The Nazi idea behind co-opting additional Germanic people into the SS stems to a certain extent from the Völkisch
belief that the original Aryan-Germanic homeland rested in Scandinavia
and that, in a racial-ideological sense, people from there or the
neighbouring northern European regions were a human reservoir of
Nordic/Germanic blood. Conquest of Western Europe gave the Germans, and especially the SS,
access to these "potential recruits" who were considered part of the
wider "Germanic family". Four of these conquered nations were ripe with Germanic peoples
according to Nazi estimations (Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, and
Flanders). Heinrich Himmler referred to people from these lands in terms of their Germanic suitability as, "blutsmässig unerhört wertvolle Kräfte" ("by blood exceptionally valuable assets"). Accordingly, some of them were recruited into the SS and enjoyed the
highest privileges as did foreign workers from these regions, to include
unrestrained sexual contact with German women. Eager to expand their reach, Nazis like Chief of the SS Main Office, Gottlob Berger considered the Germanic SS as foundational for a burgeoning German Empire.
Himmler's vision for a Germanic SS started with grouping the Netherlands, Belgian, and French Flanders together into a western-Germanic state called Burgundia,
which would be policed by the SS as a security buffer for Germany. In
1940, the first manifestation of the Germanic SS appeared in Flanders as
the Allgemeene SS Vlaanderen to be joined two-months later by the Dutch Nederlandsche SS, and in May 1941 the Norwegian Norges SS was formed. The final nation to contribute to the Germanic SS was Denmark, whose Germansk Korpset (later called the Schalburg Corps) came into being in April 1943. For the SS, they did not think of their compatriots in terms of
national borders but in terms of Germanic racial makeup, known
conceptually to them as Deutschtum, a greater idea which transcended traditional political boundaries. While the SS leadership foresaw an imperialistic and semi-autonomous
relationship for the Nordic or Germanic countries like Denmark, the
Netherlands, and Norway as co-bearers of a greater Germanic empire,
Hitler refused to grant them the same degree of independence despite
ongoing pressure from ranking members of the SS.
Duties and participation in atrocities
Vidkun Quisling inspects the Germanske SS Norge on the Palace Square in Oslo, Norway
The purpose of the Germanic SS was to enforce Nazi racial doctrine, especially anti-Semitic ideas. They typically served as local security police augmenting German units of the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and other main departments of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
RSHA). Their principal responsibilities during wartime were to root-out
partisans, subversive organizations, and any group opposed to Nazi
ideas. In other cases, these foreign units of the SS were employed by
major German firms to distribute propaganda for the Nazi cause among
their compatriots and to police and control workers. In addition, the inclusion of other Germanic peoples was part of the
Nazi attempt to collectively Germanize Europe, and for them,
Germanization entailed the creation of an empire ruled by Germanic
people at the expense of other races.
One of the most notorious groups was in the Netherlands, where the Germanic SS was employed to round-up Jews. Of the 140,000 Jews that had lived in the Netherlands prior to 1940, around 24,000 survived the war by hiding. Despite their relatively small numbers, a total of 512 Jews from Oslo were hunted down by the Norwegian Police and the Germanske SS Norge
(Norwegian General SS); once caught, they were deported to Auschwitz.
More Jews were rounded-up elsewhere, but the total number of Norwegian
Jews captured never reached a thousand throughout the course of the war. Similar measures were planned by the SS against Danish Jews, who
totaled about 6,500, but most of them managed to go into hiding or
escape to Sweden before the senior German representative in Denmark,
SS-General Werner Best, could marshal the SS forces at his disposal and complete his planned raids and deportations.
Organizations
The following countries raised active Germanic SS detachments:
The Germanic Corps (Germansk Korpset) was established in April 1943 and renamed the SS-Schalburgkorps shortly afterwards. It was formed under the leadership of K.B. Martinsen who had recently returned to Denmark from the Eastern Front after the disbandment of the Free Corps Denmark (Freikorps Danmark) which he had latterly commanded as part of the Waffen-SS. It was divided into two parts. "Group I" acted as a uniformed
paramilitary force, while "Group II" consisted of civilian sympathisers
expected to fund the entity. The latter was transformed into a political party known as the Danish People's Defence (Dansk Folke Værn) which drew a number of existing factions of the Danish extreme-right away from the main National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark (Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejderparti, or DNSAP). According to historian Martin Gutmann, this professional paramilitary group was "meant to replace the interned Danish army." By the winter of 1943, Martinsen had built up the unit to some 1,000 men commanded by two-dozen Danish Waffen-SS officers. Under plans devised by Himmler, Best, and Martinsen, the SS-Schalburgkorps was used to crush Danish resistance. It participated in the murder of opposition figures—including the Danish playwright, Kaj Munk—and bombed buildings with suspected links to Danish resistance.
