Hitler 'led henchmen' in Kristallnacht riots
Adolf Hitler marched his henchmen onto the streets of Munich to perpetrate the atrocity that became known as Kristallnact, newly deciphered passages from the diaries of Josef Goebbels show.
It had never been in doubt that the Nazi propaganda machine fuelled the Night of Broken Glass but now a German scholar has uncovered strong evidence that on the night of Nov 9 the Fuhrer led Nazis to destroy an important synagogue, deliberately throwing a match into a tinderbox.
On November 7, 1938, Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan walked into Germany's embassy in Paris and shot dead diplomat Ernst vom Rath, sparking the Night of Broken Glass, the most ferocious single pogrom of the Nazi era.
By morning of the tenth, at least 92 Jews had been murdered, more than 200 synagogues destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses ransacked across Germany.
Angela Hermann, an historian at Munich's Institute for Contemporary History, has decoded a mysterious passage in the diary of Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that had stumped scholars ever since this section of Goebbels' diaries was retrieved from Moscow in 1992.
''We have real evidence now that Hitler pulled the strings, that he personally directed the Kristallnacht,'' Dr Herman said, using the German name for the notorious night.
The riddle revolved around Goebbels' enigmatic reference to ''Hitler's Stosstrupp'', or Hitler's ''special troops''. In his diary entry for November 9, the Nazi propaganda minister recounts a rally at the Munich Town Hall in which Hitler told him, among other things, that the police should let people express their anger over the vom Rath assassination.
Goebbels then wrote: ''Hitler's Stosstrupp goes out immediately to clean up Munich ... and a synagogue is smashed.''
This had historians puzzled, as there was no force known as ''Hitler's Stosstrupp'' in 1938. By digging through Munich archives, Dr Hermann found letters and documents to show that the term referred to the veterans of Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
It had never been in doubt that the Nazi propaganda machine fuelled the Night of Broken Glass but now a German scholar has uncovered strong evidence that on the night of Nov 9 the Fuhrer led Nazis to destroy an important synagogue, deliberately throwing a match into a tinderbox.
On November 7, 1938, Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan walked into Germany's embassy in Paris and shot dead diplomat Ernst vom Rath, sparking the Night of Broken Glass, the most ferocious single pogrom of the Nazi era.
By morning of the tenth, at least 92 Jews had been murdered, more than 200 synagogues destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses ransacked across Germany.
Angela Hermann, an historian at Munich's Institute for Contemporary History, has decoded a mysterious passage in the diary of Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that had stumped scholars ever since this section of Goebbels' diaries was retrieved from Moscow in 1992.
''We have real evidence now that Hitler pulled the strings, that he personally directed the Kristallnacht,'' Dr Herman said, using the German name for the notorious night.
The riddle revolved around Goebbels' enigmatic reference to ''Hitler's Stosstrupp'', or Hitler's ''special troops''. In his diary entry for November 9, the Nazi propaganda minister recounts a rally at the Munich Town Hall in which Hitler told him, among other things, that the police should let people express their anger over the vom Rath assassination.
Goebbels then wrote: ''Hitler's Stosstrupp goes out immediately to clean up Munich ... and a synagogue is smashed.''
This had historians puzzled, as there was no force known as ''Hitler's Stosstrupp'' in 1938. By digging through Munich archives, Dr Hermann found letters and documents to show that the term referred to the veterans of Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch.