘not allow the Jews to regain any equilibrium. One can note a definite hysteria spreading among Jewish women and men.’ Amongst ‘the most striking signs of a progressive proletarianization of the Jews’ was ‘the rising number of suicides’.¹⁸²

The end of Czechoslovakia and occupation of Bohemia and Moravia

The misery spread to a further 87,000 Jews when German troops occupied Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler had never surrendered his ambition to take over the rich, industrial areas beyond the Sudetenland. As the shortage of labour and raw materials in Germany worsened, the prospect of seizing the Czech arms industry and stores of munitions became irresistible. Following German prompting, on 14 March 1939, Slovak nationalists declared independence and appealed for German aid against Czech countermeasures. The next day, the Czech president travelled by train to Berlin, where Hitler and Göring bullied him into signing a document calling on the Germans to secure order in what was left of the country, now re-named Czecho-Slovakia. Twenty-four hours later German troops marched in and the Czech lands were declared a Protectorate of the Greater Reich.¹⁸³

They arrived in Prague on a wretched day, punctuated by flurries of snow and rain. Helga Weiss, a precocious nine-year-old who kept a diary, noticed the sad expressions on people in the frozen streets. When she returned from school in the afternoon she saw German military vehicles parked along the roads. ‘In this way we came under the “protection” of the Third Reich, without knowing how or what from. We also got a new name. Instead of Czecho-Slovakia we were now called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.’¹⁸⁴

The Protectorate was another curious Nazi improvisation, part annexation and part colonization. A puppet government under Emil Hácha was allowed to continue ruling Czechs according to Czech law, but under the overall supervision of a German Protector. The first postholder was Neurath, the former foreign minister. At the same time as he was installed, German law was extended to the territory and enforced by the German security apparatus, the Gestapo and Sipo-SD. Ethnic Germans were treated as subjects of German law, able to lord it over Czechs. In short order the Germans plundered the country’s gold reserves, while over the longer term the economy was geared to German needs.¹⁸⁵

German aggression was now plainly revealed to the world. There were no suffering Volksdeutsche in Prague and no territorial claims arising from the Versailles Treaty to justify the occupation. In an article exposing German ambitions, Leopold Schwarzschild declared, ‘We’ve finally got there.’ The evisceration of Czecho-Slovakia dispelled any surviving illusions about Nazi aims and blew away Hitler’s professed commitment to the peace of Europe. ‘To subjugate everything, to have power over everything – that is their sole, their simple, undivided goal, like a beast in heat they will be satisfied with nothing less.’ Now that the democracies knew what they were up against, he argued, they had to formulate a defensive strategy. President Roosevelt concurred. He responded by beginning the task of revising the Neutrality Act that prevented the US administration giving military aid to belligerents overseas. Sensing the hardening attitude of the major powers, Victor Klemperer again hoped that there would be some sort of international backlash that would lead to a change of regime.¹⁸⁶

For the moment, though, the German occupation spelled ruin for Jews in the Protectorate. The Czech authorities under Hácha drafted anti-Jewish laws just days after the occupation, but the Germans took this over and the full panoply of measures were immediately applied. Aryanization swung into operation. According to the SD, ‘The dissolving of Jewish business enterprises made many Jews jobless. In numerous localities it became necessary to set up collective work camps for Jews so as to keep them from becoming a burden for public welfare.’ Helga Weiss experienced conditions worsen from one day to the next. Since the morning the Germans arrived, she wrote in her diary, there was ‘not a calm day’. They could not keep up with the torrent of anti-Jewish ordinances. ‘The worst of it has landed on us Jews … We can’t help being Jews and nor can we help any of these other things. No one asks; they just feel they have to pour out their anger on someone.’ She was excluded from her school and forced to begin studying with a group of Jewish girls taught by students who had been thrown out of university.¹⁸⁷

