The Night of Broken Glass

22 22. Ibid.

23 23. Quoted from Friedländer, op. cit., p. 292.

24 24. Kershaw, op. cit., p. 458. ‘Disorder and uncontrolled violence and destruction were not the SS’s style.’

25 25. Facsimile in Döscher, op. cit., pp. 95–7.

26 26. Dachau: 10,911 deliveries; Buchenwald: 9,845 deliveries; Sachsenhausen an estimated 6,000–10,000 deliveries.

27 27. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part I, vol. 6, p. 182, entry for 11 November 1938.

28 28. Ibid.

29 29. Instructions to the press quoted in Longerich, op. cit., p. 125.

30 30. Quoted from Avraham Barkai, ‘ “Schicksalsjahr 1938”. Kontinuität und Verschärfung der wirtschaftlichen Ausplünderung der deutschen Juden.’ In Pehle, op. cit., p. 99.

31 31. It is all the more astounding that the stenographic record has still not been published in toto. The literature cites the partial record presented to the International Military Court in Nuremberg: IMT, op. cit., vol. 28, p. 499 ff. Cf. Döscher, op. cit., p. 123 f., there pp. 133–44.

32 32. Domarus, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 1058.

33 33. Harry Kaufman, unpublished manuscript (Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Ger 91, File 108); extracts from memoirs in this volume, pp. 231–5.

34 34. Both concepts were formed in connection with Auschwitz, but can be directly applied to the November pogroms. A good overview of the state of the question in Longerich, op. cit., pp. 7–21.

35 35. Longerich, op. cit., p. 24.

36 36. Ibid., p. 133.

37 37. November Pogrom 1938. Die Augenzeugenberichte der Wiener Library, London. Ed. Von Ben Barkow, Raphael Gross and Michael Lenarz. Frankfurt am Main, 2008.

38 38. Moritz Berger, unpublished manuscript (Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Ger 91, File 24).

39 39. On the approach of the organizers, the scholarly preparations, and the evaluation of the materials, see the Afterword, p. 236 ff.

40 40. Cf. the Bibliography, p. 275 ff.

41 41. Cf. the Editor’s Note, p. vii ff.

Born in the Rhineland in 1894; employed since 1920 by the Oppenheim Bank; married, two children; emigrated to the USA in 1939.

Exactly one year later, the greatest organized pogrom the world has ever seen occurred in Germany. The 1905 pogroms in Russia, the pogroms in Romania and in all the other countries of the world pale in comparison. The latter were only outflows of public opinion and their products, but this one was planned, organized and encouraged by the government. The preceding sufferings, privations, humiliations and horrors cannot be compared with what happened on this single night.

It was the harrowing night of 10 November 1938, when in Germany, in accordance with a very precisely elaborated plan, the homes and shops of Jews were senselessly vandalized, plundered, destroyed and put to the torch. On that night, synagogues and thousands of prayer halls and schools were set on fire at precisely the same time, and fire brigades and police all over Germany were not allowed to leave their quarters unless an express command to that effect had been given. In a single hour on that night, a horde of drunken animals in uniform wrecked the possessions, the past and the future of thousands of people, while bloodthirsty, savage, brutal creatures, decked out in and protected by the brown and black uniforms of the ruling party, slaughtered poor, tormented people in the thousands and sadistically abused thousands of wretched people.

I am going to describe one more time the events of that night, even if some of the details are already known, and even if hundreds of my poor fellow Jews may have suffered still more. I am going to describe them because the memory has still not grown fainter – although in the meantime a year and a half has gone by – and because they were the worst thing that the human mind could have imagined and carried out.

At the beginning of March 1938, all of the Jews in Germany had their passports confiscated. On 27 April 1938, we Jews in Germany who had more than 5,000 marks had to declare our possessions in cash, real estate, jewellery and so on.

In mid-October 1938, I met with a man from Berlin with whom I had had many business dealings, and who I knew had very good connections at the highest levels of the party and the government. Here is exactly what he said to me on that evening: ‘If you knew what was going to happen to you, and if you can justify it to your family and your company, get out of Germany as fast as you can. If not with a passport, then try to sneak across the border somewhere. In Berlin, they are preparing to do dreadful things to the Jews.’ When I explained to him that I had as yet made no preparations to emigrate and in any case would not leave my family in the lurch, he was astonished and said: ‘Soon there won’t be a single Jew left here who can or would want to emigrate.’

When I asked him what was actually going on, and he saw my frightened face, he said: ‘Give me your word not to say anything to anyone; it could cost me my life. Soon Jews will have to make enormous financial payments; they are going to be housed in ghettos, and Jews up to the age of sixty are going to be put in concentration camps to do forced labour. Barracks for this purpose are being built everywhere. In addition, all the synagogues are to be closed.’ I emphasize that I was told this around the middle of October 1938, and the assassination of Herr vom Rath, which the German government claimed was what triggered the Jewish pogroms in November 1938, did not take place until the early days of November 1938. I was very depressed and at home I could not conceal my feelings. My wife, to whom I have always told my joys and concerns, and who shared everything with me in true companionship, saw that I was depressed, and I told her what I knew. So my wife is the living witness to the truth of what I have said.

The abominable and damnable act in Paris had taken place: the Jew Grynszpan had shot the German vom Rath, and the external and probably very welcome excuse for carrying out and stepping up the planned measures against Jews described above had been provided. Everyone in Germany knew and felt that all Jews would have to pay a dreadful price for this act of an irresponsible young man. The occasion for the attack in Paris was the expulsion of all Polish Jews from Germany. May it also be said here that, since Grynszpan’s parents were also affected by this expulsion, the true and perhaps sole reason for his act is to be found in the regime’s order.

On a Monday morning in October 1938, 1the Gestapo suddenly appeared at the homes of all Jews of Polish ancestry in every city in Germany and told them to vacate their apartments within five hours, taking all their moveable goods with them. The unfortunate people packed up the most indispensable of their meagre possessions and gathered, weeping and lamenting, at their assembly points. In the city where I was employed, the poor gathered on the busiest square in the middle of the city. The children had been taken out of school and picked up by officials; hungry, frightened and crying loudly, they ran to their parents. The cordoning officials had great difficulty holding back the excited and shouting people who had gathered around the square. A few Aryan men and women who had expressed their criticisms too loudly were led away. An Aryan doctor took out of the crowd a Polish woman who was about to give birth and accompanied her to the hospital. Two days later the child was born.

The others were led away to the railway station and there loaded onto cattle wagons, and we Jewish men used lorries and cars to help them load their few possessions until our hands were bleeding in the freezing air. A girlfriend of my daughter’s later wrote to her from a camp on the Polish border: ‘Had the train run off the rails and killed us all, we would have been better off.’