Pogrom witnessed by all

The Berlin correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph reported on November 10: “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.’”

This was just one of many reports that appeared in the international press after the Nazis instigated attacks on Jews throughout Germany and Austria on November 9-10 in what became known as Kristallancht, the “Night of Broken Glass. During the “orgy of destruction” at least 96 Jews were murdered, 1,300 synagogues and 7,500 businesses were destroyed, and countless Jewish cemeteries and schools were vandalized. An estimated 30,000 Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps.

Germans and Austrians witnessed and, in many cases, participated in the pogrom. They could not claim, as many would after World War II, that they were unaware of the persecution of the Jews.

Michael Bruce, a non-Jewish Englishman, provided this eyewitness account of Kristallnacht: “Hurriedly we went out into the street. It was crowded with people, all hurrying towards a nearby synagogue, shouting and gesticulating angrily. We followed. As we reached the synagogue and halted, silent and angry, on the fringe of the mob, flames began to rise from one end of the building. It was the signal for a wild cheer. The crowd surged forward and greedy hands tore seats and woodwork from the building to feed the flames.”

Bruce then saw a group of people go to a department store where granite cubes for repairing the roads were piled. “Youths, men and women, howling deliriously, hurled the blocks through the windows and at the closed doors,” he said. “In a few minutes the doors gave way and the mob, shouting and fighting, surged inside to pillage and loot.”

Part of the mob then began to walk toward the outskirts of the city. Bruce followed and saw what he described as “one of the foulest exhibitions of bestiality I have ever witnessed.” The marauders entered a hospital for sick Jewish children. “In minutes, the windows had been smashed and the doors forced,” Bruce recalled. “When we arrived, the swine were driving the wee mites out over the broken glass, bare-footed and wearing nothing but their nightshirts. The nurses, doctors, and attendants were being kicked and beaten by the mob leaders, most of whom were women.”

Inge Berner went to work in Berlin as she did every day. “Across the street was a confectionary. I looked out the window and saw the window of the store was broken and people were taking things from the store and an old couple who owned the store was just sitting inside shaking. I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ The book keeper came in and said, ‘You better go home. They’re killing Jews all over Berlin.’”

‘What happened to German civilization?’

In the village of Kehl, which lies just across a bridge from Strasbourg, Jews were marched through the streets where they were hit, insulted and spat upon by the townspeople. As they marched through this hostile gauntlet, they were forced to sing, “We have betrayed the German Fatherland. We are responsible for the Paris assassination.”

Norbert Wollheim heard the synagogues were burning throughout Berlin. “I couldn’t believe it. I went to the synagogue where I was bar mitzvahed, and where I’d been married, and I saw the flames coming from the roof, from the cupola of this beautiful edifice. The fire engines were standing by doing nothing, only protecting the buildings next to it. I still couldn’t believe it. I thought, maybe it’s the only one, so I went to another major synagogue in West Berlin, and it, too, was burning and already partly in ruins. I thought, this is the people you were brought up with, these are the poets and the thinkers. What happened to German civilization?....There were also quite a number who made very nasty remarks. There was glee among them. They said, ‘The Jews got what they deserve,’ and so on. That really gave me the shock of my life. I saw it, but I couldn’t digest it, not intellectually and not emotionally.”

Hans Waizner was only 9-years-old, but remembered being forced to move from his home in Vienna to his grandmother’s house. He and his mother were riding through the city in a truck filled with their possessions and saw Jewish stores that had been vandalized. Upon reaching his grandmother’s street, they saw a crowd throwing books out of a Jewish school into the street and burning them. “My strongest, most physical memory of Kristallnacht was of our lorry bumping and rolling across that pile of smoldering religious books. I will never forget it.”

Roughly 1,000 editorials

Michael Lucas lived in Hoengen where the small Jewish community had built a synagogue on the meadow he owned opposite his home. A mob approached the synagogue shouting, “Down with the Jews.” Michael watched with horror as the crowd smashed the Holy Ark and tossed the Torah scrolls as if they were balls before heaving them out the door into the muddy street. Children stomped on the parchment while others tore them to pieces and stole the silver adornments that had covered them. According to his nephew, Lucas tried to run outside, but his wife held him back fearing the rabble would kill him. “He leaned against the wall, tears streaming from his eyes, like those of a little child.”

While all the details were not immediately available, reports of the pogrom, such as the one in the Telegraph, were in many international newspapers. Roughly 1,000 editorials, mostly critical of Germany, were written by journalists who were not fooled by Nazi propaganda suggesting the violence was spontaneous. Few papers made a connection, however, between the violence and the blatant Nazi anti-Semitism.

Instead, journalists believed the primary motivation behind the pogrom was the desire to extort money from the Jews to boost the German economy. In addition, while the Nazi threat was now more widely accepted, and some reporters even began to anticipate the plight of the Jews would worsen, the media barons of the time did not demand changes in US policy. “In fact,” historian Deborah Lipstadt observed, “they cautioned against them because the most efficacious and speedy solution would have necessitated ignoring two prevailing American sentiments: the necessity to maintain strict neutrality and even stricter bars to increased immigration.”

Beyond some brief protestations, the world took no steps to punish Germany for its treatment of the Jews on Kristallnacht. Still, the Germans learned from the outcry that future measures against the Jews should be done beyond public view to ensure there would be no criticism or interference. Thus, when the Final Solution was ultimately formalized at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the Nazis made every effort to disguise and conceal their actions, and the pogrom of November 9-10 was never repeated.

Mitchell Bard is author of 48 Hours of Kristallnacht: Night of Destruction-Dawn of the Holocaust – An Oral History and director of the Jewish Virtual Library (http://www.JewishVirtualLibrary.org )