Turning Point

Synagogues were burned all over the Reich, Jewish shops were broken into, looted and burned, Jews were beaten, subjected to public humiliation, tortured, sent to concentration camps and, in some cases, murdered. While things had been bad enough already, with Jews legally segregated and stigmatized, and everywhere the legitimate target for playful Nazis, and while persecution was to climax in a then-unthinkable genocide, that night marked a decisive turning point, both for the Germans and the Jews. From then on, all but the blindest German and Austrian Jews knew they had to get out. The regime had both revealed and consolidated its murderous intentions by what was, in part, a symbolic act foreshadowing extermination.

Sir Martin Gilbert, best known as the leading biographer of Winston Churchill, but an extraordinarily prolific historian on Jewish topics as well as 20th century history, has contributed a book on the subject to the Making History series, which features events that make “a lasting impact on the unfolding course of history.” Kristallnacht was such an event, and known to be so from the time the sun came up the next day. To demonstrate this, however, requires Gilbert to tell two, in some ways quite separate, stories, which are linked by the experiences of the victims. The first is what happened on Kristallnacht, told for the most part from the viewpoint of Jewish survivors. The second is the desperate rush to the closing exits that continued, feebly, even after the war started in September 1939.

There is a difficulty that faces anyone who tackles this subject today. What horrified the civilized world (as Gilbert shows by his effective citations of British and American observers) was so overshadowed in retrospect by the dimensions of what we call the Holocaust that it may be hard for jaded readers to respond appropriately to violence that, after all, “only” involved less than a hundred deaths. Gilbert solves it by heaping eyewitness accounts upon each other, with the apparent artlessness of a mere chronicler. But what is at first a wild array of particulars, from hairbreadth escapes and the occasional principled and courageous German–such as the aristocratic district official Wichard von Bredow who, armed with a revolver, single-handedly drove off the SA gangs that had come to burn the local synagogue–to arrests, burnings, and beatings, begins to show comprehensible patterns, all the while involving the reader in the desperation and fear of the victims.

Here we see the details: The sinister politeness of the Gestapo, the meanness of property-grabbing neighbors, the broken feather bedding of one store soaking out on the street in the broken wine bottles of its neighbor.

Here, too, is the striking scene from Dresden, described by a local painter, at the burning of the Semper synagogue, where the Nazis dragged out some Jewish teachers, “forced crumpled top hats onto their heads and exhibited them to the baying crowd,” where “a well-dressed, grey-haired passerby” called out “Incredible, this is like the worst times of the Middle Ages!” only to be arrested. This is where the golden Star of David that crowned the synagogue was safe guarden by a German firefighter, who hid it until the end of the war. This is also where, when a few days later the remains of the synagogue were dynamited in the presence of a documentary film crew, “a local character” told the painter, “This fire will return! It will make a long curve and then come back to us.” (Uncharacteristically, Gilbert comments that “the fire was to come to Dresden six years and three months later.”)

We even get a few petty victories of the humiliated, such as the boy who, set to cleaning public toilets with a rag, managed to convince his captor that he didn’t know how, and got the pedantic Nazi to clean two urinals himself, just to teach him the right way to do it.

Here, as in much of his writing, Gilbert does little overt interpreting. He can, therefore, sometimes seem a bit superficial. But in this he follows in the footsteps of Thucydides, who does his interpretation, as his translator Thomas Hobbes pointed out, by the ordering and selection of his facts, only rarely by his own comments. For instance, in telling the emigration story, Gilbert frequently emphasizes the attainments and excellences of many of the refugees. So when later, deadpan, he recounts how a scheme to send thousands of Jews to Alaska fell before the anxious objections of the chambers of commerce of Anchorage and Juneau, we don’t need commentary; we reflect on the implications ourselves. True, the basic story of Kristallnacht is one of evil unleashed on innocence. But there are plenty of shades of gray to think about in the choices of the many interested observers, from the watching crowds to the watching nations.

