Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” wrote Lord John Acton in 1887.1 Adolf Hitler seemed determined to prove those words. He wanted power and he would use anyone or anything to get it. He would also destroy whatever stood in his way.
In the summer of 1934, Hitler’s march to power hit a snag. Ernst Roehm had built the SA into a force so powerful it threatened the regular army. When Hitler was on the rise, he had needed street fighters and revolutionaries to run roughshod over his opponents. After he became chancellor, his needs changed.
Ernst Roehm did not appreciate that fact. He still wanted a revolution that would destroy the existing power structure and give the SA total control of the German Army. That made him a liability to his former comrades in the Nazi party.
Hitler knew he could not build an empire without the support of industry and the military. The price of that support was his promise to curb the power of the SA. Hitler made that promise.
Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Himmler’s second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, spearheaded the plot against Roehm. They had come to fear the SA as a threat to their own power.
Roehm’s enemies did everything possible to smear him. They made him out to be a traitor to the führer and to the party. They even brought out the best-known “secret” in the Nazi party: that Roehm and many of his SA lieutenants were homosexuals. Before Roehm outlived his usefulness, his homosexuality was something everybody knew but pretended they did not. Afterward, it was a “shocking discovery.”
On June 30, 1934—a date that would forever be remembered as the “Night of the Long Knives”—Hitler gave the order to purge the SA. The SS rounded up Brownshirt leaders. Some were shot in the streets and some in their beds. The lucky ones were hauled off to jail. Roehm himself was taken into custody in the predawn hours of July 1. Later that day, he was executed by personal order of the führer.
No one knows exactly how many died in the purge. According to most sources, at least one hundred people, and probably more, were executed or killed during arrest. All of them died without trial, marked as traitors to the Reich.
For Hitler and his accomplices, the Night of the Long Knives was a great success. Even before the killing stopped, General Wilhelm von Blomberg made a formal statement of the army’s “complete loyalty”2 to the führer. Himmler gained control of the Gestapo as well as the SS when Goering made him chief of the Prussian Secret State Police. As Himmler’s second-in-command, Heydrich assumed responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the Gestapo. Goering himself was shortly promoted to commander in chief of the Luftwaffe (air force).
A month after the Roehm purge, on August 2, 1934, President von Hindenburg died. Hitler immediately combined the offices of president and chancellor. This meant that he was also supreme commander of the Wehrmacht (the combined armed services of Germany, including the army, navy, and air force).
A structured, authoritarian society cannot function without political, social, and ideological unity. The Reich had no room for anybody who could not—or would not—fit into the Nazi mold. The process of identifying “undesirables” began soon after Hitler came to power.
As more people were arrested, the Nazis built new concentration camps to house them. In time, there was a vast network of camps, spreading through Germany, Austria, and into the conquered nations of Europe.
Homosexuals were among the first to be targeted for deportation to the camps. Arrests began in 1934, after the Roehm purge triggered a wave of homophobia (fear and hatred of homosexuals). Clergymen denounced homosexuality as a sin, college professors called it a moral disease, and doctors called it “a threat to public health.”3 All over Germany, homosexuals and suspected homosexuals were rounded up and imprisoned.
Next came Jehovah’s Witnesses, who openly refused to salute the Nazi flag, swear obedience to the führer, or serve in the armed forces. For this “treason,” they were imprisoned. Witnesses who renounced their religion and pledged allegiance to the Reich could go free. Few of them agreed to do this. They stood by their convictions in spite of the cost.
Gypsies were another group who had no place in the grim world of the Third Reich. They were dark-skinned wanderers who valued freedom and had little use for authoritarian governments. They disrupted the social order and “polluted” Aryan blood.
In the early 1930s, the Nazis used existing laws to deal with “the Gypsy problem.”4 Local police could arrest and imprison Gypsies on a wide variety of charges, from burglary to loitering. Gypsies who could not prove German citizenship were expelled from the country.
Finally, there were the Jews. In September 1935, the Nazi party held its national conference in the town of Nuremberg. There they passed the first of a series of anti-Jewish measures that came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws.
The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which was passed on September 15, 1935, prohibited marriages between Jews and people “of German or cognate [allied; similar] blood.”5 Non-Jewish women of childbearing age could not work as domestic servants in Jewish homes. Jews were even forbidden to display the national flag.