Algemeene SS Vlaanderen, renamed the Germaansche SS in Vlaanderen in October 1942
The General SS Flanders (Algemeene Schutscharen Vlaanderen, or Alg. SS-Vl.) was originally founded in November 1940 and was one of the first collaborationist formations to become part of the Germanische SS in October 1942. It was created as a political militia under the leadership of the radical flamingantsRené Lagrou and Ward Hermans. It included a reserve unit known as the Flanders Corps (Vlaanderen-Korps) and a short-lived youth movement called the Youth Front (Jeugdfront). Lagrou was killed on the Eastern Front while serving with the Flemish Legion
in the Waffen-SS and Hermans emigrated to Germany to work in Nazi radio
propaganda, meaning that leadership of the formation passed to Jozef De Langhe [nl], Raf Van Hulse [nl], and later Jef François. From 1943, it became associated with the radical political faction DeVlag which sought to supplant the larger and more conservative Flemish National League (Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond, VNV) as the principal collaborationist group in Flanders. Unofficially, Himmler wanted to use the organization to penetrate occupied Belgium, which was under the control of a military administration run by the German Army rather than the Nazi Party or SS. It was also used to staff the anti-Jewish units of the German security services with auxiliary staff and provided guards for the prison camp at Fort Breendonk. It also published a newspaper entitled De SS Man.
The group claimed only 3,499 members in January 1944 and more than half
were serving in some capacity on the Eastern Front and the historian
David Littlejohn estimates the number of its active members in Belgium
at fewer than 400 by this point. Under the leadership of StormbanleiderRobert Verbelen [nl],
DeVlag and the SS-Vlaanderen collaborated in the killings of civilians
and public figures in notional reprisals for attacks committed by the Belgian Resistance. According to historian Jan Craeybeckx, "their 1944 raid in the Hageland near Leuven
left a trail of death and destruction" and "countless people were
deported to concentration camps", notably from the small village of Meensel-Kiezegem which was attacked in August 1944. Alexandre Galopin, the incumbent governor of the Société Générale,
was assassinated on Verbelen's orders in February 1944. As the Allies
entered Belgium in September 1944, many of the perpetrators and
collaborators fled to Germany.
Nederlandsche SS, renamed the Germaansche SS in Nederland in November 1942.[b]
The Dutch SS (Nederlandsche SS) was formed in September 1940 under the auspices of Henk Feldmeijer within the main collaborationist party National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland, NSB). Feldmeijer was a longstanding member of the party's radical Völkisch faction and envisaged the force as a kind of political police unit rather than a strictly military one. Its base was established at Avegoor, near Arnhem. The Dutch SS was increasingly subordinated to the SS which weakened its
ties to the NSB. It became part of the Germanic SS in November 1942 and
was renamed. It slowly gravitated away from the NSB's Dutch nationalism towards the
idea of integrating the Netherlands in a Greater Germany. It published a
newspaper entitled Storm and served an important role in
facilitating recruitment for Dutch Waffen SS units on the Eastern
Front. In principle, there were six regiments (standaarden) based in Groningen, Arnhem, Amsterdam, the Hague, Eindhoven and Nijmegen. The movement claimed to have 6,127 members over the course of its
existence but a large proportion at any given time were outside the
Netherlands on the Eastern Front, meaning that all its units were likely
to have been significantly understrength throughout its existence. Feldmeijer, who himself enlisted for service on the Eastern Front,
participated in the killing of Dutch civilians in retaliation for
attacks by the resistance in September 1943.
Norges SS, renamed the Germanske SS Norge in July 1942
The Norwegian SS (Norges SS) was established in May 1941 under the auspices of Jonas Lie,
a career police officer who came from a notable family of writers who
had recently returned to Norway after serving in the Balkans with the SS Nordland Regiment in the Waffen-SS. Sverre Riisnæs was Lie's second in command. Lie was inspired by the German ReichskommissarJosef Terboven and established the Norwegian SS without consulting Vidkun Quisling even though the formation remained notionally part of Quisling's National Union (Nasjonal Samling, or NS). It was separate from the NS's own Hird regiments although initially used its uniforms and structure. Heinrich Himmler
personally attended the foundation ceremony for the Norwegian SS and
continued to bestow favour of Lie, preventing Quisling from prohibiting
the formation's establishment although he later forbade members of the Hird from participating. The establishment of the Norwegian Legion for its service on the Eastern Front in June 1941 led many members of the Norwegian SS to enlist and severely weakened it. As part of the SS's attempt to weaken Quisling's power, the Norwegian
SS was renamed in July 1942 and brought into the Germanic SS. The organisation's membership reached a notional strength of 1,300 in
1944. A large part of the members were recruited from the police, and
about 50 percent served in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front. It published a newspaper called Germaneren. Ultimately, it remained too small to represent a serious threat to Quisling's primacy in German-occupied Norway.
An underground Nazi organization also existed in Switzerland, known as the Germanische SS Schweiz. It had very few members and was considered merely a splinter Nazi group by Swiss authorities.
