As Hitler met with England’s prime minister, Sir Neville Chamberlain, in Bad Godesberg to negotiate the Sudeten crisis, and a few days later when he appeared at a mass rally at the Berlin Sportpalast as the dictator, ready to go to war, the SS leadership waited anxiously to be allowed to cross the border. Instead, peace was saved once again by the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938. It goes without saying that Himmler and Wolff could not miss the conference, but they were not asked for advice. They were, as always, brought in for decorative purposes.
Although Hitler’s demands were met, whereby Czechoslovakia was forced to immediately hand over the Bohemian border regions to the Reich, he did not feel like a conqueror. His puzzled chief interpreter, Dr. Paul Schmidt, noted his employer’s bad mood. He would have preferred to have a small war. Even Himmler thought so, since he was one of the agitators during the entire critical time and his inseparable adjutant Wolff was looking forward to new military fame.
The Reichsführer SS was already playing a double game behind Hitler’s back in those days, which is understandable, but almost impossible to prove. Leading army generals, like General of the Artillery Franz Halder and General Erwin von Witzleben, had sworn that at the outbreak of a war of aggression, they would have soldiers arrest Hitler and remove him from office. If the Gestapo had known this, couldn’t Himmler have used the situation to further his own plans? Hitler, liberated by Himmler with
the help of the armed SS units, would have had to appoint him as his deputy and successor, and a Hitler killed in the confusion of a putsch could have been replaced by the trusted Heinrich. Several years later Himmler and Wolff were to demonstrate that their loyalty to the Führer was mostly skin deep, and when it really mattered, it would not mean loyalty unto death.
Austria and Sudetenland were both returned to the Reich in 1938. The victorious Hitler crowed that “the reintegration of ten million Germans and approximately 110, 000 square kilometers of land to the Reich” made the Germans happy. Anyone close to power in Germany was now zealously intent on reaping the benefits. Himmler and Wolff, still fully immersed with organizational and personnel problems in the new Ostmark (as Austria was now named), went to great lengths to claim their share in the newly created Sudeten Gau. Hitler dissolved the Sudeten-German voluntary corps, created only recently, with a simple four-line proclamation, which stated that its members “from now on will fulfill their duties in the Party’s fighting units.” It went without saying that the SS chose the blondest and tallest individuals with the brightest blue eyes. Prominent leaders of the now dissolved Sudeten-German party (which had also become redundant) received honorary ranks in the SS and were allowed to wear decorations and medals on their new black uniforms. The top man was Konrad Henlein, raised to the rank of gauleiter, although it was whispered among the SS that he had homosexual tendencies.
All of them flocked to the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS, where Karl Wolff, as always ready to take on any task, took care of each one individually. Wolff was thus able to manage the proper distance, according to social conventions, to the wealthy members of Himmler’s circle of friends. This, however, did not stop him from accepting small gifts, for example pleasure cruises from the leaders in the shipping industry. His hunting mate was the ball-bearing manufacturer from Schweinfurt, Dr. Sachs, with whom he became so friendly that he was allowed into his estates anytime he wanted, and was even guaranteed a loan to build his house at a favorable interest rate. After knowing him just a very short time, Wolff was on friendly terms with the former Viennese gauleiter Odilo Globocnik, who had been dismissed from the leadership of the Austrian Nazi party for corruption. He called him “Globus,” even after this man tried to rehabilitate himself within the Party through the mass murders of Jews.
One cannot infer from this that Wolff was one of those brutal anti-Semitic killers who, in the drunken wee hours, raucously proclaimed that, “When Jewish blood drips from the knife, then nothing could be better!”
Vulgarity had always repulsed him. Since he believed that those of the Nordic race were the elite representing the culmination of a development that had ended centuries before, and since he realized that, at least outwardly, he could be viewed as the prototype of that race, he became so utterly convinced of his superiority that he could not entertain any general feelings of hatred toward the Jews. Naturally there were many subhuman creatures among them, but these could be isolated in concentration camps. They were indeed easy to recognize. With a shaved head, their criminal physiognomy became very apparent.
A man like Wolff had many acquaintances, and unavoidably these included Jews. He did not deny the fact nor did he feel himself endangered by them. His uniform and his convictions protected him against the suspicion of being beholden to the Jews. On the other hand, he never imagined that things would become as extreme as the regulations of the Nazi party’s program suggested.
But in the late fall of 1938 it became clear to him that his anti-Semitism was not strong enough for what the highest authorities had in mind. He, as well as Himmler, Heydrich and even the executioner’s assistant, the lowly SS Führer Adolf Eichmann, still believed at that time that they were fulfilling the Führer’s wishes if they got as many Jews as they could to emigrate. Their life in Germany was becoming awful enough, anyway. They had been pressured out of most of the academic professions, they had been fired from all civil service positions, and those in private business were being actively boycotted. Since the summer of 1938, they were kept out of the trading markets and stock markets and, in addition, they were being forced to use first names as identifying brands: Israel for men and Sarah for women. Next to many town signs on country roads, on a second post, was a sign that read, “Jews are not welcome.” For the Viennese and Berlin Jews, Adolf Eichmann perfected a bureaucratic system that moved citizens who had become annoying across the border, on a conveyor belt of sorts.
For fanatic anti-Semites, this removal undertaken by the SS was too humane, took too long and also, over time, did not fulfill the purpose well enough because the adversaries of the regime forced to emigrate to foreign countries only strengthened the opposition front there. The most raving anti-Semite was the gauleiter from Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, self-anointed as the
Leader of the Franks
, which underscored his dictatorial power. Despite acts of violence, money and sex scandals, he demonstrated that the rule of law did not apply to him. He also found a comrade in the
Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP and gauleiter from Berlin, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. This was surprising because the newly ardent anti-Semite, as a student in Heidelberg, had been the enthusiastic disciple of Friedrich Gundolf, a Jewish professor of literature, and had been deeply in love with a Jewish girlfriend, to whom he even dedicated some of his poems.
That Streicher, an uncouth, uneducated former schoolmaster from Nuremberg, was attempting to get the Jews under his control was easy enough to understand. His weekly newspaper
Der Stürmer
described in every issue how “world enemy #1” had been systematically spoiling every nation, turning them against each other in bloody wars. Readers who had little interest in such pseudo-historical fantasies could amuse themselves with detailed descriptions of how those Jews would ruin other races through tainted Aryan virgins. Such reports may have stimulated the imagination of the repulsive Streicher. In 1937, he received a group of hand-picked journalists at his headquarters who were being shown the locations of the Party rallies. His half-hour welcoming speech was dedicated to his “feeling for life,” which to him meant his sexual potency.
To the intellectual Joseph Goebbels, the alliance with this beast was certainly a necessary, if distasteful, matter. The propaganda minister had fallen out of grace with Hitler because his love affair with the Czech movie actress Lida Baarova had caused a public scandal. She almost caused him to seek a divorce and therefore damage the Party’s reputation, while he was actually crusading for German morality. Therefore on October 21, 1938, at Obersalzberg, Hitler ordered the married couple to reconcile and demanded moral good behavior of his minister. It is very probable that he used this opportunity to insinuate that Goebbels could regain some of the respect he had lost by carrying out acts of violence against the Jews.
The opportunity presented itself soon enough and Heydrich unknowingly created it. At that time, a young 17-year-old Jew of Polish nationality, Herschel Grynszpan, was living in Paris. His parents, residents of Hannover, had sent him to France to live with relatives so that he might have a future. The Grynszpan family, along with many other Jews, had fled Poland in 1918 because of the threatening pogroms. Now the government wanted to prevent any of them returning by stripping them of their citizenship. But Hitler’s Reich did not want them at all. Heydrich had them picked up and transported by train to the Polish border, and then in the middle of the night driven into the no-man’s-land. Polish border police immediately sent them back westwards, so these people spent days and nights going back and forth between border posts,
hungry and constantly threatened with beatings. Herschel Grynszpan’s parents were part of this group.
