Adam Kirsch: The November Pogrom
[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic.]
In our collective memory of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht occupies a central but ambiguous place. If you look simply at the statistics, there is little reason why the events of November 9-10, 1938, should loom so large. According to the Nazis themselves, 91 Jews were killed in the nationwide pogrom that became known as the “Night of Broken Glass.” That figure, as Alan Steinweis points out in his illuminating new study Kristallnacht 1938, “included neither Jewish suicides nor the significantly larger number of Jews who were arrested in connection with the pogrom and would die in concentration camps in the following weeks and months.” But even when we remember that 30,000 Jewish men were arrested--about 10 percent of the entire Jewish population of Germany--Kristallnacht pales in comparison with later Nazi crimes. Why do Jews--and, as Steinweis points out, Germans--continue to remember Kristallnacht as a uniquely terrible event, even though the broken glass was followed, within a few years, by gas chambers and death camps?
To capture the full significance of Kristallnacht, it is necessary to see the pogrom not in hindsight, but through contemporary eyes--and that is the achievement of Steinweis’s short but revelatory book. Knowing what came after, we tend to see the pogrom of November 1938 as a prelude to genocide; but to those who lived through it, it was precisely the unprecedented quality of Kristallnacht that made it so momentous. For the previous six years, Hitler’s regime had persecuted Jews, driven them from their jobs, segregated them socially and legally, and compelled almost half the Jewish population of Germany to emigrate. But not until the night of November 9 did it become clear that the Jews in Germany were doomed--that there was no way for them to continue living in the midst of a population that applauded and connived in their destruction.
Kristallnacht 1938 offers a succinct narration of the well-known events leading up to the pogrom. On Monday, November 7, at 9:35 in the morning, a 17-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan “presented himself to the receptionist at the German Embassy in Paris. A few minutes later, Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, a 29-year-old junior diplomat.” When the French police asked him why he had done it, he replied, “I acted because of love for my parents and for my people, who were subjected unjustly to outrageous treatment.”
Herschel’s parents, Sendel and Rifka Grynszpan, were among the 18,000 Polish Jews living in Germany who, two weeks earlier, had been rounded up and deported across the Polish border. Because the Poles didn’t want the Jewish émigrés any more than the Germans did, the two “were compelled to live in the no-man’s land between the two countries, subject to the elements and with little food,” Steinweis writes. It was this treatment--a vivid demonstration of the Jews’ pariah status in Europe--that led Grynszpan to protest to the police, “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have a right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth.”
To Grynszpan, then, the shooting of vom Rath was intended to make a clear political statement: it was an act of Jewish revenge against the Nazis. Ironically, the Nazis were only too glad to take that explanation at face value. It allowed them to make the ineffectual lashing-out of a helpless refugee sound like a strategic offensive in the war between Germany and “international Jewry.” At around 9:30 p.m., Steinweis shows in his meticulous reconstruction, the German News Agency--an arm of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry--sent a memo to the nation’s newspapers, instructing them on how to report the crime. “Not only was the guilt of ‘international Jewry’ obvious,” Steinweis writes, “but so was its motive: ‘the extermination of National Socialist Germany.’” And if the Jews were collectively responsible for Grynszpan’s action, then “it would be ‘right and proper’ if ‘Jewry in Germany were to be called to account for the shooting in the Paris embassy.’” It is a characteristic example of the diabolical logic of Nazi anti-Semitism: the Nazis victimized German Jews, and if Jews abroad protested, it was proof of the international conspiracy that justified the victimization in the first place.
The news from Paris led to a few local anti-Jewish riots in Germany, notably in the city of Kassel. But it was not until November 9, when the news came that vom Rath had died of his wounds, that the highest Nazi leadership decided to call for a nationwide pogrom. One of the major strengths of Steinweis’s study is the way he places this decision in the context of contemporary politics, both domestic and international. It so happened that November 9, 1938 was the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt at a coup against the Weimar Republic, which ended with his imprisonment. Every year, veteran Nazis gathered in Munich to retrace the events of that day and remember the men who had been killed.
When vom Rath died, just as this blood ritual was underway, Steinweis writes, “he … became the newest martyr for the Nazi cause.” That afternoon, according to Goebbels’s diary, Hitler decided to declare open season on the Jews: “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.” As always, Hitler was acting with his larger political and military ambitions in mind. Less than six weeks earlier, he had won a diplomatic victory with the Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France acquiesced in Germany’s annexation of part of Czechoslovakia. This emboldened Hitler to prepare for the war that was soon to come and made him less concerned than ever about foreign reaction to Nazi persecutions of the Jews. As Steinweis writes, “Hitler no longer recognized a need for discretion in matters of Jewish policy.”..
