1938 (41 page)

The fifteen-year-old Peter Fröhlich rode that way too a few hours later. Facades on the Tauenzienstrasse had “been effectively reduced to rubble, their huge display windows shattered, their mannequins and merchandise scattered on the pavement. Evidently more Jewish-owned shops had survived the government’s efforts to ‘Aryanise’ them than I had imagined.” Much worse was to follow: His uncle’s shop, Fröhlich, the milliner on the Olivaer Platz, had been similarly trashed. For Gerhard Beck the destruction was revelatory. He had not always known which shops in the Badstrasse were Jewish-owned—now it was clear. When he went to work on the 10th, the facades of Hemdenmatz, Bata, Etam, and Salamander had been wrecked. He was working for a furrier in the same street. All the furs had been smeared with excrement. As one Jewish shop assistant exclaimed in disgust, “What did the SA eat to shit like that?”

It was not rare for Gentiles to deplore what was happening. There is even an instance of a member of a Gestapo saving a Jew, while the Nazi authorities had placed sentries outside a Jewish seminary run by a rabbi who had rendered Germany valuable service in the Great War. Klepper went through the Bayrischer Viertel in Schöneberg and noted that the population had not supported the action. His Jewish wife received gestures of support from virtually everyone. The philo-Semitic Maria von Maltzan said the same. She was driving around that night with friends, upset by the burning synagogues and the sight of laughing SA men throwing the Talmud scrolls onto bonfires and beating up rabbis. “The actual private citizen was not involved in it at all.” Most of the synagogues went up in flames, but the SA merely wrecked the one in the Heidereutergasse, as it had recently rented space to the post office. It carried on holding services until 1940. The city’s most famous synagogue in the Oranienburgerstrasse was saved by the timely intervention of the head of the local police, who informed the arsonists it was a historic building.

The pogrom in Vienna was predictably the most savage of all. It was organized on the ground by the head of the Jewish department of the Gestapo, Dr. Lange. The SA dirty-tricks specialist Skorzeny was commissioned to destroy the remaining synagogues, tasting blood for the first time. Despite the damage inflicted in October, a further forty-two prayer houses were burned to the ground or blown up with hand-grenades, together with the halls in the Central and New Cemeteries. The efficiency of the operation is clear from the report of the fire brigade, which had to be present in case the flames spread to Aryan properties.

The action started at 8:00 AM on the morning of the 10th. By 9:30 they had destroyed the synagogue at Neue Weltgasse 7 in Hietzing, inflicting 100,000 RM worth of damage, but ensured that the neighboring buildings were safe. Half an hour later, the fire brigade was in the Jewish Leopoldstadt. The damage at the synagogue was only half as great. Half an hour later, in the Untere Viakduktgasse, a mere 3,000 RM; a minute later another synagogue went up in the Sixth District, 10,000 RM; half an hour later in the Fifth, 150,000 RM, the biggest prize to date. It had continued to burn, although it had been made safe. Fifteen minutes later it was the turn of the Grosse Schiffgasse in the Second: 100,000 RM; similar damage was done to the synagogue in the Fifteenth half an hour later. It took the fire brigade nearly an hour to reach the Eighteenth, and by that time the arsonists had notched up 80,000 RM worth of damage. The synagogue in the Seitenstettengasse in the First Bezirk was not to be torched. The Gestapo feared for the valuable archive material housed in the neighboring buildings of the IKG.

The Sophiensäle concert halls were turned into a temporary prison. The violence was followed by 680 suicides in Vienna on November 10 or later. There was dancing on the Torah rolls, and in prisons like the Karajangasse eighty-eight Jews were badly hurt and twenty-seven killed. For the first time women were the targets of violence. They were locked in cells with whores and forced to perform orgiastic acts. In Brigitenau two hundred Jewish women were obliged to perform a goosestep march in the nude. One who refused was strapped to a table, and the others had to spit in her face.

