The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (87 page)

W
ITHIN TEN DAYS
of affixing his signature to the Munich Agreement—before even the peaceful military occupation of the Sudetenland had been completed—Adolf Hitler got off an urgent top-secret message to General Keitel, Chief of OKW.

1. What reinforcements are necessary in the present situation to break all Czech resistance in
Bohemia
and
Moravia
?

2. How much time is required for the regrouping or moving up of new forces?

3. How much time will be required for the same purpose if it is executed after the intended demobilization and return measures?

4. How much time would be required to achieve the state of readiness of October 1?
¹

Keitel shot back to the Fuehrer on October 11 a telegram giving detailed answers. Not much time and not very many reinforcements would be necessary. There were already twenty-four divisions, including three armored and four motorized, in the Sudeten area. “OKW believes,” Keitel stated, “that it would be possible to commence operations without reinforcements, in view of the present signs of weakness in Czech resistance.”
²

Thus assured, Hitler communicated his thoughts to his military chiefs ten days later.

The future tasks for the armed forces and the preparations for the conduct of war resulting from these tasks will be laid down by me in a later directive.

Until this directive comes into force the armed forces must be prepared at all times for the following eventualities:

1. The securing of the frontiers of Germany.
   

2. The liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
   

3. The occupation of the
   Memel
   district.
   

Memel, a Baltic port of some forty thousand inhabitants, had been lost by Germany to
Lithuania
after Versailles. Since Lithuania was smaller and weaker than Austria
and Czecho
slovakia
, the seizure of the town presented no problem to the Wehrmacht and in this directive Hitler merely mentioned that it would be “annexed.” As for Czechoslovakia:

   It must be possible to smash at any time the remainder of Czechoslovakia if her policy should become hostile toward Germany.

The preparations to be made by the armed forces for this contingency will be considerably smaller in extent than those for “Green”; they must, however, guarantee a considerably higher state of preparedness since planned mobilization measures have been dispensed with. The organization, order of battle and state of readiness of the units earmarked for that purpose are in peacetime to be so arranged for a surprise assault that Czechoslovakia herself will be deprived of all possibility of organized resistance. The object is the swift occupation of
Bohemia
and
Moravia
and the cutting off of Slovakia.
³

   Slovakia, of course, could be cut off by political means, which might make the use of German troops unnecessary. For this purpose the German Foreign Office was put to work. All through the first days of October, Ribbentrop and his aides urged the Hungarians to press for their share of the spoils in Slovakia. But when Hungary, which hardly needed German prodding to whet its greedy appetite, spoke of taking Slovakia outright, the Wilhelmstrasse put its foot down. It had other plans for the future of this land. The Prague government had already, immediately after Munich, granted Slovakia a far-reaching autonomy. The German Foreign Office advised “tolerating” this solution for the moment. But for the future the German thinking was summed up by Dr. Ernst Woermann, director of the Political Department of the Foreign Office, in a memorandum of October 7. “An independent Slovakia,” he wrote, “would be weak constitutionally and would therefore best further the German need for penetration and settlement in the East.”
⁴

Here is a new turning point for the Third Reich. For the first time Hitler is on the verge of setting out to conquer non-Germanic lands. Over the last six weeks he had been assuring Chamberlain, in private and in public, that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe. And though the British Prime Minister was gullible almost beyond comprehension in accepting Hitler’s word, there was some ground for his believing that the German dictator would halt when he had digested the Germans who previously had dwelt outside the Reich’s frontier and were now within it. Had not the Fuehrer repeatedly said that he wanted no Czechs in the Third Reich? Had he not in
Mein Kampf
and in countless public speeches reiterated the Nazi theory that a Germany, to be strong, must be racially pure and therefore must not take in foreign, and especially Slav, peoples? He had. But also—and perhaps this was forgotten in London—he had preached in many a turgid page in
Mein Kampf
that
Germany’s future lay in conquering
Lebensraum
in the East. For more than a millennium this space had been occupied by the
Slavs
.

In the autumn of 1938 another turning point for Nazi Germany was reached. It took place during what was later called in party circles the “Week of the Broken Glass.”

On November 7, a seventeen-year-old German Jewish refugee by the name of Herschel Grynszpan shot and mortally wounded the third secretary of the German Embassy in
Paris
, Ernst vom Rath. The youth’s father had been among ten thousand Jews deported to Poland in boxcars shortly before, 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, Count Johannes von Welczeck. But the young third secretary was sent out to see what he wanted, and was shot. There was irony in Rath’s death, because he had been shadowed by the Gestapo as a result of his anti-Nazi attitude; for one thing, he had never shared the anti-Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country.

On the night of November 9–10, shortly after the party bosses, led by Hitler and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in the Third Reich occurred. According to Dr. Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a “spontaneous” demonstration of the German people in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris. But after the war, documents came to light which show how “spontaneous” it was.
⁵
They are among the most illuminating—and gruesome—secret papers of the prewar Nazi era.