Germanic battalions
Danish members of the Schalburg Corps, filmed in 1944
Separately from the Germanic SS, a number of so-called Germanic Battalions (Germanische Sturmbanne) were established in September 1942 as part of the Allgemeine SS from among Flemish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swiss expatriates and volunteer workers in Germany. A Danish unit in Berlin was disbanded in January 1943 amid a lack of personnel. In total, the total number of members was only 2,179 in March 1944.
Postwar
After
the war, many Germanic SS members were tried by their respective
countries for treason. Independent war crimes trials outside the
jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Trials were conducted in several European countries, such as in the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, leading to several death sentences; an example being the commander of the Schalburg Corps, K.B. Martinsen. In Norway, Lie committed suicide.
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation:[kʁɪsˈtalnaχt]ⓘ lit.'crystal night') or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (German: Novemberpogrome, pronounced[noˈvɛm.bɐ.poˌɡʁoːmə]ⓘ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The euphemistic name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination, on 9 November 1938, of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. British historian Martin Gilbert
wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945
was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from
foreign journalists working in Germany drew worldwide attention. The Times
of London observed on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent
upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of
burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and
innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."
Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered.[a]
Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much
higher; when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent
suicides are included, the death toll reaches the hundreds, with Richard J. Evans estimating 638 deaths by suicide, with a total between one and two thousand. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
In the 1920s, most German Jews were fully integrated into the
country's society as citizens. They served in the army and navy and
contributed to every field of German business, science and culture. Conditions for German Jews began to worsen after the appointment of Adolf Hitler (the Austrian-born leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party) as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, and the Enabling Act (implemented 23 March 1933) which enabled the assumption of power by Hitler after the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933. From its inception, Hitler's regime moved quickly to introduce anti-Jewish policies. Nazi propaganda
alienated the 500,000 Jews living in Germany, who accounted for only
0.86% of the overall population, and framed them as an enemy responsible
for Germany's defeat in the First World War and for its subsequent economic disasters, such as the 1920s hyperinflation and the subsequent Great Depression. Beginning in 1933, the German government enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws restricting the rights of German Jews to earn a living, to enjoy full citizenship and to gain education, including the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, which forbade Jews to work in the civil service. The subsequent 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jewish Germans.
These laws resulted in the exclusion and alienation of Jews from German social and political life. Many sought asylum abroad; hundreds of thousands emigrated, but as Chaim Weizmann
wrote in 1936, "The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those
places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not
enter." The international Évian Conference on 6 July 1938 addressed the issue of Jewish and Romani
immigration to other countries. By the time the conference took place,
more than 250,000 Jews had fled Germany and Austria, which had been annexed by Germany
in March 1938; more than 300,000 German and Austrian Jews continued to
seek refuge and asylum from oppression. As the number of Jews and Romani
wanting to leave increased, the restrictions against them grew, with
many countries tightening their rules for admission. By 1938, Germany
"had entered a new radical phase in anti-Semitic activity". Some historians believe that the Nazi government had been contemplating
a planned outbreak of violence against the Jews and were waiting for an
appropriate provocation; there is evidence of this planning dating back
to 1937. In a 1997 interview, the German historian Hans Mommsen claimed that a major motive for the pogrom was the desire of the Gauleiters of the NSDAP to seize Jewish property and businesses. Mommsen stated:
The need for money by the party organization stemmed from the fact that Franz Xaver Schwarz,
the party treasurer, kept the local and regional organizations of the
party short of money. In the fall of 1938, the increased pressure on
Jewish property nourished the party's ambition, especially since Hjalmar
Schacht had been ousted as Reich minister for economics. This,
however, was only one aspect of the origin of the November 1938 pogrom.
The Polish government threatened to extradite all Jews who were Polish
citizens but would stay in Germany, thus creating a burden of
responsibility on the German side. The immediate reaction by the Gestapo
was to push the Polish Jews—16,000 persons—over the borderline, but
this measure failed due to the stubbornness of the Polish customs
officers. The loss of prestige as a result of this abortive operation
called for some sort of compensation. Thus, the overreaction to Herschel
Grynszpan's attempt against the diplomat Ernst vom Rath came into being
and led to the November pogrom. The background of the pogrom was
signified by a sharp cleavage of interests between the different
agencies of party and state. While the Nazi party was interested in
improving its financial strength on the regional and local level by
taking over Jewish property, Hermann Göring,
in charge of the Four-Year Plan, hoped to acquire access to foreign
currency in order to pay for the import of urgently-needed raw material.
Heydrich and Himmler were interested in fostering Jewish emigration.
The Zionist leadership in the British Mandate of Palestine
wrote in February 1938 that according to "a very reliable private
source—one which can be traced back to the highest echelons of the SS
leadership", there was "an intention to carry out a genuine and dramatic
pogrom in Germany on a large scale in the near future".