On November 14, 1935, the law was expanded to strip Jews of their citizenship, their right to vote, and their right to hold public office. Jews working in any branch of government service were forced out of their jobs.
Nazi racial policy applied not only to Jews, Gypsies, and other “inferior” peoples but to Reich citizens as well. A broad program of “racial hygiene”6 was based on the principles of eugenics, which was defined as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”7 Eugenicists studied the process of heredity, the way in which inborn characteristics pass from one generation to the next.
To eugenicists, heredity is destiny. Many believed there is a gene for every imaginable trait. For example, one eugenicist claimed that a gene for thalassophilia (love of the sea) explained why “naval careers ran in families,” and that “nomadism, the impulse to wander, was obviously hereditary because such racial groups as Comanches, Gypsies, and Huns were all nomadic.”8
Such ideas may sound almost comical by modern standards, but at the time, nobody was laughing. Respected scientists all over the world took eugenics seriously. The movement was well established in Germany by the time the Nazis came to power. All they had to do was use it. In the name of eugenics, the Nazis justified everything from forced sterilization to killing “defective” individuals to wiping out entire racial or ethnic groups.
On July 14, 1933, the government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, or Sterilization Law. People could be sterilized against their will if they had defects considered to be heredity. These included mental retardation, mental illness, certain neurological disorders, genetic blindness or deafness, and chronic (ongoing, constant) alcoholism.
Later changes to the law allowed the government to not only sterilize people against their will but to do so without their knowledge. German historians Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke reported a case where unknowing victims were sterilized while they were seated at desks, filling out questionnaires: “X-rays from equipment installed under the chairs were . . . directed toward the genitals for two to three minutes, and sterility (as well as massive burns) followed immediately.”9
An equally cruel method for mass sterilization was to inject an irritating substance into a woman’s uterus. This would produce sterility by damaging the reproductive system. These injections were given during regular physical exams, so the patients did not know about them.
Dr. Karl Brandt, who participated in the sterilization project, noted that SS director Himmler:
was extremely interested in the development of an inexpensive and rapid method of sterilization that could be used against the enemies of the German Reich, such as the Russians, Poles, and Jews. It was hoped thereby not only to defeat the enemy but also to [completely destroy] him.10
In early 1934, Germany began a rearmament program that was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. Working slowly and in secret, the Reich began building its arsenal.
On November 5, 1937, Hitler swore his military chiefs to secrecy, then announced a policy that would surely lead to war. The Reich needed to expand, he said. The only place to do that was in Europe, and the only way to do it was by force of arms. It was time to prepare for conflict. The question was not if Germany should fight, but when and where to strike.
Generals Blomberg and Fritsch begged Hitler to reconsider. Admiral Raeder did not think the führer seriously intended to go to war in the near future. He thought he was testing reactions, perhaps, or trying to prod the rearmament effort. The German Navy had no battleships. The army and air force had only minimal weaponry. “In no way were we armed for war,” Raeder later said.11
In public, Hitler hid his plans behind a storm of words. He had become a master at the art of saying one thing and doing another. The gap between word and deed kept the opposition guessing. It was a remarkably effective technique.
When the Allies found out about German rearmament, they protested, but they did not act. Hitler pushed even further. At dawn on March 7, 1936, a small German force marched into the Rhineland, which was then under French control. Their official job was to reclaim the former German territory for the Reich. Their actual job was to test the waters of European diplomacy. Once more, the Allies protested but did not act.
Austria came next. Hitler’s homeland already had a strong Nazi movement of its own. Thousands of Austrians wanted their nation to become part of the Third Reich. Austrian president Wilhelm Miklas opposed Hitler, but he lacked the support and the resources to mount an effective resistance. He resigned his office rather than preside over the destruction of his nation. Nazi loyalist Arthur Seyss-Inquart took his place.
On March 13, 1938, Seyss-Inquart signed a law annexing Austria to Germany. Britain, France, and other European governments protested but did not act. Hitler even managed to make the whole thing look legal, with carefully managed elections in both countries. The people of Austria and Germany voted overwhelmingly in favor of the anschluss.