Read entire article at New Republic
In our collective memory of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht occupies a central but ambiguous place. If you look simply at the statistics, there is little reason why the events of November 9-10, 1938, should loom so large. According to the Nazis themselves, 91 Jews were killed in the nationwide pogrom that became known as the “Night of Broken Glass.” That figure, as Alan Steinweis points out in his illuminating new study Kristallnacht 1938, “included neither Jewish suicides nor the significantly larger number of Jews who were arrested in connection with the pogrom and would die in concentration camps in the following weeks and months.” But even when we remember that 30,000 Jewish men were arrested--about 10 percent of the entire Jewish population of Germany--Kristallnacht pales in comparison with later Nazi crimes. Why do Jews--and, as Steinweis points out, Germans--continue to remember Kristallnacht as a uniquely terrible event, even though the broken glass was followed, within a few years, by gas chambers and death camps?
To capture the full significance of Kristallnacht, it is necessary to see the pogrom not in hindsight, but through contemporary eyes--and that is the achievement of Steinweis’s short but revelatory book. Knowing what came after, we tend to see the pogrom of November 1938 as a prelude to genocide; but to those who lived through it, it was precisely the unprecedented quality of Kristallnacht that made it so momentous. For the previous six years, Hitler’s regime had persecuted Jews, driven them from their jobs, segregated them socially and legally, and compelled almost half the Jewish population of Germany to emigrate. But not until the night of November 9 did it become clear that the Jews in Germany were doomed--that there was no way for them to continue living in the midst of a population that applauded and connived in their destruction.
Kristallnacht 1938 offers a succinct narration of the well-known events leading up to the pogrom. On Monday, November 7, at 9:35 in the morning, a 17-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan “presented himself to the receptionist at the German Embassy in Paris. A few minutes later, Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, a 29-year-old junior diplomat.” When the French police asked him why he had done it, he replied, “I acted because of love for my parents and for my people, who were subjected unjustly to outrageous treatment.”
Herschel’s parents, Sendel and Rifka Grynszpan, were among the 18,000 Polish Jews living in Germany who, two weeks earlier, had been rounded up and deported across the Polish border. Because the Poles didn’t want the Jewish émigrés any more than the Germans did, the two “were compelled to live in the no-man’s land between the two countries, subject to the elements and with little food,” Steinweis writes. It was this treatment--a vivid demonstration of the Jews’ pariah status in Europe--that led Grynszpan to protest to the police, “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have a right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth.”
To Grynszpan, then, the shooting of vom Rath was intended to make a clear political statement: it was an act of Jewish revenge against the Nazis. Ironically, the Nazis were only too glad to take that explanation at face value. It allowed them to make the ineffectual lashing-out of a helpless refugee sound like a strategic offensive in the war between Germany and “international Jewry.” At around 9:30 p.m., Steinweis shows in his meticulous reconstruction, the German News Agency--an arm of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry--sent a memo to the nation’s newspapers, instructing them on how to report the crime. “Not only was the guilt of ‘international Jewry’ obvious,” Steinweis writes, “but so was its motive: ‘the extermination of National Socialist Germany.’” And if the Jews were collectively responsible for Grynszpan’s action, then “it would be ‘right and proper’ if ‘Jewry in Germany were to be called to account for the shooting in the Paris embassy.’” It is a characteristic example of the diabolical logic of Nazi anti-Semitism: the Nazis victimized German Jews, and if Jews abroad protested, it was proof of the international conspiracy that justified the victimization in the first place.
The news from Paris led to a few local anti-Jewish riots in Germany, notably in the city of Kassel. But it was not until November 9, when the news came that vom Rath had died of his wounds, that the highest Nazi leadership decided to call for a nationwide pogrom. One of the major strengths of Steinweis’s study is the way he places this decision in the context of contemporary politics, both domestic and international. It so happened that November 9, 1938 was the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt at a coup against the Weimar Republic, which ended with his imprisonment. Every year, veteran Nazis gathered in Munich to retrace the events of that day and remember the men who had been killed.
When vom Rath died, just as this blood ritual was underway, Steinweis writes, “he … became the newest martyr for the Nazi cause.” That afternoon, according to Goebbels’s diary, Hitler decided to declare open season on the Jews: “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.” As always, Hitler was acting with his larger political and military ambitions in mind. Less than six weeks earlier, he had won a diplomatic victory with the Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France acquiesced in Germany’s annexation of part of Czechoslovakia. This emboldened Hitler to prepare for the war that was soon to come and made him less concerned than ever about foreign reaction to Nazi persecutions of the Jews. As Steinweis writes, “Hitler no longer recognized a need for discretion in matters of Jewish policy.”..