Polish Jews expelled from Germany in late October 1938
In August 1938, German authorities announced that residence permits
for foreigners were being canceled and would have to be renewed.This included German-born Jews of foreign citizenship. Poland stated that it would renounce citizenship rights of Polish Jews living abroad for at least five years after the end of October, effectively making them stateless. In the so-called "Polenaktion", more than 12,000 Polish Jews, among them the philosopher and theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and future literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki,
were expelled from Germany on 28 October 1938, on Hitler's orders. They
were ordered to leave their homes in a single night and were allowed
only one suitcase per person to carry their belongings. As the Jews were
taken away, their remaining possessions were seized as loot both by
Nazi authorities and by neighbors.
The deportees were taken from their homes to railway stations and
were put on trains to the Polish border, where Polish border guards
sent them back into Germany. This stalemate continued for days in the
pouring rain, with the Jews marching without food or shelter between the
borders. Four thousand were granted entry into Poland, but the remaining 8,000
were forced to stay at the border. They waited there in harsh conditions
to be allowed to enter Poland. A British newspaper told its readers
that hundreds "are reported to be lying about, penniless and deserted,
in little villages along the frontier near where they had been driven
out by the Gestapo and left." Conditions in the refugee camps
"were so bad that some actually tried to escape back into Germany and
were shot", recalled a British woman who was sent to help those who had
been expelled.
Among those expelled was the family of Sendel and Riva Grynszpan,
Polish Jews who had emigrated to Germany in 1911 and settled in Hanover, Germany. At the trial of Adolf Eichmann
in 1961, Sendel Grynszpan recounted the events of their deportation
from Hanover on the night of 27 October 1938: "Then they took us in
police trucks, in prisoners' lorries, about 20 men in each truck, and
they took us to the railway station. The streets were full of people
shouting: 'Juden Raus! Auf Nach Palästina!'" ("Jews get out! Go to Palestine!"). Their seventeen-year-old son Herschel was living in Paris with an uncle. Herschel received a postcard from his family from the Polish border,
describing the family's expulsion: "No one told us what was up, but we
realized this was going to be the end.... We don't have a penny. Could you send us something?" He received the postcard on 3 November 1938.
On the morning of Monday, 7 November 1938, he purchased a
revolver and a box of bullets, then went to the German embassy and asked
to see an embassy official. After he was taken to the office of Nazi
diplomat Ernst vom Rath,
Grynszpan fired five bullets at Vom Rath, two of which hit him in the
abdomen. Vom Rath was a professional diplomat with the Foreign Office
who expressed anti-Nazi sympathies, largely based on the Nazis'
treatment of the Jews and was under Gestapo investigation for being
politically unreliable. However, he also argued that the anti-Semitic laws were "necessary" to allow the Volksgemeinschaft to flourish.
Grynszpan made no attempt to escape the French police and freely
confessed to the shooting. In his pocket, he carried a postcard to his
parents with the message, "May God forgive me...
I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I
will do." It is widely assumed that the assassination was politically
motivated, but historian Hans-Jürgen Döscher
says the shooting may have been the result of a love affair gone wrong,
and that Grynszpan and vom Rath had become intimate after they met in Le Boeuf sur le Toit, which was a popular meeting place for gay and bisexual men at the time.
The next day, the German government retaliated, barring Jewish
children from German state elementary schools, indefinitely suspending
Jewish cultural activities, and putting a halt to the publication of
Jewish newspapers and magazines, including the three national German
Jewish newspapers. A newspaper in Britain described the last move, which
cut off the Jewish populace from their leaders, as "intended to disrupt
the Jewish community and rob it of the last frail ties which hold it
together." Their rights as citizens had been stripped. One of the first legal measures issued was an order by Heinrich
Himmler, commander of all German police, forbidding Jews to possess any
weapons whatsoever and imposing a penalty of twenty years' confinement
in a concentration camp upon every Jew found in possession of a weapon
hereafter.
Pogrom
Death of Ernst vom Rath
Ernst
vom Rath died of his wounds on 9 November 1938. Word of his death
reached Hitler that evening while he was with several key members of the
Nazi party at a dinner commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. After intense discussions, Hitler left the assembly abruptly without giving his usual address. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels
delivered the speech, in his place, and said that "the Führer has
decided that... demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by
the party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be
hampered." The chief party judge Walter Buch later stated that the message was clear; with these words, Goebbels had commanded the party leaders to organize a pogrom.
