ures must be in one central hand.” Lest he be misunderstood, he
instructed Bormann to send Göring a letter emphasizing that
the Führer wanted a uniform attack on the whole problem.
On Hitler’s instructions, Göring called a Cabinet-level
conference on November . “I am sick and tired of these dem-
onstrations,” he bellowed. “They don’t harm the Jews but they
do end up hurting me, because I am the one who has to hold
the economy together.”
Most of Crystal Night’s appalling results were now in.
Nazi-directed mobs had wrecked seventy-five hundred Jewish
stores and a hundred synagogues, often setting fire to neigh-
boring non-Jewish property. A single Berlin jeweler’s like Mar-
graf’s had been looted of ,, Reichsmarks (,) of
stock. The total loss provisionally assessed at million
Reichsmarks (. million) would fall squarely on the (non-
Jewish) German insurance market. Meanwhile the government
would lose all tax revenue from the seventy-five hundred
wrecked stores. It was a massive “own goal” that Goebbels, the
Nazi “minister for public enlightenment,” had scored. “It
seems,” snapped Göring at the conference, “that our own public
could do with some enlightenment!”
The chief of the Insurance Companies’ Association, Eduard
Hilgard, assessed the glass damage alone at million
Reichsmarks. He confirmed that the major loss would fall on
non-Jews, since the Jewish businessmen mainly just rented their
stores.
: “That’s just what we were saying.”
: “Then the Jew must pay for the damage.”
: “That’s not the point. We haven’t got the
raw materials. It’s all foreign plate glass [a Belgian mo-
nopoly], and it’s going to cost a fortune in hard cur-
rency! It’s enough to drive you up the wall!”