Using violence to accelerate the tempo of emigration was not particularly popular in Vienna either. From Styria the SD reports showed that the people preferred “legal” persecution. The same report showed how counterproductive the destruction had been. Papers had been incinerated that would now have to be reissued, and that meant that the targets for emigration would not be met. In at least one instance the thugs destroyed a restaurant that had already been transferred to the ownership of a Party member. In Innsbruck, four prominent Jews were murdered, three of them in front of their families. The anti-Jewish measures had been popular up to now, but in the wake of the pogrom, citizens openly expressed their sympathy for the Jews. Similar sentiments were expressed in Vienna. The jails were filled with Jews. Eichmann addressed the prisoners in the Karajangasse, issuing dark warnings: If the emigration could not be speeded up, he would find other means. The pogrom was followed by a wave of confiscations. Nearly 2,000 Jewish homes were seized, and their inhabitants were forced to find shelter either in
Judenhäuser
or with their relatives.

Hitler and Goebbels had met for lunch on the 10th at the Führer’s favorite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria in Munich’s Schellingstrasse. Goebbels gave Hitler a report on the night: “He approves of everything. His views are wholly radical and aggressive. The measure itself went off without a hitch.” Hitler now wanted the Jewish businesses appropriated. There was no question of their claiming for the damage on their insurance policies. Hitler continued to keep his role a secret, but some people realized that he was involved. When the Prussian minister of finance, Popitz, complained to Göring, he told him the perpetrators should be punished and tried to resign. Göring replied, “My dear Popitz, do you wish to punish the Führer?”

Hitler and Goebbels were alone in seeing the pogrom as a universal success.

The economics minister, Funk, was one of the angriest of his critics, calling the riots a shambles. Ribbentrop called the propaganda minister a little beast: “Goebbels smashes the windows and I have to mend the foreign situation.” Hefty criticism from all around moved Goebbels to make an announcement at 5 PM on the 10th, calling the party to an end. Exhausted looters and arsonists went home, often carrying baskets filled with food, wine, and valuables. Goebbels was disappointed at the outcome and thought the number of people who had participated in the vandalism had been miserably small.

Göring didn’t like Goebbels, and he was furious about the destruction. Hitler nonetheless mediated between his two princes. In a telephone conversation with Hitler, Göring was won over with the idea of a fine: 1 billion marks for his Four Year Plan. Göring was strapped for cash and may well have been the one who suggested it. Besides a huge armaments program and no money to pay his civil service, there was a near total lack of reserves of foreign currency. Even if he could make some money from it, the effect on foreign trade was disastrous—this would not make international Jewry call off its boycott. Göring managed to win an assurance from Hitler that such methods would not be used again.

Of the 7,800 Jews arrested in Vienna, 1,226 were already in the process of effecting their departure through the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. There were 4,083 businesses closed down and 1,950 buildings confiscated. Jews who were still in the possession of their apartments and houses were obliged to hand over the keys. They were given no time to pack up their belongings. Their remaining valuables were predictably stolen. It provided another chance for some informal plunder, and the police had to step in again to dampen the ardor of the Viennese Gentiles.

Across the Reich, official figures listed 76 synagogues destroyed and a further 191 set on fire. Twenty-nine Jewish-owned department stores had also been demolished, including the provocatively named Nathan Israel in Berlin, which had been protected until then. At a conservative estimate, the thugs had also destroyed a further 815 shops and 117 private houses. The real figure is probably far higher. Even the Party condemned the action, calling it destructive, expensive, and misguided. The SD reports spoke of Party members saying, “This is no longer anything to do with culture or decency.” They wanted to know if the perpetrators of the destruction were to be punished too. That Sunday there was a tellingly small amount contributed to the boxes that collected money for the Nazi Winterhilfe (Winter Aid) charity. No one seems to have been too concerned for the Jews themselves, although 200 of them were beaten up, and (officially) 35 killed. The tally is more likely to have been between 100 and 200. The approximately 30,000 who had been rounded up were taken to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where they were encouraged to think about emigration.