On the evening of November 9, according to a secret report made by the chief party judge, Major Walther Buch, Dr. Goebbels issued instructions that “spontaneous demonstrations” were to be “organized and executed” during the night. But the real organizer was Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister thirty-four-year-old Number Two man, after Himmler, in the S.S., who ran the Security Service (S.D.) and the Gestapo. His teletyped orders during the evening are among the captured German documents.

At 1:20
A.M
. on November 10 he flashed an urgent teletype message to all headquarters and stations of the state police and the S.D. instructing them to get together with party and S.S. leaders “to discuss the organization of the demonstrations.”

   
a
. 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.)
^*

b
. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted….

d….
2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police …

         5. 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.

   It was a night of horror throughout Germany. Synagogues, Jewish homes and shops went up in flames and several Jews, men, women and children, were shot or otherwise slain while trying to escape burning to death. A preliminary confidential report was made by Heydrich to Goering on the following day, November 11.

   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….

   The ultimate number of murders of Jews that night is believed to have been several times the preliminary figure. Heydrich himself a day after his preliminary report gave the number of Jewish shops looted as 7,500. There were also some cases of rape, which Major Buch’s party court, judging by its own report, considered worse than murder, since they violated the Nuremberg racial laws which forbade sexual intercourse between Gentiles and Jews. Such offenders were expelled from the party and turned over to the civil courts. Party members who simply murdered Jews “cannot be punished,” Major Buch argued, since they had merely carried out orders. On that point he was quite blunt. “The public, down to the last man,” he wrote, “realizes that political drives like those of November 9 were organized and directed by the party, whether this is admitted or not.”
^*

Murder and arson and pillage were not the only tribulations suffered by innocent German Jews as the result of the murder of Rath in Paris. The Jews had to pay for the destruction of their own property. Insurance
monies due them were confiscated by the State. Moreover, they were subjected, collectively, to a fine of one billion marks as punishment, as Goering put it, “for their abominable crimes, etc.” These additional penalties were assessed at a grotesque meeting of a dozen German cabinet ministers and ranking officials presided over by the corpulent Field Marshal on November 12, a partial stenographic record of which survives.

A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they were to make good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, though they harbored Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damaged goods. The destruction in broken window glass alone came to five million marks ($1,250,000) as a
Herr Hilgard
, who had been called in to speak for the insurance companies, reminded Goering; and most of the glass replacements would have to be imported from abroad in foreign exchange, of which Germany was very short.

“This cannot continue!” exclaimed Goering, who, among other things, was the czar of the German economy. “We won’t be able to last, with all this. Impossible!” And turning to Heydrich, he shouted, “I wish you had killed two hundred Jews instead of destroying so many valuables!”
^*

“Thirty-five were killed,” Heydrich answered, in self-defense.

Not all the conversation, of which the partial stenographic record runs to ten thousand words, was so deadly serious. Goering and Goebbels had a lot of fun arguing about subjecting the Jews to further indignities. The Propaganda Minister said the Jews would be made to clean up and level off the debris of the synagogues; the sites would then be turned into parking lots. He insisted that the Jews be excluded from everything: schools, theaters, movies, resorts, public beaches, parks, even from the German forests. He proposed that there be special railway coaches and compartments for the Jews, but that they be made available only after all Aryans were seated.

“Well, if the train is overcrowded,” Goering laughed, “we’ll kick the Jew out and make him sit all alone all the way in the toilet.”

When Goebbels, in all seriousness, demanded that the Jews be forbidden to enter the forests, Goering replied, “We shall give the Jews a certain part of the forest and see to it that various animals that look damned much like Jews—the elk has a crooked nose like theirs—get there also and become acclimated.”

In such talk, and much more like it, did the leaders of the Third Reich while away the time in the crucial year of 1938.

But the question of who was to pay for the 25 million marks’ worth of damage caused by a pogrom instigated and organized by the State was a fairly serious one, especially to Goering, who now had become responsible for the economic well-being of Nazi Germany. Hilgard, on behalf of the insurance companies, pointed out that if their policies were not honored to the Jews, the confidence of the people, both at home and abroad, in
German insurance would be forfeited. On the other hand, he did not see how many of the smaller companies could pay up without going broke.

This problem was quickly solved by Goering. The insurance companies would pay the Jews in full, but the sums would be confiscated by the State and the insurers reimbursed for a part of their losses. This did not satisfy Herr Hilgard, who, judging by the record of the meeting, must have felt that he had fallen in with a bunch of lunatics.

   G
OERING
: The Jew shall get the refund from the insurance company but the refund will be confiscated. There will remain some profit for the insurance companies, since they won’t have to make good for all the damage. Herr Hilgard, you may consider yourself damned lucky.

   H
ILGARD
: I have no reason to. The fact that we won’t have to pay for all the damage, you call a profit!

   The Field Marshal was not accustomed to such talk and he quickly squelched the bewildered businessman.

   G
OERING
: Just a moment! If you are legally bound to pay five millions and all of a sudden an angel in my somewhat corpulent shape appears before you and tells you that you may keep one million, for heaven’s sake isn’t that a profit? I should like to go fifty-fifty with you, or whatever you call it. I have only to look at you. Your whole body seethes with satisfaction. You are getting a big rake-off!