Hitler’s next objective was the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. He proposed to annex the area for Germany on the grounds it had a large German-speaking population. Hitler approached this territorial claim with much caution. Czechoslovakian interests were protected by various treaties and alliances. He wanted the Sudetenland, but he was not prepared to provoke a war to get it.
He did not have to. None of Czechoslovakia’s allies did anything to stop him. They were not willing to risk war for a little strip of territory of uncertain ownership. On September 29, 1938, the three governments that might have blocked the Sudetenland takeover—Britain, France, and Italy— agreed to Hitler’s terms. The Czechs had no say in the matter. They could only stand and watch as the Sudetenland became part of Germany.
Three weeks after annexing the Sudetenland, Hitler made a surprise move against the Jews of Germany. On October 27, he expelled eighteen thousand Jews from the country. They were born in provinces that had belonged to Poland or Russia at the time of their birth. Therefore, they were not German citizens. The government confiscated their property, and then hauled them to the border in overcrowded trucks, or herded them there like so many cattle. A Jewish shopkeeper named Zindel Grynszpan later recalled the brutality of that evacuation:
When we reached the border, we were searched to see if anybody had any money, and anybody who had more than ten marks, the balance was taken from him. This was the German law. No more than ten marks could be taken out of Germany . . . . [The SS] told us to go—the SS men were whipping us, those who lingered they hit, and blood was flowing in the road. They tore away their little baggage from them, they treated us in a most barbaric fashion—this was the first time that I’d ever seen the wild barbarism of the Germans.12
After arriving in Poland, Grynszpan wrote to his seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, who was a student in Paris at the time. Stunned by his father’s description of the ordeal, the young man vowed revenge. A German, any German, would do; Herschel Grynszpan was not particular.
On November 7, 1938, he walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot the first German who greeted him. It was Ernst von Rath, a low-level embassy employee. In an odd twist of fate, Rath was being watched by the Gestapo. They suspected him of “anti-Nazi” attitudes.13
Rath died of his wounds on the afternoon of November 9. The Nazis wasted no time in denouncing the murder as part of “a Jewish-inspired world conspiracy against Germany.”14 The announcement triggered a night of wild violence all over Germany.
Mobs raced through Jewish neighborhoods; burning, looting, and killing. Firefighters watched as synagogues burned. Police watched as Jews were beaten and killed, and Jewish property smashed. “I was visiting my aunt nearby when my father came to get me,” recalled one victim, who was fourteen years old at the time:
He was very upset for he had just seen freight trains packed with Jews. . . . About two o’clock in the morning, my uncle from another village knocked on the door. He told us Nazis had come into his village and arrested all the Jewish men. He hid, and later walked 25 kilometers to our home. My cousin, who was seventeen years old, had been tied onto a horse and dragged about the village. The two large synagogues in my town were burned.15
Similar horrors happened all over Germany. The attacks were supposed to appear spontaneous and unplanned. In fact, they were orchestrated by the Nazis. After Rath died in Paris, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the burning of synagogues and the destruction of Jewish businesses and homes. His only caution was to take “special care” that “non-Jewish establishments will be safeguarded at all cost against damage.”16
He also gave explicit instructions about the arrest of Jews:
as many Jews, particularly wealthy ones, as the local jails will hold, are to be arrested in all districts. Initially only healthy male Jews, not too old, are to be arrested. After the arrests have been carried out the appropriate concentration camp is to be contacted immediately with a view to a quick transfer of the Jews to the camps.17
The devastation of this night was massive. The cost of the broken window glass in itself came to 5 million marks ($1,250,000).18 From this detail comes the name Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.”
Sources differ on the damages, especially in the number of synagogues that were destroyed in part or in whole. One author says that more than one thousand synagogues were burned, seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses destroyed, and ninety-six Jews killed. Nearly thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where many of them died.19
Historian Saul Friedländer states that 267 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 businesses destroyed or vandalized, and 92 Jews killed.20 The Holocaust Museum and Studies Center of the Bronx, New York, gives the synagogue figure at 191.21
Whatever the actual figures, one thing appears to be certain: Kristallnacht was a crucial, horrifying turning point. Many historians regard it as the true beginning of what would be called the Holocaust. No longer would the Nazis settle for repressive laws and economic sanctions. They were ready to destroy and to kill. The Jews of Germany and the world had been put on notice; the worst was yet to come.