One of the measures imposed on the Jews was a tax to fund emigration. The Germans wanted to strip Czech Jews of their wealth, but had no intention of being saddled with a mass of Jewish paupers unable to leave the country. They had learned this lesson in Vienna and in the wake of the November pogrom. So, Franz Stahlecker was transferred from Vienna to Prague to set up the Sipo-SD apparatus for the Protectorate and in April brought in Adolf Eichmann to establish a Central Jewish Emigration Office. Eichmann was accompanied by Hans Günther and Alois Brunner, two Austrians who he had recruited to his operation in Vienna. They were typical of the Austrian SS men who filled new posts in the expanding Nazi domain: hardened activists who felt it was their turn to get ahead after years of living marginal, semi-underground lives. Eichmann’s men gathered officials of the Czech Jewish community, briefed them on their new tasks, and sent them to Vienna to learn the ropes from Murmelstein and the IKG. The new office ran in parallel to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin, established on 27 February 1939 in response to an ‘intensified pressure to emigrate’.¹⁸⁸

In the autumn of 1938 the British government, smitten by guilt over the fate of its abandoned ally, offered help to Czechs displaced from the Sudetenland. Although 20,000 Jews were amongst those forced to leave, they were not specifically included in this aid package. While the Germans wanted to get rid of the Jewish population but prevent political opponents evading their clutches, the British government put in place measures to achieve the opposite. The sum of £4 million was advanced for the settlement in Britain of Czech political refugees and their families; if Jews were assisted it was because they were Social Democrats not because they were Jewish. Meanwhile, the refugee organizations in London were so strapped for cash coping with the flood from Germany and Austria that they felt unable to take on financial responsibility for yet more impoverished migrants. Consequently, the British authorities began to apply visa controls to Czechs applying to enter the UK, making it almost impossible for Jews without means of support to obtain entry. A few hundred reached Palestine, with British agreement, and just over 660 children were taken to England on children’s transports.¹⁸⁹

As the refugee crisis continued to mushroom, the Americans and the British pinned their hopes on George Rublee, director of the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees. The Foreign Office and the State Department believed that Jewish refugees would stand a much better chance of settling outside Germany if they were allowed to take some wealth with them. Rublee was empowered to negotiate with the Germans on this score and both governments ardently wished him to reach some sort of deal with Berlin. In mid-December 1938 it looked as though the Nazis were willing to discuss terms, if only for their own convenience. Hjalmar Schacht agreed to meet Rublee during a visit to London on business for the Reichsbank. He proposed that 150,000 Jews would be enabled to emigrate over three years with some capital if world Jewry paid funds into a trust to finance their departure; the property of German Jewry would stand as collateral for this enormous loan. Rublee travelled to Berlin in January to continue the negotiations, only to discover that Schacht had been sacked. Instead, he found himself in discussion with Hermann Göring and a senior executive in the Office of the Four-Year Plan, Helmuth Wohlthat. Nevertheless, his Nazi interlocutors appeared to be in earnest. Apart from adding a sanctions-busting element to Schacht’s proposal, they endorsed it. Rublee reported to London and Washington that a deal was in the making.¹⁹⁰

In late April 1939, Sumner Welles submitted a memo to President Roosevelt outlining an agreement that would secure the orderly emigration of German Jewry. It was not to be. Jewish leaders in London and New York looked askance at a scheme that enjoined them to finance the liquidation of the German Jewish community. No less objectionable was the notion that Jews would be compelled to act as a corporate body, thus vindicating Nazi claims for the existence of international Jewry. When Myron Taylor, chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, met Jewish figures to discuss setting up a trust as the necessary instrument, they gave him the cold shoulder. Nor was Sir Herbert Emerson, the High Commissioner for Refugees, able to overcome their reluctance. Robert Pell, a State Department official who was in the thick of the negotiations, summed up the stalemate in a letter to Taylor on 15 May 1939: ‘My candid impression is that our business is becoming a tug of war between the Government and our Jewish financial friends. The Governments are striving hard to shift the major part of the responsibility to Jewish finance and Jewish finance is working equally hard to leave it with the Governments.’ To further complicate matters, Jewish opinion was divided. Zionist leaders like Stephen Wise refused to back the plan because it ignored Palestine as a settlement option. By June 1939 only $0.8 million had been raised, mostly by the AJJDC. Emerson and Wohlthat were scheduled to meet again in July, but international developments nullified their discussions.¹⁹¹