The SS promulgated new measures as soon as vom Rath’s death was announced. In Buchenwald the prisoners were deprived of food, and there was no more talk of early release. The
Manchester Guardian
said as many as seventy Jewish prisoners had been executed. Bruno Heilig, who was there at the time, reported a number of deaths from savage punishment. Some of the Aryan prisoners saved their food and hid it in the woods for the Jews. Buchenwald was so full that there was no more room, and the transports had to be stopped. Himmler gave orders for the release of all Jews over the age of fifty to accommodate new arrivals. On November 14 more room was secured by Heydrich’s order releasing all Jews in possession of papers, allowing them to emigrate. They were to leave within three weeks.

ON THE night of November 9–10 Eichmann received a summons to Berlin by telegram. The Nazi leadership took stock of what they had achieved or destroyed through Goebbels’s “spontaneous” demonstrations. Heydrich insisted on Eichmann being there to “communicate his experiences of practical procedure.” Eichmann was to tell them how things
should
be done. This was the background to the conference on the progress of the “Jewish question” that took place in the Air Ministry in Berlin on November 12. There were over a hundred persons present, including Göring, Goebbels, and Heydrich. Himmler was absent; he had taken himself to Italy for a five-week break.

Hitler had requested a coordinated solution to the Jewish question. As such the meeting was the forerunner to the better-known Wannsee Conference. The host, Göring, was unimpressed. He feared for his own credibility, as he had exhorted the German people to hang on to every scrap of material for the Four Year Plan, and now this wanton destruction had come. He wanted to know who was going to pay for the damage, particularly insurance bills of between 6 and 10 million RM for the 7,500 businesses destroyed. The Berlin jeweler Margraf in Unter den Linden was presenting a reckoning for 1.7 million RM; the bill for the glass alone came to 6 million RM. The replacements had to be brought in from Belgium, meaning a payout of 3 million RM in foreign exchange—the loss amounting to half of Belgium’s annual production in plate glass. The total bill was estimated at 220 million RM. “I have had enough of these demonstrations,” Göring told the meeting. “In the end they don’t damage the Jews, they damage me, as in the last resort, I am the economy.” “I would be happier if you had beaten 200 Jews to death and not destroyed so much of value.” Göring issued orders to catch the pillagers and some 800 others. No charges were brought against the men who murdered Jews that night, but four who assaulted women were expelled from the Party and handed over to the courts.

Instead of “spontaneous demonstrations,” Heydrich argued that the most important thing was to get rid of the Jews; he drew the others’ attention to Eichmann’s success. Eichmann’s Viennese model was recommended for the Altreich, “where they had yet to achieve so much” and where emigration had stagnated to 20,000 Jews a year. The Reich could not afford to finance the transfer of Jewish assets, and the taxes they had imposed on the Jews were failing to bring in enough money. Heydrich then had a brain wave: The insurers should pay the Jews, and at that point the money would be confiscated. There was discussion as to what to do with the damaged synagogues. Goebbels suggested that the Jews should demolish them themselves. He seemed much exercised by the question of Jews sharing cinemas, theaters, and circuses or even breathing the same open air as Gentiles in public parks and woods. Jews had been seen freely walking around the Grunewald in Berlin. The Reichs’ master of hunts, Göring, clearly saw it as a matter of little importance and made light of it. He would have reservations made for the Jews, and all those animals that resembled them—for example, elks, which had similarly hooked noses—could come and join them there.

In his diary, Goebbels interpreted his role in a heroic light and failed to mention Göring’s ribbing (on November 22 he claimed that he and Göring were wholly of the same mind when it came to the Jews): “a hot debate over the solution. I represent the radical point of view.” He dismissed Funk as “soft” and claimed, “I work splendidly with Göring,” and “the radical opinion won the day.” He did not mention the fact that he had Hitler’s blessing and they did not.