had jointly hit on this cynical idea as one way of bridging Ger-
many’s growing currency deficit. As Göring frankly explained at
a meeting of the Reich Defense Council on November , ,
this penalty and the sale of Jewish businesses provided an “in-
terim remedy” for the budgetary shortfall.
There remained some loose ends after the pogrom. He
signed a fistful of decrees over the coming weeks providing the
legal framework that Hitler had been demanding for an orderly,
regularized solution of “the Jewish problem.”
Undoubtedly his purpose was to prevent any recurrence of
such pogroms. In his eyes Heydrich was the real villain, after
Goebbels. “The rest of them,” his sister Ilse Göring told a friend,
quoting Hermann, “are tolerable. Himmler himself is quite
unimportant and basically harmless.”
Heydrich had a clever legal mind and had thought the
whole “Jewish problem” through logically. “The problem [is],”
he had explained at the November meeting, “not how to get
the rich Jews out but the Jewish mob.” He foresaw a ten-year
plague of rootless, unemployed Jews in the Reich and demanded
that they wear distinguishing badges.
“My dear Heydrich,” said Göring, “you’re not going to get
anywhere without the large-scale erection of ghettos in the cit-
ies.”
In some instances he moderated the anti-Jewish ordi-
nances. At the end of November he ordered the release of any
World War combat veterans found among the twenty thou-
sand Jews detained during the “reprisal action” after the diplo-
mat’s murder. To avoid excesses, in mid-December he is-
sued a circular stating, “To ensure uniformity in dealing with
the Jewish problem, which is of vital concern for our overall
economic interests, I request that all regulations and other im-
portant directives bearing upon it be submitted to me for sanc-