‘Kristallnacht’, the night of shards of glass. Gangs
of ruffians roamed the streets and entered Jewish
apartments – it was a night of terror. Jewish men
were arrested in their homes on the following
day and incarcerated in concentration camps.
Goebbels’ diary fully implicates Hitler, thus
adding more evidence, if any were needed, that
no major action could be undertaken in the Reich
without the Führer’s explicit approval. It so hap-
pened that 9 November was the annual occasion
when all the Nazi leaders met to commemorate
the abortive Putsch of 1923. In Munich,
Goebbels wrote in his diary:
I report the situation to the Führer. He decides:
let the demonstrations continue. Pull back the
police. The Jews should be made to feel the
wrath of the people.... As I head for the hotel,
I see the sky is blood-red. The synagogue is
burning.... the Führer has ordered 20,000–
30,000 Jews to be arrested immediately.
The purpose of the great November pogrom
of 1938 was to force the remaining Jews into emi-
gration. A visa to a foreign country gained release
from concentration camps. The question is often
asked: why did Hitler try to force the Jews out of
Germany even after the war began? Does this
mean he would have preferred this solution to
murdering them later? We do not know exactly
what was in Hitler’s mind but it is safe to con-
clude that humanitarian considerations did not
come into his calculations on so central a ques-
tion as his hatred of the Jews. He certainly was
sensitive to German public feeling and presum-
ably concluded that the German people were not
ready to back his rule with increasing enthusiasm
if he simply massacred all German Jews, men,
women and children, inside the Reich.
During the war, vain efforts were made to pre-
serve the secrecy of the death camps. Hitler
wished to remove physically all Jews from the ter-
ritory ruled by him. Emigration would ‘export’
anti-Semitism. And when he had won his wars the
Jews would be done for in any case, as Nazi poli-
cies in all occupied Europe were to show during
the war. After November 1938 the Jews in panic
belatedly attempted to leave: the civilised world
debated but could not agree to absorb the
remaining 300,000. But tens of thousands of
people were saved, with the ‘children’s transports’
to Britain forming a poignant part of these emi-
grants. Most of these children never saw their
parents again. The exodus was made possible by
the response of thousands of concerned individ-
uals who collected money and pressurised their
reluctant governments to let the refugees in. The
Jewish persecution by bureaucratic machine
involved and implicated more and more Germans
in the criminal activities of the Nazi regime under
pseudo-legislative cover. Opposition became
more risky as the grip of the totalitarian state
tightened. There were still a few who spoke out
openly, such as the Protestant pastor Martin
Niemöller, and were placed in concentration
camps. Amid the general enthusiasm for the
Nazis, it must be remembered that there were
many, too, who were terrorised into silence.
The Jews were the most obvious and open
targets of persecution. But there were hundreds
of thousands of others who suffered. In ruthless
pursuit of the supposedly racially healthy German
Volk, laws were passed in 1933 which permitted
mass sterilisation of those deemed able to pass on
genetic defects, such as medical handicaps,
epilepsy and deafness, mental defects or even
social defects, one of which was identified as
drunkenness and another as habitual criminality.
Not only were pregnancies aborted and sterilisa-
tion ordered for the individual affected, but the
whole family, including young adolescents, were
sterilised. Convicted homosexuals were incarcer-
ated in concentration camps. In the interests of
‘racial hygiene’ it was then but a step to proceed
to murder people with disabilities during the war
under the pretence that they were being released
from their suffering – this was the ‘euthanasia’
programme. But, as with the murder of the Jews,
Hitler decided that the extermination of ‘lives not
worthy of life’ would have to wait for the cover
of war. Racial discrimination after 1935 was also
suffered by the 22,000 gypsies living in Germany.
They too, men, women, children and babies,
together with the tens of thousands of Polish and
European gypsies, were designated for extermi-
nation.
1
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