Seventy-Five Years After Kristallnacht

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Seventy–five years ago, Nazis in Germany and Austria launched Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which was designed to intimidate German Jews.

Actually, it did a lot more than intimidate the Jews, I suppose, and I don't mean to belittle the significance of the event by using that word.

One can reach many conclusions about Kristallnacht's role in the Holocaust — whether it was truly the starting point for the Holocaust or merely another step in a process that had been under way for years (the persecution of the Jews, observes TIME magazine, was "already intense by the mid–1930s").

If it was the latter, it was a massively violent step and signaled more clearly than anything that had come before — to those who did not turn away and ignore what was happening, which was still a sizable number in 1938 — the Nazis' intention to eliminate the Jews from Europe. Synagogues were burned, Jewish schools, homes and businesses were vandalized, and nearly 100 Jews (men, women and children) were killed.

Some context is necessary here.

A few days earlier, a 17–year–old German Jewish refugee shot and killed the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris. "The youth's father had been among 10,000 deported to Poland in boxcars shortly before," wrote historian William Shirer, "and it was to revenge this and the general persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany that he went to the German embassy intending to kill the ambassador."

Instead, the third secretary was sent out to see what the young man wanted and paid with his life.

As Shirer observed, there was irony in the death of the third secretary — "[H]e had been shadowed by the Gestapo as a result of his anti–Nazi attitude," Shirer wrote. "[H]e had never shared the anti–Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country."

But it was used as the pretext for the Night of Broken Glass.

All through the night of Nov. 9–10, 1938, the sound of shattering glass could be heard throughout Germany and Austria as the Nazis carried out their search–and–destroy mission.

"According to Dr. (Joseph) Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a 'spontaneous' demonstration ... in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris," Shirer wrote. "But after the war, documents came to light which show how 'spontaneous' it was. They are among the most illuminating — and gruesome — secret papers of the prewar Nazi era."

Those papers revealed that it was Reinhard Heydrich — perhaps the main architect of the Holocaust and "the man with the iron heart," in Hitler's words — who was the "real organizer" of Kristallnacht, Shirer asserted.

On Nov. 9, Goebbels ordered that the "spontaneous demonstrations" were to be "organized and executed" during the night.

But Heydrich issued more specific instructions on how the demonstrations were to be organized:

• "Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to German life or property. (For instance, synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)"
• "Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted ..."
• "The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police."
• "As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons ... Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible."

The thing I found telling was that the numerous rapes on Kristallnacht were of greater concern to Nazi leaders than the killings — because it was a violation of the Nuremberg racial laws for Gentiles to have sex with Jews. That says a lot about the priorities of the Third Reich. The day after Kristallnacht, Heydrich made a preliminary confidential report:

"The extent of the destruction of Jewish shops and houses cannot yet be verified by figures ... 815 shops destroyed, 171 dwelling houses set on fire or destroyed only indicate a fraction of the actual damage so far as arson is concerned ... 119 synagogues were set on fire, and another 76 completely destroyed ... 20,000 Jews were arrested. 36 deaths were reported and those seriously injured were also numbered at 36. Those killed and injured are Jews."

In the story and timeline of the Third Reich, what was the significance of Kristallnacht? Was it a perpetuation of a policy that was already in place, or was it the introduction of a new and more sinister phase of the Third Reich's rule? The Los Angeles Times favors the latter, writing that Kristallnacht "marked the Nazis' transition from discrimination to genocide." Given the historical record, it was reasonable for BBC News to wonder recently "how strong is anti–Semitism in Germany?" The answer to that question is unclear, but Stephen Evans of BBC News writes that "[w]hat does seem to be clear is that anti–Semitism is rising in Germany."

Evans cited figures from the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an anti–racism organization, that reported more than 800 attacks on Jews in Germany in 2011. The number was more than 850 last year. The trend has continued this year; figures show 409 attacks in the first half of 2013. Not all the attacks have been physical; some have been verbal.

Makes me wonder if civilization has learned anything in the last 75 years.

When Did the Holocaust Begin?

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I've been studying history most of my life, and I think I have a pretty good understanding of things that have happened and how they have influenced the days, months and years that followed.

Some events in history are easy to pinpoint — like battles. You know when they began. You know when they ended. You know how many people were killed and how many people were injured.

Same with presidential administrations. With few exceptions, a presidential administration spreads over several years; when all is said and done, you know when a president's tenure began and when it ended.

Other events are harder to nail down. When, for example, did the Great Depression begin? Was it when the stock market crashed in 1929? Or did it really begin with events that happened before that? Or after that? I've heard historians engage in lively debates on that one.

The Holocaust is kind of the same way, really.