Still, telling the story through the eyes of the victims has some drawbacks. Thus, when drawing lessons, Gilbert’s first is “that a whole nation can be turned totally and obscenely against a decent, hard-working, creative, loyal and integral part of its own society.” But to what extent was Kristallnacht the final catalyst to complete that process, and to what extent was it an expression of its completion? Gilbert reports that in the small town of Marktbreit-am-Main, the Nazis who showed up with a list of Jewish houses were strangers; presumably, the local Nazis weren’t trustworthy. My mother, who was in Hamburg during Kristallnacht, always said that the Nazi leadership there didn’t trust its own SA and had sent in thugs from Schleswig-Holstein. Was this true, or just a comforting illusion of the Hamburg Jews? Gilbert does not go into it; his story is not told from the Nazi viewpoint. Yet it would be worthwhile to know how sure of their own the Nazis were, or how much Kristallnacht was meant to create among Germans a fait accompli from which there could be no going back.

Again, Gilbert gives us many relevant details. We see the fire departments that tried to help and those that stood idly by, the police that only partly or wholly forfeited their responsibilities, the crowds of onlookers that variously cheered and participated, or stood by with (in the words of a British diplomatic observer) “the inane grin which often inadvertently betrays the guilty conscience,” or that, occasionally, watched glumly. We see the sadists given leave to indulge themselves and, in one case, the party members who twice refused to arrest their Jewish pal. But more evidence, on a larger scale, would have helped.

The second story, of the race to emigrate in the face of a largely indifferent, if not hostile, world, has been told before, but Gilbert does it powerfully. The usual villains are there, e.g., the State Department official Breckinridge Long, instructing embassy officials “to put every obstacle in the way and to . . . resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas” and Secretary of State Cordell Hull himself, who ably performed the same service at the policy level (for example, urging the Haitian government not to take in any more refugees).

Then there was the British official Patrick Reilly who wrote of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia to Poland, who now wanted to get to England: “A great many of these . . . are not in any sense political refugees, but Jews who panicked unnecessarily and need not have left.”

But there are heroes who are not as well known as they should be, particularly the British captain Frank Foley, the Chinese diplomat Feng Shan Ho (a Christian), the Swiss police commander Paul Grüninger, and the Portuguese consul general in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, all of whom bent and even broke the rules of their own governments just to save as many Jews as possible. Britain comes off particularly well in this account, and is justly praised for the famous evacuation of children, the Kindertransports. (I myself have reason to thank it for its attempt to solve the servant problem by giving refuge to young German Jewish women who would work as domestics, among them my mother.)

Britain’s craven immigration policy for Palestine is not, however, neglected. As for us, Gilbert emphasizes both the large total of eventual Jewish immigration to the United States and the unwillingness of top leadership, especially President Roosevelt, to overcome the short-range and local obstacles put up most memorably by those wretched Alaskan chambers of commerce. (Speaking of northern climes, the Canadians, especially the Québécois, come off quite badly.) While it is not one of the lessons Gilbert draws from his own account, what comes through most powerfully to me is the overwhelming human tendency not to inconvenience oneself in the slightest, even by changing everyday bureaucratic rules, in the face of someone else’s tragedy, and the accompanying capacity to rationalize indifference.

All those today, especially Jews of a progressive bent who, like the scholar Tony Judt, think that the disappearance of the Jewish state would mean a net increase in human progress, urgently need to reflect on this example. Would a humane world today offer refuge to millions of Israeli Jews fleeing a “binational” Hamas-run state? Want to count on it?

It is hard to know what kind of a reception a book like this will get today among its intellectual target audience. All around us we see, among progressives, unmistakable signs of Holocaust fatigue, even of irritation with the most impeccable historical reminders. Following Norman Finklestein, many express indignation about the Holocaust “industry” and display suspicion that all talk about it is just meant to justify Israeli “imperialism.”

Sir Martin Gilbert, however, is a true historian, and his real purpose is to record what can still be recorded. After the political lessons are drawn–the human costs of vengeful hatred on the one hand and feckless incomprehension and dawdling on the other, the need to recognize the former and take steps to deal with it early enough, and the enormous difficulties that arise in meeting that need–what remains most powerfully in memory is Gilbert’s testament to those heroic and decent people, Jews and Gentiles, who may have been overpowered but were not overwhelmed, like the pianist and conductor Leopold Birkenfeld, who organized an orchestra in the Lodz ghetto that played Schubert, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn to raise the spirits of their downtrodden audiences, or the 3,000 non-Jewish women, married to Jews, who demonstrated for a week in front of the building where their husbands were being held before deportation to Auschwitz.

Miraculously, Goebbels backed down and their husbands survived the war. Sometimes, courage does make a difference.

Fred Baumann is the Harry M. Clor professor of political science at Kenyon College.