The Perpetrators of the November 1938 Pogrom Through German-Jewish Eyes

Home , Einsatzgruppen, November 1938

Chapter 4 The Perpetrators of the November 1938 Pogrom through German-Jewish Eyes

Alan E. Steinweis

The November 1938 pogrom, often referred to as the “Kristallnacht,” was the largest and most significant instance of organized anti-Jewish violence in Nazi Germany before the Second World War.1 In addition to the massive destruc- tion of synagogues and property, the pogrom involved the physical abuse and terrorizing of German Jews on a massive scale. German police reported an official death toll of 91, but the actual number of Jews killed was probably about ten times that many when one includes fatalities among Jews who were treated brutally during their arrest and subsequent imprisonment in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.2 Violence had been a normal feature of the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish measures since 1933,3 but the scale and intensity of the Kristallnacht were unprecedented. The pogrom occurred less than one year before the outbreak of the war and the first atrocities by the Wehrmacht against Polish Jews, and less than three years before the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police, and other units began to undertake the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union. Knowledge about the perpetrators of the pogrom, therefore, pro- vides important context for understanding the violence that came later. To be sure, nobody has yet undertaken the extremely ambitious project to identify precisely which perpetrators of the Kristallnacht eventually would participate directly in the “Final Solution.” There certainly were many such cases, however, perhaps the most notable being Odilo Globocnik, who presided over the pogrom violence in Vienna in November 1938 and less than three years later was placed in charge of Operation Reinhardt, the mass murder of the Jews in the General Government.4

1 Many of the observations in this chapter are based on cases described and documented in the author’s book, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 2 Kim Wünschman, Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 204. 3 Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007). 4 On Globocnik’s role in the pogrom, see Herbert Rosenkranz, Verfolgung und Selbst- behauptung. Die Juden in Österreich 1938-1945 (Vienna: Herold, 1978), 159-67.

Several types of sources are available to historians who wish to recon- struct and to understand the behaviour of the perpetrators of the November pogrom. These include contemporaneous reports written by foreign journal- ists and diplomats; reports filed by German police and local government of- ficials in the days immediately after the violence;5 testimony given by accused Kristallnacht perpetrators at their post-1945 trials;6 and accounts provided by Jewish witnesses and victims. The Jewish testimony can, in turn, be divided into several categories: accounts produced in close proximity to the event; statements provided at the post-1945 trials; and narratives recorded many years later in connection with oral history or video testimony projects. This essay will focus on the first of these sub-categories, i.e., Jewish accounts that were recorded in the immediate aftermath of the pogrom. More specifically, it will focus on two collections of such documentation. The first of these is the Wiener Library reports. These documents, 356 in number, were collected in late 1938 and early 1939 by the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam. This organization and its archive were relocated to London later in 1939, and in 1946 was renamed the Wiener Library in honour of its founder, Alfred Wiener. The reports have been open to research for many de- cades, but have been used only sparingly by historians, perhaps because the Kristallnacht, despite its great notoriety, has itself been subjected to relatively little intensive historical research.7 In 2008, the Wiener Library published the original German texts of the reports in a volume of almost 1,000 pages.8 The second source that forms the basis of this chapter is a collection of texts submitted by German refugees in response to an essay contest organized by sociologist Edward Hartshorne of Harvard University in 1939. In 1940, Hartshorne assembled 34 of the essays for a volume he planned to publish about the Kristallnacht, Nazi Madness: November 1938. The book however, did not

5 Many are included in the Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel, eds., Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933-1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004). 6 For a summary of the postwar Kristallnacht trials see Steinweis, Kristallnacht, chapter 7. For a general history of post-war prosecutions for Nazi crimes before German courts, see Edith Raim, Justiz zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie: Wiederaufbau und Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen in Westdeutschland 1945-1949 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013). 7 Alan E. Steinweis, “The Historiography of the Kristallnacht,” in Violence, Memory, and History: Western Perceptions of Kristallnacht, ed. by Colin McCullough (New York: Routledge, 2015), 151-62. 8 Novemberpogrom 1938: Die Augenzeugenberichte der Wiener Library London, ed. Ben Bar- kow, Raphael Gross, and Michael Lenarz (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008), hereafter cited as Wiener Library Reports. In addition to page numbers in this volume, the report numbers will be cited here for readers wishing to consult the original documents in the Wiener Library in London.