Some people will tell you that the Holocaust began with laws that systematically segregated Jews from the rest of German society, the most noteworthy of those being the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, or with the establishment of the labor camps, which did not come into existence as the temporary homes of Jews who had been selected for extermination (the image that many in the early 21st century have of the Nazi camps) but rather were intended to squeeze as much labor out of each prisoner as possible.

Others will tell you that the Holocaust began when hostilities did — when the Nazis conquered Poland and France.

And, while some scholars prefer to define only Jewish casualties as victims of the Holocaust, others include all victims — not just Jews but Soviets, Poles, homosexuals, the disabled and others as well — which affects the parameters of that period in history as well as the actual number of victims.

The timeline that tracks the history of the Holocaust is not always clear, even after nearly three–quarters of a century. Concentration camps were part of the Third Reich from the beginning, but, originally, they were not designed for extermination. Many prisoners did die in them but primarily from being worked to death or being killed after being overcome with fatigue.

Mass extermination was a concept that was still in the future.

In the view of many, I suppose, January 20 of this year was the 70th anniversary of the actual birth of the Holocaust as we have come to know it — the approval of the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish question."

It was on that occasion that the Wannsee Conference was held. More than a dozen Nazi leaders gathered to discuss the implementation of the "Final Solution," and the conversion of concentration camps to extermination camps began in earnest.

Some concentration camps continued to serve as concentration camps, which were understood to be places where the prisoners were forced to work for the Third Reich. The deaths of prisoners under such circumstances were regarded as acceptable — albeit unintended — consequences. Collateral damage, you might say.

Extermination camps, on the other hand, were places where prisoners were not expected to live long after their arrival. Those camps were designed to carry out mass killings with almost assembly line–like precision.

But, from all outward appearances, one camp looked remarkably like the next — with the possible exceptions of the huge ovens and gas chambers that were on some properties but not on others. And in the winter and spring of 1942, some camps required physical conversions to prepare them for their new roles.

There were also changes in administrative procedures that were being implemented, the most significant of which may well have been what happened at Auschwitz 70 years ago tomorrow.

In a meeting in Berlin, Heinrich Himmler and three others made the decision on that day to begin medical experimentation on women prisoners at Auschwitz and to look into conducting similar experiments on males.

It was probably a natural step in the evolution of the Third Reich, considering that the experiments that were to be conducted were little more than torture — hardly legitimate scientific experiments.

Without going into too much detail, the experiments observed the physical reactions of people who were subjected to conditions and circumstances that would certainly result in their deaths. Of that, there was no doubt.

(The experiments included things like performing amputations on the subjects, testing drugs on them, freezing them, forcing them to drink nothing but sea water and injecting chemicals into eyes to alter their color.

(In William Shirer's rather stately language in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," the experiments yielded "no benefit to science." Talk about an understatement.)

Nevertheless, while those experiments may have been given a fallacious label of legitimacy that permitted the doctors to put their ethics on a shelf, they seem to have ushered in the period when the Nazis as a group went past the point of no return — when they stopped merely mistreating their prisoners and began focusing on more efficient ways to kill them.

After the war, these abuses were addressed in the Doctors' Trial, one of the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials" in which primarily medical doctors were accused of human experimentation and mass murder under the pretense of mercy killings.

That, at least, was how the doctors justified their actions — their experiments would benefit medical science, and sometimes the merciful thing was to kill their involuntary subjects when the experiment was concluded.

The wholesale killing that would forever stain this time in history had not really begun in earnest 70 years ago.

But the fact that Himmler and his colleagues even considered experimenting on humans — never mind actually sanctioning such a policy — is all the proof one needs that the Holocaust happened ... although there is so much more.

The mindset was in place.

It is bad enough to entertain the thought of human experimentation, but when the thought is given the legitimacy of law, it is no longer a considerable leap to implementation.

It is a very short step.

Hitler's House of Horrors

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Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It is the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz in January 1945.

It was actually a system — a network, if you will — of camps in parts of Poland. It was the largest of the German concentration camps and arguably the most notorious.

The Nazis, history tells us, committed all kinds of atrocities.

Not every atrocity for which they were responsible was committed in every place — but all the repugnant, barbaric, offensive acts ever committed by the Nazis were committed within the walls of Auschwitz — mass murder, human medical experimentation, slave labor, everything. It all happened at Auschwitz.

It is virtually impossible to document how many people were killed at Auschwitz, but the figure that has been agreed upon by most is 1.1 million. In the process of arriving at that figure, the number tended to vary considerably, a point that has often been seized upon by those who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred.

Most such denials have been discredited.

When the camp was liberated by the Russians, one of those liberated prisoners was a man named Elie Wiesel, a writer and, eventually, a Nobel Prize winner who had been, the Nobel committee said, a "messenger to mankind."

On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Wiesel gave a speech there, saying, "Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger."

Those are the words of one who has gazed into the gaping jaws of hell — and, somehow, has survived.