Some leading party officials disagreed with Goebbels' actions, fearing the diplomatic crisis it would provoke. Heinrich Himmler wrote, "I suppose that it is Goebbels's megalomania... and stupidity which is responsible for starting this operation now, in a particularly difficult diplomatic situation." The Israeli historian Saul Friedländer believes that Goebbels had personal reasons for wanting to bring about Kristallnacht. Goebbels had recently suffered humiliation for the ineffectiveness of his propaganda campaign during the Sudeten crisis, and was in some disgrace over an affair with a Czech actress, Lída Baarová. Goebbels needed a chance to improve his standing in the eyes of Hitler. At 1:20 a.m. on 10 November 1938, Reinhard Heydrich sent an urgent secret telegram to the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; SiPo) and the Sturmabteilung
(SA), containing instructions regarding the riots. This included
guidelines for the protection of foreigners and non-Jewish businesses
and property. Police were instructed not to interfere with the riots
unless the guidelines were violated. Police were also instructed to
seize Jewish archives from synagogues and community offices, and to
arrest and detain "healthy male Jews, who are not too old", for eventual
transfer to (labor) concentration camps. Heinrich Müller, in a message to SA and SS commanders, stated the "most extreme measures" were to be taken against Jewish people.
Beginning on November 9, the SA and Hitler Youth shattered the
windows of about 7,500 Jewish stores and businesses, hence the name Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), and looted their goods.Jewish homes were ransacked all throughout Germany. Although violence
against Jews had not been explicitly condoned by the authorities, there
were cases of Jews being beaten or assaulted. Following the violence,
police departments recorded a large number of suicides and rapes.
The rioters destroyed many hundreds of synagogues throughout
Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, with estimates of over one
thousand. Over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms, many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores were damaged, and in many cases destroyed. More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, primarily Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
The synagogues, some centuries old, were also victims of
considerable violence and vandalism, with the tactics the Stormtroopers
practiced on these and other sacred sites described as "approaching the
ghoulish" by the United States Consul in Leipzig. Tombstones were
uprooted and graves violated. Fires were lit, and prayer books, scrolls,
artwork and philosophy texts were thrown upon them, and precious
buildings were either burned or smashed until unrecognizable. Eric Lucas
recalls the destruction of the synagogue that a tiny Jewish community
had constructed in a small village only twelve years earlier:
It did not take long before the
first heavy grey stones came tumbling down, and the children of the
village amused themselves as they flung stones into the many colored
windows. When the first rays of a cold and pale November sun penetrated
the heavy dark clouds, the little synagogue was but a heap of stone,
broken glass and smashed-up woodwork.
The Daily Telegraph correspondent, Hugh Greene, wrote of events in Berlin:
Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout
the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of
destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany
during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this.
Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of
otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their
hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers
held up their babies to see the 'fun'.
Many Berliners were, however, deeply ashamed of the pogrom, and some
took great personal risks to offer help to their beleaguered Jewish
neighbors. The son of a US consular official heard the janitor of his
block cry: "They must have emptied the insane asylums and penitentiaries
to find people who'd do things like that!"
KOLD
briefly reported on a 2008 remembrance meeting at a local Jewish
congregation. According to eyewitness Esther Harris: "They ripped up the
belongings, the books, knocked over furniture, shouted obscenities". Historian Gerhard Weinberg is quoted as saying:
Houses of worship burned down, vandalized, in every community in the country where people either participate or watch.
Aftermath
A ruined synagogue in Munich after KristallnachtA ruined synagogue in Eisenach after Kristallnacht
The former German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, commented "For the first time, I am ashamed to be German."
Göring, who was in favor of expropriating the property of the
Jews rather than destroying it as had happened in the pogrom, directly
complained to Sicherheitspolizei Chief Heydrich immediately after
the events: "I'd rather you had beaten to death two-hundred Jews than
destroy so many valuable assets!" ("Mir wäre lieber gewesen, ihr hättet 200 Juden erschlagen und hättet nicht solche Werte vernichtet!"). Göring met with other members of the Nazi leadership on 12 November to
plan the next steps after the riot, setting the stage for formal
government action. In the transcript of the meeting, Göring said,
I have received a letter written on the Führer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another....
I should not want to leave any doubt, gentlemen, as to the aim of
today's meeting. We have not come together merely to talk again, but to
make decisions, and I implore competent agencies to take all measures
for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy, and to submit
them to me.
The persecution and economic damage inflicted upon German Jews
continued after the pogrom, even as their places of business were
ransacked. They were forced to pay Judenvermögensabgabe,
a collective fine or "atonement contribution" of one billion
Reichsmarks for the murder of vom Rath (equivalent to €4 billion 2021 or
7 billion in 2020 USD), which was levied by the compulsory acquisition
of 20% of all Jewish property by the state. Six million Reichsmarks of
insurance payments for property damage due to the Jewish community were
instead paid to the Reich government as "damages to the German Nation".
Jews were required to pay for the cost of all damages caused by the
pogrom to their residences and businesses.
The number of emigrating Jews surged, as those who were able to leave, abandoned the country. In the ten months following Kristallnacht, more than 115,000 Jews emigrated from the Reich. The majority went to other European countries, the United States or Mandatory Palestine, though at least 14,000 made it to Shanghai, China.
