Authors: Giles MacDonogh
In six months that year, Eichmann had produced a tally of emigration from Austria that was two and a half times as great as that of the Altreich. He explained that the rich Jews had to pay for the poor: “The problem was not getting the rich out, but the Jewish mob.” Göring expressed his fear that they would take their money with them. Heydrich was able to reassure him: “In Vienna the dough stayed in the country.” By contrast, Goebbels’s pogrom had actually slowed down the process of emigration. Heydrich had every reason to be angry with the propaganda chief. Once Göring had been shown the color of the money he could hope to receive, he conferred with the Austrian economics minister Fischböck about the fate of 17,000 Jewish businesses in Vienna. It was decided that only between 3,000 and 3,500 would stay open, and the rest would be either closed or taken over by the state and awarded to trustees.
In the aftermath of the pogrom in Vienna, the police had instructions to arrest the richest Jews. A total of 6,547 were taken into custody, and 3,700 were shipped out to Dachau. At the end of the year the Gestapo totted up their figures and estimated that they had packed 20,793 Austrians off to concentration camps since March 13. When the Jews arrived in Dachau, the guards were delighted to find that they had a number of rabbis under their roofs and singled them out for special punishments. Urns filled with ashes began to arrive a few days later: 350 of the Jews detained after Reichskristallnacht died in Buchenwald that winter, and the combined total for the three camps—Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau—exceeded 5,000, of whom nearly 3,000 were Austrian. Sachsenhausen had the reputation of being the mildest of the three, Buchenwald the worst. After the “Rath-Aktion” the oldest inmate was ninety, the youngest, twelve.
Many of the Jews in Dachau and Buchenwald were released before June 1939. The former frontline soldiers were the first to be liberated. A large number of those were allowed to go as a celebration of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday on April 20. The condition imposed on all of them was that they should leave the Reich and never return. They had also to promise that they would say nothing of their experiences in the camps. Even Jews who had not been through this mill were advised to keep quiet about what they had seen and heard. When Arnold Schoenberg’s son-in-law, Felix Greissle, arrived in the United States, the composer told him, “Don’t say anything you don’t have to say about your experiences of the last few weeks. Especially not to newspapermen or to people who might pass it on to them. You know the Nazis take revenge on relatives and friends still in their power. So be very reserved and don’t get mixed up in politics. I have kept to this strictly, always refusing to tell any stories, out of consideration for my friends and relatives in Germany. And people completely understand this.”
In Dresden, Victor Klemperer was lucky. On November 11 two gendarmes appeared at his door to search his house for weapons. He had the impression that the search was pure torture to one of them. They eventually found the saber he carried as an officer in the First World War. They took him down to the police station, but he was quickly released. Stubborn though he was, he decided it was high time to emigrate, and on November 28 he visited the Advice Bureau for Emigration in the Pragerstrasse. A very humane Major Stübel told him that if he sold his house, he would be able to leave Germany naked, with 7 1/2 percent of its value. Even then he would have had to obtain a berth on a ship, and all the places were taken. Klemperer decided to stay put.
FOLLOWING THE pogrom there were audible rumbles from abroad. The former kaiser in exile in the Dutch town of Doorn echoed the feelings of many members of the old military caste: “What is going on at home is certainly a scandal. It is now high time that the army showed its hand; they have let a lot of things happen. . . . All the older officers and all decent Germans must protest.” Of course he was hoping that an army coup would place him back on his throne. His son, August Wilhelm, or “Auwi,” who had been an early and enthusiastic member of the SA, took the opposite line, incensing his father with his support for the pogrom. “When I told him that any decent man would describe these actions as gangsterism, he appeared totally indifferent.”
The pogrom took away the regime’s last vestiges of credibility. Hitler and Goebbels had “unconditional” support from the Duce, who worked himself up into a lather against the Jews, but elsewhere they found little sympathy. In many places the embargo on German goods was reinforced, and doors were shut to German trade. The
Manchester Guardian
in England was not taken in by Goebbels’s “spontaneous demonstrations” and attributed the action to Hitler’s “old guard.” Goebbels’s own newspaper,
Angriff
, riposted by making out that the assassination of vom Rath had been instigated by Churchill and Attlee.
