By Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg
EDISON, New Jersey — Between the late evening hours of November 9, and the early morning of the 10th, 1938, gangs of German brownshirts and the SS publicly destroyed and firebombed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland.
Historian Richard Evans noted that Reinhard Heydrich chief of the Reich Security Main Office, the SS and police agency most responsible for implementing the Final Solution, instructed the police and the SS not to stop the destruction of Jewish property or restrain those committing violent acts against German Jews. At the same time, looting was prohibited, foreign nationals were to be unharmed even if they were Jewish, and German properties had to be shielded from being damaged, which meant no fires were to be started next to Jewish stores or synagogues.
In addition to burning down synagogues, Evans said stormtroopers shattered shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial businesses and their wares looted or left strewn on the pavements outside, coated with broken glass. Before Heydrich directed the security police to thwart looting, there were many robberies, ledgers recording mortgages and unsettled debts owed to Jews were destroyed wrote historian David Cesarani. Extortion bourgeoned under the pretext of implementing Aryanization and creating areas free of Jews. In Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, Jews signed a “declaration of their intent to leave the district immediately and never to return …”
Evans adds Jewish homes and apartments were ransacked, and the contents, including jewelry, radios, cameras, electrical equipment and other consumer products were stolen. Furniture was smashed, books and valuables were tossed everywhere, and the residents were terrorized and beaten. In many towns, gravestones in Jewish cemeteries were trashed.
Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the plan, to rob the Jews of their possessions for the benefit of the Reich and then to sweep them forever from the German scene. Furthermore, thereafter, Jews had no place in the German economy, and no independent Jewish life was possible, with the dismissal of cultural and communal bodes and the banning of the Jewish press.
During the week after Kristallnacht, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Berlin reporter called that night “The worst outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in modern German History.” Several hundred Jews were killed and 30,000 were arrested and sent to the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau, where thousands more died.
Systematic public humiliation became a harrowing part of this uncontrolled, disorganized and anarchic pogrom according to Cesarani. In dozens of cities and towns, the ‘degradation ritual’ took different forms: as their synagogues burned, Jews were forced to watch it while it went up in flames; others were compelled to dance around it or kneel in front of it. Torah scrolls and prayer books were vandalized, frequently by German youth. In Vienna, many rabbis had their beards cut.
Jews were paraded through their city in their pajamas. Old age homes and orphanages were ransacked. In the Jewish hospital in Nuremberg, patients were removed from the premises with such viciousness that several died.
One may ask, how could the entire world stand by and allow such a disaster to occur? The fascist or authoritative regimes in Italy, Rumania, Hungary and Poland were governments who approved of this pogrom and wanted to use the pogrom as a case to make their own antisemitic policies stronger in their individual countries. The three Great Western powers – Great Britain, France and the United States – said the appropriate things but did nothing to save the Jews. Hitler, in the late 1930’s told the world to take the Jews but there was just no one willing to take them in.
Even in our own country, President Roosevelt and his administration kept on expressing their shock over the terrible events which were occurring in Germany and Austria, but when it came time to act and help save the refugees by bringing them to the United States, the United States government refused and replied by saying that they have no intention to allow more immigrants to enter the United States. This teaches we must remain vigilant and not permit even the smallest seed of antisemitism to take root.
*
Rabbi Dr. Bernhard H. Rosenberg is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth-El in Edison, New Jersey and is the author of Theological and Halachich Reflections on the Holocaust, among other books.