As part of government policy, the Nazis seized houses, shops, and other
property the émigrés left behind. Many of the destroyed remains of
Jewish property plundered during Kristallnacht were dumped near Brandenburg. In October 2008, this dumpsite was discovered by Yaron Svoray,
an investigative journalist. The site, the size of four football
fields, contained an extensive array of personal and ceremonial items
looted during the riots against Jewish property and places of worship on
the night of 9 November 1938. It is believed the goods were brought by
rail to the outskirts of the village and dumped on designated land.
Among the items found were glass bottles engraved with the Star of David, mezuzot, painted window sills, and the armrests of chairs found in synagogues, in addition to an ornamental swastika.
Responses to Kristallnacht
In Germany
The reaction of non-Jewish Germans to Kristallnacht
was varied. Many spectators gathered on the scenes, most of them in
silence. The local fire departments confined themselves to preventing
the flames from spreading to neighboring buildings. In Berlin, police
Lieutenant Otto Bellgardt barred SA troopers from setting the New Synagogue on fire, earning his superior officer a verbal reprimand from the commissioner.
Portrait of Paul Ehrlich, damaged on Kristallnacht, then restored by a German neighbor
The British historian Martin Gilbert believes that "many non-Jews resented the round-up", his opinion being supported by German witness Dr. Arthur Flehinger who
recalls seeing "people crying while watching from behind their
curtains". Rolf Dessauer recalls how a neighbor came forward and restored a portrait of Paul Ehrlich that had been "slashed to ribbons" by the Sturmabteilung. "He wanted it to be known that not all Germans supported Kristallnacht."
The extent of the damage done on Kristallnacht was so great that
many Germans are said to have expressed their disapproval of it, and to
have described it as senseless. There was however no personal comment or even acknowledgment from the German leader Adolf Hitler himself about Kristallnacht.
In an article released for publication on the evening of 11 November, Goebbels ascribed the events of Kristallnacht
to the "healthy instincts" of the German people. He went on to explain:
"The German people are anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its
rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the
Jewish race." Less than 24 hours after Kristallnacht, Adolf Hitler made a one-hour
long speech in front of a group of journalists where he completely
ignored the recent events on everyone's mind. According to Eugene
Davidson the reason for this was that Hitler wished to avoid being
directly connected to an event that he was aware that many of those
present condemned, regardless of Goebbels's unconvincing explanation
that Kristallnacht was caused by popular wrath. Goebbels met the foreign press in the afternoon of 11 November and said
that the burning of synagogues and damage to Jewish owned property had
been "spontaneous manifestations of indignation against the murder of
Herr Vom Rath by the young Jew Grynsban [sic]".
In 1938, just after Kristallnacht, the psychologist Michael Müller-Claudius
interviewed 41 randomly selected Nazi Party members on their attitudes
towards racial persecution. Of the interviewed party-members 63%
expressed extreme indignation against it, while only 5% expressed
approval of racial persecution, the rest being noncommittal. A study conducted in 1933 had then shown that 33% of Nazi Party members
held no racial prejudice while 13% supported persecution. Sarah Ann
Gordon sees two possible reasons for this difference. First, by 1938
large numbers of Germans had joined the Nazi Party for pragmatic reasons
rather than ideology thus diluting the percentage of rabid antisemites;
second, the Kristallnacht could have caused party members to reject
antisemitism that had been acceptable to them in abstract terms but
which they could not support when they saw it concretely enacted. During the events of Kristallnacht, several Gauleiter
and deputy Gauleiters had refused orders to enact the Kristallnacht,
and many leaders of the SA and of the Hitler Youth also openly refused
party orders, while expressing disgust. Some Nazis helped Jews during the Kristallnacht.
After
1945 some synagogues were restored. This one in Berlin features a
plaque, reading "Never forget", a common expression around Berlin.
As it was aware that the German public did not support the
Kristallnacht, the propaganda ministry directed the German press to
portray opponents of racial persecution as disloyal. The press was also under orders to downplay the Kristallnacht,
describing general events at the local level only, with prohibition
against depictions of individual events. In 1939 this was extended to a prohibition on reporting any anti-Jewish measures.
The U.S. ambassador to Germany reported:
In view of this being a
totalitarian state a surprising characteristic of the situation here is
the intensity and scope among German citizens of condemnation of the
recent happenings against Jews.
To the consternation of the Nazis, the Kristallnacht affected public
opinion counter to their desires, the peak of opposition against the
Nazi racial policies was reached just then, when according to almost all
accounts the vast majority of Germans rejected the violence perpetrated
against the Jews. Verbal complaints grew rapidly in numbers, and for example, the
Düsseldorf branch of the Gestapo reported a sharp decline in
anti-Semitic attitudes among the population.