Der Stürmer
presented a gallery of “Jewlovers”: Mayor [
sic
] Attlee, Anthony Eden (who, they had already pointed out, had Jewish cousins), Winston Churchill, Lloyd-George, Duff Cooper, Stalin, and Roosevelt. The weekly left it to Fips to celebrate the actions that night. In one cartoon a Jew is complaining of the cold draught; in another he runs into the arms of the Church, the Nazis’ other bugbear.
The United States was particularly virulent in its condemnation. Hitler and his men saw all too quickly that it was not the 20 million German Americans who led public opinion. There were formal protests made in Britain and France, and in Rome the pope spoke out against racialism and the destruction of lives and property. This led to a demonstration against Jews
and
Catholics in Munich, when the gauleiter, Adolf Wagner, warned Cardinal Faulhaber that his utterances constituted an incitement to the Jews to agitate against the Germans. The cardinal’s palace was wrecked as a response to his kindness toward the rabbi on the 10th. Pius XI was not to be put off and continued to attack the Nazis, challenging their claim to racial superiority. There was, he said, just one human race. He wanted to break diplomatic ties with Germany but was dissuaded by Eugenio Pacelli, the former German nuncio and the man who would succeed him as Pius XII three months later.
Archbishop Lang wrote to the
Times
to express his disgust: “Whatever provocation may have been given by the deplorable act of a single irresponsible Jewish youth, reprisals on such a scale, so fierce, cruel, and vindictive, cannot possibly be justified. A sinister significance is added to them by the fact that the police seem either to have acquiesced in them or to have been powerless to restrain them.” The letter annoyed Goebbels so much he had the
Times
withdrawn from sale. In Germany the pogrom proved a watershed: The Church of England would now be united in its desire for the British government to assert itself in Germany.
Even within Germany the pogrom marked a change of course. It is said that among the conservative elite there was a fear that the Left was now back in the saddle with the end of Goebbels’s disgrace, and that they could now expect an attack on the churches as well as on the capitalists, not to mention the nobility. Certainly Hitler appeared to have forgiven Goebbels. On November 16, the gauleiter was proud to note that “the Führer wholly approves my and our policies.” Hitler showed his solidarity by coming to stay with the Goebbelses in Schwanenwerder after a performance of Schiller’s
Kabale und Liebe
. The next day Uncle Adolf played with the children before heading off to Düsseldorf for vom Rath’s state funeral.
There were numerous small acts of personal courage in which Germans showed their sympathy for the Jews. The industrialist Robert Bosch in Stuttgart put half a million RM in a Dutch bank to help out Jews lacking funds to continue their journeys to freedom. For Peter and Christabel Bielenberg in Hamburg, it made up their minds for them that they were going to leave Germany and go and live in Ireland. It was only their friend Adam von Trott who held them back. He argued that the evil needed to be fought from within.
For many Germans there was an all-pervading sense of shame. Major Groscurth said, “You have to feel ashamed to remain German,” but thought Göring and Hitler innocent of the outrage. Another who disapproved was Heydrich, who believed it had been “the heaviest blow against the state and Party since 1934.” Klepper noted there was a desire to emigrate among rich Gentiles and that both churches were muzzled by flagrant attacks on them in the Nazi organs—they were not to speak out for non-Aryan Christians. Eleanor von Trott, the widow of a former imperial minister and mother of Adam, went into Bebra, where one of the “spontaneous” demonstrations had occurred before those unleashed by Goebbels. Leaving her driver at a safe distance, she went into each Jewish shop in turn and personally apologized for the damage to their property. Robert Smallbones, the British consul in Frankfurt, talked of “passionate resentment” among Christian Germans and in the army and civil service, while Vansittart’s informant, Group Captain Christie, overheard similar views expressed in Berlin and Essen, talking of “universal horror” and “general abhorrence.”
In Württemberg, reactions ranged from dismissing the action as “childish” or inhumane. In Stuttgart glaziers sold glass at a reduced rate “because it was not the Jews who had caused the damage.” A Party member sent flowers to a Jew to show his support. Another Nazi in Creglingen helped an arrested Jew to escape with the support of the local leader of the Nazi War Veterans’ Association. The ordinary clergy were especially vocal in their condemnation, particularly the Protestants. The Catholics tended to be more cowed after the expulsion of Bishop Sproll.