The impasse over Jewish refugees was highlighted by the saga of one ship carrying would-be emigrants from Germany to Cuba. On 13 May 1939, the St Louis, a liner in the Hamburg-America fleet, left Bremen bound for Havana with 937 passengers holding Cuban entry visas. The Jews on board were not aware that just a week earlier the Cuban government had cancelled the visas on the grounds that many were forged. When the vessel arrived off Havana a fortnight later all but twenty-nine of the passengers were denied the right to land. The ship’s captain, Gustav Schröder, was unusually solicitous towards his human cargo. He sailed towards Florida and along the US coast while Jewish organizations lobbied the government to allow the refugees in. The State Department adamantly refused to breach the quota for immigrants from Germany and Roosevelt did nothing. Eventually, the St Louis returned to Europe where the IGCR had brokered an arrangement that allowed 288 passengers to enter the UK, 224 to go to France, 214 to Belgium and 181 to the Netherlands.¹⁹²

After this debacle, shipping companies demanded that Jews purchase return tickets in case the refugee passengers were refused leave to land at their destinations. But while the experts in the SD acknowledged that emigration was getting harder and harder, they did not draw the conclusion that Jews should be allowed to keep some wealth in order to make themselves more appealing prospects as immigrants. Rather, they argued that it was essential to keep up the pressure on them and on the refugee agencies.¹⁹³

For those who had found new homes, like Ruth Maier, life remained fraught. She had been welcomed into the Strøm family in Lillestrøm and was working hard to learn Norwegian even though she hoped, ultimately, to emigrate to England and train as a nurse. She agonized over the choice: ‘I don’t know what’s better – to stay in Norway or to go to England.’ At the same time as she was vacillating she bombarded her sister Judith, already in the UK, to get a visa for their mother who was stuck in Vienna. After the German occupation of Prague she sensed that war was impending and became ever more anxious, both for her mother and herself. ‘Norway’, she wrote in her diary, ‘is only separated from Germany by a small stretch of water.’ However, she had become infatuated with Arne Strøm, her guarantor, and began to hope that with his support she could pursue academic studies in Oslo. In April, Ruth’s mother finally made it to London but Ruth’s visa for the UK expired. Her choice was made, determined as much by her heart as her head. She wrote to her sister on 1 June 1939, ‘there is something else apart from high-minded thoughts about socialism and Jewish persecution … your body’. Ruth met a boy, started smoking, indulged in sexual experiments, planned to attend a new school, and went on holiday. Doubts continued to plague her. She asked her sister, ‘I don’t want to be in Norway if there’s a war. Do you think I should write to London about my visa?’ If war broke out she could be of use in England as a nurse, but not where she was. ‘After all, I have to help. Norway will remain neutral.’¹⁹⁴

Jewish refugees scattered across the continent scanned newspapers apprehensively as spring turned to summer and Hitler gave signs of preparing for war against Poland. In January 1939, Germany had begun to press the Polish government to return the port city of Danzig to German sovereignty. The Poles reacted robustly and entered discussions with Britain about a defensive treaty designed to thwart German designs. In March, the German occupation of the Czech lands so shocked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues that the government offered to guarantee the Polish border against German aggression. The gesture counted for little with Hitler who now harboured only contempt for British and French politicians. On 28 April he informed the Reichstag that Germany was renouncing its non-aggression treaty with Poland and tearing up the Anglo-German naval pact. Having earlier ordered the army high command to plan the invasion of Poland, he held a series of meetings in which he set out his objectives to the party and the military. Germany needed living space in order to survive. The only way to gain resources was by force and he intended to conquer territory and resources in eastern Europe, hopefully without triggering war with Britain and France. During the following months, the German Foreign Office worked overtime to conclude a series of diplomatic and trade agreements with the aim of isolating Poland and removing potential threats to Germany. The diplomatic offensive culminated in the conclusion of a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union on 24 August 1939.¹⁹⁵