After he had heard of his parents’ misery, he went to the German embassy in Paris, intending an assassination in order to call the world’s attention to the suffering of his mother and father. Because he could not meet the ambassador, he shot the embassy’s first councilor, Ernst Eduard vom Rath, wounding him so severely that he was expected to die.
On the evening of November 8, 1938, the anniversary of Hitler’s 1923 putsch at the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler spoke to the “old fighters” and Party dignitaries. Wolff and Himmler were also present. The Führer did not mention the shooting in Paris, although he knew that his listeners were waiting for his orders. He apparently found it more effective to let their rage simmer. Even on the afternoon of the following day when the Nazi veterans, in memory of the bloody end of the putsch, marched through the streets of Munich to the Feldherrnhalle, there was no mention of the Paris attack. But Hitler’s plans for the pogrom were certainly already being worked out, and he had already done his part. As during the extermination of the Jews several years later, in this case there was not the smallest piece of paper bearing an order from the almighty Leader. The two avengers appointed by Hitler, Goebbels and Streicher, were only waiting for the news of vom Rath’s death in Paris.
During the afternoon, vom Rath died. The report reached Munich in the evening as the Party leaders gathered for their usual meal at the Munich Rathaus. Hitler normally gave another speech there, but this time he only whispered quickly with Goebbels and then disappeared. His propagandist spoke in his place. This speech was not written down, so the exact wording is not recorded, but it is known that he fanned the feelings of revenge among his listeners and spoke of spontaneous reactions with which the people must retaliate against the murder. Here and there, Goebbels announced, the Jews were already experiencing this retaliation: numerous synagogues were already in flames.
While Hitler quietly waited for further developments in his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, the gauleiters hastily made their way, one after the other, to the telephones and telegram printers in the Town Hall. Typically, they warned the SA and political leaders almost everywhere, but not the SS. They were to be avoided, not just because the SS might bring the police into the picture too early, but also because the pogrom was not the form of persecution of the Jews that the SS were using. Those now causing havoc in the streets, the vandals, thugs, and arsonists, were all dressed in
civilian clothes. Neither the Party nor the State was to be involved in such “spontaneous” actions.
The value of property destroyed was in the millions of marks, innumerable store windows were smashed, Jewish businesses and stores were looted, apartments were demolished and their owners abused—36 Jews were murdered—cultural centers and synagogues were burned to the ground. Among a circle of close friends, Goebbels cynically was quite pleased that the Berlin mob finally had the opportunity to shop so cheaply.
That evening Wolff sat in the Four Seasons Hotel with no idea of what was going on—which seems plausible enough. He was preparing for his appearance in the final scene of the fall Party spectacle. Himmler wanted to swear in his new SS volunteer recruits at midnight in front of the Feldherrnhalle—the place where the State police shot into Hitler’s demonstrators 15 years earlier, killing 16 marchers. Wolff’s role was to pick up the Führer at his apartment one half hour before the beginning of the ceremony and take him to the inner courtyard of his residence so that Hitler could step through a widely opened gate onto the small plaza in front of the Feldherrnhalle and dramatically climb the stairs as the clock finished striking midnight.
In a luxury hotel on Maximilianstrasse, Heydrich and several of his SS leaders were also celebrating. The glow of flames and noise on the streets drew their attention to the synagogue burning nearby. Then Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, called from Berlin to report that all Jewish shops had been ransacked and that bands of youths dressed like hooligans destroyed the apartments of Jews. Müller wanted to know how the police were to behave. But even Heydrich had no orders. It was a delicate matter. For that reason, he went a few rooms down the hall and asked Chief of the Personal Staff Wolff whether the pogrom was to be encouraged, tolerated, or stopped. The fact that Himmler’s closest colleague was also just beginning to hear about those events left them both dumbfounded. Heydrich therefore demanded to speak with Himmler. Wolff slowed him down; it was not quite that simple, since their superior happened to be at the Führer’s apartment at that precise moment. He offered to drive over there immediately and request instructions.