In Nuremberg the public outcry was so great that Julius Streicher had to make a speech to protest against sympathy being shown for the Jews. Pity for the Jews might have induced relative silence from
Der Stürmer
, which did not formally celebrate the pogrom until issue 48 came out at the end of the month. On the other hand, the more likely cause was Goebbels, who had once again muzzled the press. Ernst Hiemer wrote
Der Stürmer
’s cover story, entitled, “Has the Jewish Question Been Solved?” The previous issue, number 47, did include a poignant image by Fips entitled “November Storms” and showing a Jew being leveled by a huge fist.
THE ROUNDING up of the Jews had proved an excellent source of wealth for corrupt German officials. Göring did not see all of it by any means. In Nuremberg the Jews had to sign away the rights to their property before they went into concentration camps. The taxable value of the estate was calibrated at 10 percent of its real worth. In Vienna the corruption was so flagrant that Bürckel was obliged to pack a number of Aryan administrators off to Dachau to join their victims.
In response Jews north of the Inn laid siege to the consulates to obtain visas to leave. Few found what they wanted. Of three hundred who lined up at the Argentinian and Paraguayan consulates in Berlin, only two were able to proceed to making a formal application. On the 19th it was decreed that no one could leave until the billion mark fine or “Atonement Contribution” had been paid.
The Contribution was based on the data accumulated since the enforced registration of Jewish property after April 26. The sum total for Jewish property was set at 7,538,500,000 RM, of which nearly two-thirds was estimated to be in the form of liquid assets. Every Jew liable had to make over 20 percent of his property in four installments. The first fell on December 15, and thereafter every three months, until August 15, 1939. Together with the Emigration Tax, the Atonement Contribution yielded a neat two billion RM. Using the Jews as a cash cow to fund rearmament and other projects was shortsighted. They had already given away so much, and their milk was soon to dry up altogether; income from the beleaguered Jews amounted to some 5 percent of tax revenue. Even the assumption of Jewish businesses only altered German economic life in small areas such as textiles and department stores. There was still no alleviation of the Reich’s finances, which continued to cause grave concern.
On November 18 Göring met members of the Defense Council and explained the parlous state of the nation’s coffers and the fear of renewed inflation. The rearmament program was in itself inflationary, as it failed to expand consumer sales. In the New Year the Reichsbank sent Hitler a letter requesting restraint in government spending. Hitler’s response was to sack Schacht—although there may have been other reasons. The national debt had increased threefold since Hitler’s takeover. Autarky prevented Germany from indulging in conventional foreign trade.
Göring was aware that he was not getting his hands on all the money and that he still lacked buying power abroad. On November 14 Fischböck came to him with the first of several schemes to make the Jews sponsor German exports, an idea that had been aired before Kristallnacht. It came about as a result of a meeting between George Rublee’s wife and the German air attaché in London, Ralph Wenninger. Wenninger had introduced her to Theo Kordt, which had eventually resulted in a direct channel opening up between Göring and Rublee. Once again it was necessary to keep Ribbentrop in the dark, especially as the RAM had gotten it into his head that Rublee was a Jew. The international boycott was starving Germany of foreign currency. The chemical giant IG Farben’s foreign orders were down by 40 percent, for example. Göring wanted the Jews to be allowed to remain in the export trade: “The business point of view must prevail. . . . Every concession involving ideological principles is possible.” Under the scheme, Germany would relieve the richer Jews of 200 million RM and allow them to emigrate; in return, after thirty years Germany would pay 3 percent to the governments participating in the scheme.
The opposition had a new straw to grasp at. Goerdeler relayed the contents of a speech made by the minister of state and vice president of the Reichsbank, Dr. Rudolf Brinckmann, to an audience of industrialists in Cologne. The news was bleak: All the money sucked out of Austria since the Anschluss was now spent. The luxury and high cost of Party functions and the state were to blame. There was no foreign currency and a dearth of raw materials. The annual state budget needed to be reduced by 6,000 million RM straight away. There was only a short time before Germany suffered complete economic collapse. Brinckmann later went insane, although it is not clear whether this resulted from the shambles in the Nazi economy or some other cause.