The outbreak of amity between Nazi Germany and the USSR was an astonishing turnaround for both regimes. Nazi propaganda suddenly stopped referring to the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy. Stalin ordered that German communists, including many Jews, who had found refuge in Moscow should be handed over to the Nazis, who he had once encouraged them to oppose. The public did not know that Ribbentrop and Molotov, the new Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, had also concluded a secret agreement to divide Poland or that Germany had consented to the Soviet Union occupying the Baltic states and a strip of Romanian territory. Nevertheless it was as plain to the man on the street as it was to experienced diplomats that the treaty opened the way for a German assault on Poland. Furthermore, it made it possible for German forces to confront the British and the French, if necessary, without having to worry about a threat in their rear. Victor Klemperer, in Dresden, struggled to digest the implications of the ‘incredible turn about’. In his eyes it posed ‘Incalculable danger for all Jews here’. Ruth Maier wrote to her sister Judith setting out the advantages of being in a non-belligerent country now that war was all but inevitable. She hoped that Britain would emerge victorious but ‘If Germany “wins” (strange word for mass murder) in the end, then at least we’ll know where we are.’¹⁹⁶

For several days diplomats in Paris, London and Rome tried to engineer a peaceful resolution to Germany’s demands on Poland. But this time Hitler was not to be denied his war. On his orders the SS intelligence service created a casus belli by fabricating an attack by Polish militia against a German radio station on the border near Gleiwitz. In the light of this ‘provocation’, German forces crossed the Polish border on the morning of 1 September 1939. Hitler was rattled that Britain and France continued to stand by their defensive alliance with Poland: he had not envisaged war in the west so soon. Gambling that it was actually a bluff he refused to heed a British ultimatum to desist from the invasion and, consequently, on 3 September the Third Reich found itself at war on two fronts.¹⁹⁷

To Hitler, Germany was at war on a third front, too. In his mind the entire conflict could be reduced to an existential struggle between the Jews and the Germans, representing civilization. He told Nazi Party members, ‘Our Jewish democratic global enemy has succeeded in placing the English people in a state of war with Germany … The year 1918 will not be repeated.’ From this point, the fate of the Jews was locked into the course of the war.¹⁹⁸

Yet Helga Weiss welcomed the invasion of Poland. ‘No one was surprised. The way events turned out, we had to come to it. However horrid the prospect that this could lead to a world war, it’s the only hope.’ Strange as it may seem, Jews received news of the war with relief: it heralded a fundamental change in international opinion about the Third Reich. At last those who opposed Nazism, who were persecuted by the regime, had powerful allies. However, Victor Klemperer did not see it that way to begin with. As he contemplated their predicament, caught between warring titans, he considered that the time had come for him and his wife to take their own lives. But he steadied and they, too, decided to wait and see what war would bring. After all, Germany was now ranged against two powerful empires and no one could foretell the outcome. Klemperer was not being fanciful. Several senior German generals thought Hitler had taken leave of his senses and members of the conservative opposition believed that the regime was riding for a fall, giving them an opportunity to topple the Nazis.¹⁹⁹

One way or another, war would determine the fate of the Jews. As Hitler made clear in his address to Nazi Party members, they were, in effect, enemy combatants. It was implicit that the Jews had to be treated as ruthlessly as any other enemy, no matter what guise they took. Hitler had already threatened that the German Jews would be held hostage against the good behaviour of their co-religionists in the USA who clamoured for America to declare war against Germany. If that came about he was unequivocal that they could expect a terrible retribution. Even if he had merely been trying to scare the democracies into evacuating the German Jews, he had conceived a potentially lethal scenario that hinged on geo-strategic developments. When Hitler warned that ‘1918 will not be repeated’ he was evoking the alleged Jewish treachery and subversion that had cost Germany the last war. Thus, not only were Jews the enemy, and hostages, they were also in the firing line lest things go wrong. Finally, Hitler had stressed time and time again that the war was being fought for food and raw materials to ensure the well-being of the Volk, while the Jews were to be squeezed and exploited mercilessly. Rationing had already been introduced in the Reich: it was hardly likely that in conditions of scarcity Jews would be well fed and cared for. If Hitler had not actually planned a war against the Jews, the Jews were now at the mercy of military developments. Strategy and tactics would be as influential as ideology and anti-Semitism in deciding their treatment. Judenpolitik and the politics of war commingled. However, since war was paramount, ultimately the fate of the Jews would rest on the clash of arms.