There are many indications of Protestant and Catholic disapproval
of racial persecution; for example, anti-Nazi Protestants adopted the Barmen Declaration in 1934, and the Catholic church had already distributed pastoral letters
critical of Nazi racial ideology, and the Nazi regime expected to
encounter organised resistance from it following Kristallnacht. The Catholic leadership however, just as the various Protestant churches, refrained from responding with organised action.
Martin Sasse, Nazi Party member and bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Thuringia, leading member of the Nazi German Christians, one of the schismatic factions of German Protestantism, published a compendium of Martin Luther's writings shortly after the Kristallnacht;
Sasse "applauded the burning of the synagogues" and the coincidence of
the day, writing in the introduction, "On 10 November 1938, on Luther's
birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." The German people, he
urged, ought to heed these words "of the greatest anti-Semite of his
time, the warner of his people against the Jews." Diarmaid MacCulloch argued that Luther's 1543 pamphlet, On the Jews and Their Lies was a "blueprint" for the Kristallnacht.
Internationally
British Jews protest against immigration restrictions to Palestine after Kristallnacht, November 1938.
Kristallnacht sparked international outrage. According to Volker Ullrich, "a line had been crossed: Germany had left the community of civilised nations." It discredited pro-Nazi movements in Europe and North America, leading to a sharp decline in their support. Many newspapers condemned Kristallnacht, with some of them comparing it to the murderous pogroms incited by Imperial Russia.
The United States recalled its ambassador (but it did not break off
diplomatic relations) while other governments severed diplomatic
relations with Germany in protest. The British government approved the Kindertransport program for refugee children.
The pogrom marked a turning point in relations between Nazi Germany and the rest of the world. The brutality of Kristallnacht,
and the Nazi government's deliberate policy of encouraging the violence
once it had begun, laid bare the repressive nature and widespread
anti-Semitism entrenched in Germany. World opinion thus turned sharply
against the Nazi regime, with some politicians calling for war. On 6
December 1938, William Cooper, an Aboriginal Australian, led a delegation of the Australian Aboriginal League on a march through Melbourne
to the German Consulate to deliver a petition which condemned the
"cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of
Germany". German officials refused to accept the tendered document.
After the end of World War II,
there were hundreds of trials over Kristallnacht. The trials were
conducted exclusively by German and Austrian courts; the Allied
occupation authorities did not have jurisdiction since none of the
victims were Allied nationals.
Kristallnacht as a turning point
Kristallnacht
changed the nature of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews from
economic, political, and social exclusion to physical violence,
including beatings, incarceration, and murder; the event is often
referred to as the beginning of the Holocaust.
In this view, it is not only described as a pogrom, it is also
described as a critical stage within a process in which each step
becomes the seed of the next step. An account cited that Hitler's green light for Kristallnacht was made with the belief that it would help him realize his ambition of getting rid of the Jews in Germany. Prior to this large-scale and organized violence against the Jews, the
Nazis' primary objective was to eject them from Germany, leaving their
wealth behind. In the words of historian Max Rein in 1988, "Kristallnacht came... and everything was changed."
While November 1938 predated the overt articulation of "the Final Solution", it foreshadowed the genocide to come. Around the time of Kristallnacht, the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps called for a "destruction by swords and flames." At a conference on the day after the pogrom, Hermann Göring
said: "The Jewish problem will reach its solution if, in anytime soon,
we will be drawn into war beyond our border—then it is obvious that we
will have to manage a final account with the Jews."
Kristallnacht was also instrumental in changing global
public opinion. In the United States, for instance, it was this specific
incident that came to symbolize Nazism, forging the association between National Socialism and evil.
Modern references
Five decades later, 9 November's association with the anniversary of Kristallnacht, as well as the earlier Beer Hall Putsch, was cited as the main reason as to why Schicksalstag, the day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, was not turned into a new German national holiday; a different day was chosen (3 October 1990, German reunification).
The avant-garde guitarist Gary Lucas's 1988 composition "Verklärte Kristallnacht", which juxtaposes what would become the Israeli national anthem ten years after Kristallnacht, "Hatikvah", with phrases from the German national anthem "Deutschland Über Alles" amid wild electronic shrieks and noise, is intended to be a sonic representation of the horrors of Kristallnacht. It was premiered at the 1988 Berlin Jazz Festival and received rave reviews. (The title is a reference to Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 work Verklärte Nacht that presaged his pioneering work on atonal music; Schoenberg was an Austrian Jew who would move to the United States to escape the Nazis).
Kristallnacht was the inspiration for the 1993 album Kristallnacht by the composer John Zorn. The German power metal band Masterplan's debut album, Masterplan (2003), features an anti-Nazi song entitled "Crystal Night" as the fourth track. The German band BAP published a song titled "Kristallnaach" in their Colognedialect, dealing with the emotions engendered by the Kristallnacht.
