Genocide

As early as January 1937, Eichmann had suggested, in a lengthy internal memorandum, that pogroms were the most effective way of forcing the Jews to leave Germany. Like an answer to a prayer, the shooting of the German third legation secretary Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan on the morning of 7 November 1938 opened up an opportunity not to be missed. It was an opportunity eagerly seized upon by Goebbels. He had no difficulty in winning Hitler's full backing.

On the morning following the fateful shooting, the Nazi press, under Goebbels' orchestration, was awash with torrents of vicious attacks on the Jews, guaranteed to incite violence. Sure enough, that evening, the 8 November, pogroms – involving the burning of synagogues, destruction of Jewish property, plundering of goods and maltreatment of individual Jews – were instigated in a number of parts of the country through the agitation of local party leaders without any directives from on high.

The party's 'old guard' were meeting that evening in the Old Town Hall in Munich. Hitler, too, was present. Goebbels and Hitler were seen to confer in agitated fashion during the reception, though their conversation could not be overheard. Hitler left shortly afterwards, earlier than usual and without his customary exchanges with those present, to return to his Munich apartment. Around 10 p.m., Goebbels delivered a brief but highly inflammatory speech. He made it abundantly plain that the party should organise and carry out 'demonstrations' against the Jews throughout the country, though make it appear that they were expressions of spontaneous popular anger.

Immediately after he had spoken, the Stoßtrupp Hitler, an 'assault squad' whose traditions reached back to the heady days of pre-Putsch beerhouse brawls and bore the Führer's name, was launched to wreak havoc on the streets of Munich.

Meanwhile, across the Reich, party activists – especially SA men – were suddenly summoned by their local leaders and told to burn down synagogues or were turned loose on other Jewish property. All morning new reports of the destruction poured in. Goebbels assessed the situation with Hitler. In the light of the mounting criticism of the 'action', also – though naturally not for humanitarian reasons – from within the top ranks of the Nazi leadership, the decision was taken to halt it. By that time, the night of horror for Germany's Jews had brought the demolition of around a hundred synagogues, the burning of several hundred others, the destruction of at least 8,000 Jews' shops and vandalising of countless apartments. The material damage was estimated soon afterwards by Heydrich at several hundred millions of Marks.

The Nazis' aim of forcing the Jews out had been massively boosted. Beyond that, the problem of their slow-moving elimination from the economy had been tackled. Whatever his criticisms of Goebbels, Göring had wasted no time in ensuring that the chance was now taken fully to 'aryanise' the economy. Others, too, in the Nazi leadership, critical or not of Goebbels, also seized the chance to push through a flood of new discriminatory measures, intensifying the hopelessness of Jewish existence in Germany.

The radicalisation now encountered no opposition of any weight. Any opposition would have had to come from those with access to the levers of power. The ordinary people who expressed their anger, sorrow, distaste, or shame at what had happened were powerless. Those who might have articulated such feelings, such as the leaders of the Christian Churches, among whose precepts was 'love thy neighbour as thyself', kept quiet. Neither major denomination, Protestant or Catholic, raised an official protest or even backing for those courageous individual pastors and priests who did speak out.

The leaders of the armed forces, scandalised though some of them were at the 'cultural disgrace' of what had happened, made no public protest. The deep anti-Semitism running through the armed forces meant that no opposition worth mentioning to Nazi radicalism could be expected from that quarter.

The open brutality of the November Pogrom, the round-up and incarceration of some 30,000 Jews that followed it, and the draconian measures to force Jews out of the economy had, Goebbels' diary entries make plain, all been explicitly approved by Hitler even if the initiatives had come from others, above all from the Propaganda Minister himself.

Hitler's responsibility for the genocide against the Jews cannot be questioned. Yet for all his public tirades against the Jews, offering the strongest incitement to ever more radical onslaughts of extreme violence, and for all his dark hints that his 'prophecy' was being fulfilled, he was consistently keen to conceal the traces of his involvement in the murder of the Jews. Perhaps, even at the height of his own power he feared theirs, and the possibility one day of their 'revenge'. Perhaps, sensing that the German people were not ready to learn the deadly secret, he was determined – his own general inclination to secrecy was, as always, a marked one – not to speak of it other than in horrific, but imprecise, terms. Whatever the reasons, he could never have delivered the sort of speech which, notoriously, Himmler would give in Posen two years later when he described what it was like to see a thousand corpses lying side by side and spoken openly of 'the extermination (Ausrottung) of the Jewish people' as a 'glorious page in our history that has never been written and is never to be written'. Even in his inner circle Hitler could never bring himself to speak with outright frankness about the killing of the Jews. Full knowledge of their murder was evidently not to be touched upon directly in his presence, even among the close band of criminal conspirators.

But in his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his takeover of power, Hitler revealed publicly his implicitly genocidal association of the destruction of the Jews with the advent of another war. The 'hostage' notion was probably built into his comments. And, as always, he obviously had an eye on the propaganda impact. But his words were more than propaganda. They gave an insight into the pathology of his mind, into the genocidal intent that was beginning to take hold. He had no idea how the war would bring about the destruction of the Jews. But, somehow, he was certain that this would indeed be the outcome of a new conflagration.

It was a 'prophecy' that Hitler would return to on numerous occasions in the years 1941 and 1942, when the annihilation of the Jews was no longer terrible rhetoric, but terrible reality.