Kristallnacht was the inspiration for the 1988 composition Mayn Yngele by the composer Frederic Rzewski, of which he says: "I began writing this piece in November 1988, on the 50th anniversary of the Kristallnacht....
My piece is a reflection on that vanished part of Jewish tradition
which so strongly colors, by its absence, the culture of our time".
In 2014, The Wall Street Journal published a letter from billionaire Thomas Perkins that compared the "progressive war on the American one percent" of wealthiest Americans and the Occupy movement's "demonization of the rich" to the Kristallnacht and antisemitism in Nazi Germany. The letter was widely criticized and condemned in The Atlantic, The Independent, among bloggers, Twitter users, and "his own colleagues in Silicon Valley". Perkins subsequently apologized for making the comparisons with Nazi
Germany, but otherwise stood by his letter, saying, "In the Nazi era it
was racial demonization, now it's class demonization."
Kristallnacht has been referenced both explicitly and
implicitly in countless cases of vandalism of Jewish property including
the toppling of gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in suburban St. Louis,
Missouri, and the two 2017 vandalisms of the New England Holocaust Memorial, as the memorial's founder Steve Ross discusses in his book, From Broken Glass: My Story of Finding Hope in Hitler's Death Camps to Inspire a New Generation. The Sri Lankan Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera also used the term to describe the violence in 2019 against Muslims by Sinhalese nationalists.
On 9 November 2022, KFC
app users in Germany were sent a message reading "It's memorial day for
Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy
chicken." KFC issued an apology approximately an hour later, blaming the
original message on an "error in our system".
The Fortnite Holocaust Museum, a virtual museum based inside the videogame Fortnite, is set to feature a display featuring the Kristallnacht.
On 9 November 2024, the Kristallnacht anniversary, the only glatt kosher restaurant in Washington, D.C. had its windows smashed.
The November 2024 Amsterdam riots in the Netherlands have been compared to the Kristallnacht. On 7 November 2024, Jewish and Israeli supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team were attacked by pro-Palestinian groups and local football attendees following that day's UEFA Europa League match. The Amsterdam attacks were internationally condemned. Many Jewish
advocacy groups, such as the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the Orthodox
Union, and the Jewish Federation, have called the November 2024
Amsterdam attacks a "modern-day Kristallnacht". Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attacks, noting that it took place just before the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht and bore many similarities.
In 2025 a feature film titled Kristallnacht directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky about the historical events was in production in Austria.
Names for Kristallnacht
The
events of November 1938 have been given disparate names by the
perpetrators, bystanders, victims, and historians. In the post-war
years, the terms Kristallnacht and Reichskristallnacht became established in West Germany and abroad. In East Germany, the state typically referred to the events as "fascist pogrom night" (German: "faschistische Pogromnacht"). Despite speculation that the term was coined by the Nazis, there is no documented written use of the term before the end of World War II. Despite this, many people later recalled the term being used at the
time, leading historians to conclude the term originated from the
general public.
Beginning in the late 1970s, alternative names for Kristallnacht were introduced as the "postwar generations began challenging their parents' sanitized version of history", and by the 1980s, the "harmless-sounding" term "Kristallnacht" began to be supplanted in the German-speaking world by several alternatives, such as Reichspogromnacht, Novemberpogrome, and Novemberterror.Linguistically and historically, the term Kristallnacht is seen as problematic. It is widely seen as a euphemism that trivializes anti-Jewish violence, which avoids mentioning either the perpetrators or that the murders,
looting, and arson were officially encouraged by the state. Focusing on "broken glass" places vandalism in the foreground and ignores the murders that were committed. Heinz Galinski, the former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, criticized the term in 1978, stating "more than just glass was broken. People were killed." The use of the word "night" obscures the fact that much of the violence
was committed in broad daylight, and the violence was not confined to a
single night. Many of the 30,000 Jews arrested following Kristallnacht
were still imprisoned in concentration camps months later. The term's
unclear origins also suggest it originated from the German public and
not the event's victims. Although no evidence has been found to confirm this, "Kristallnacht" is still perceived by many as a Nazi coinage.
Although Novemberpogrome is today the dominant term, some historians and authors have also criticized the use of the term "pogrom", as it incorporates associations that can be interpreted as trivializing the events. The scale of Kristallnacht far outstripped any pogroms in the Russian Empire,
which were local or regional events of spontaneous, lawless
mass-violence against Jews and their property. These massacres were
initiated by a local population with at most the tacit approval of the
local authorities and police. In contrast, the events of Kristallnacht
were centrally organized by the national government and systematically
carried out across the country, a connotation which is missing from the
word "pogrom".The word "pogrom" also places the events in a context that suggests the Holocaust was not unique. Furthermore, the word "Kristallnacht"
is established in other languages, and divergent vocabulary can add
confusion and difficulty when communicating with researchers and people
abroad.
On the 80th anniversary, the president of the German Historical Museum stated that there "will never be" an adequate name for the events of Kristallnacht.
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