From Kristallnacht 1938 (Allan E. Steinweis, 2009) pp13-5
These actions in Berlin were endorsed and encouraged by Joseph Goebbels, who, in addition to his position as Reich minister of propaganda, was also the long-serving Nazi gauleiter for the Reich capital. Goebbels detested the continued presence of large numbers of Jews in his city and hoped that the intimidation would help force them out. “We will make Berlin free of Jews,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “I won’t relent,” he pledged, adding, “our path is the right one.” In late June, however, Hitler compelled Goebbels to rein in the radical party activists. The Führer was concerned that the incidents in Berlin-which were impossible for foreign journalists and diplomats to overlook — might worsen Germany’s foreign policy situation at a time of rising international tension. On November 9, a similar scenario would play itself out, but with a much different result: this time Hitler would give his blessing to Goebbels’s push for anti-Jewish violence.
The terror to which German Jews were subjected in the late spring of 1938 was intensified by the so-called June Action. As political opposition inside Germany had been successfully neutralized, Nazi authorities were now increasingly turning their attention to other groups in German society that were regarded as objectionable. Between June 13 and 18, German police rounded up 10,000 Germans who were classified as “averse to work and asocial” and sent them to concentration camps. The arrests were legally justified as “preventive custody.” Among the targets were 1,500 Jews, many of whom fell into the dragnet because they had previously been convicted of a crime. This was the first time that the Nazi regime had rounded up a significant number of Jews and thrown them into camps. Most of the Jewish prisoners were still in the camps in November, when they were joined by a much larger number of Jews arrested during and immediately after the pogrom.
The second major international crisis of 1938 erupted in September, when Germany threatened war against Czechoslovakia. Ostensibly Hitler wanted to protect the rights of the ethnic German minority in the Sudetenland, but in actuality the Führer regarded the annexation of that region as the first step toward his intended goal of dismantling the Czechoslovak state. The possibility of a European war seemed very real before the crisis was defused by the now notorious Munich Agreement at the end of September. Millions of people around Europe and beyond were relieved that war had been averted, but fanatical Nazis inside Germany were disappointed and frustrated that the day of reckoning with the reviled Czechoslovak state had not come to pass. The outlet for their frustrations took the form of yet another wave of antisemitic violence inside the Reich.
Much of the unrest occurred in southern Germany. It was especially severe in Franconia, the satrapy of the virulently antisemitic gauleiter Julius Streicher. The Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), which was responsible for assessing public opinion in German society, described some of the violence as having the “character of a pogrom.” In the town of Bechhofen, local Nazis demanded that Jews evacuate their homes to make way for “Aryans.” When the Jews refused, they were physically hauled out of their homes, beaten, and forced to march through the town barefoot. In a scene that would be common during the Kristallnacht just a few weeks later, many ordinary townspeople, including children, joined the mob as it tormented the Jews.
The unrest in October was especially bad in Vienna. Having joined the Third Reich only the previous March, Austrian Nazis were eager to make up for lost time, and the rapid implementation of antisemitic measures there had been exceptionally cruel. The anti-Jewish riots of October fit into this pattern. In addition to a great number of attempted expulsions of Jews from their homes, there were numerous attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions. The attacks occurred daily through the end of October and the first week of November. The regularity of the antisemitic violence in Vienna in the weeks preceding the Kristallnacht may help explain why the pogrom itself took on such barbaric dimensions in that city.
In trying to make sense of the entire wave of antisemitic violence that followed the Sudeten Crisis, the Security Service highlighted one factor in particular. “The actions against the Jewish population,” it explained, “are partially the result of the fact that party members believed that the moment of the final resolution of the Jewish question had arrived.” This observation about the October violence could just as well apply to the November pogrom. Even most Nazis could hardly imagine the course that the Holocaust would take only a few short years into the future. Many of them imagined the great reckoning with the Jews not as a program of industrial mass murder but rather as a rising up of “the people” in a moment of violent catharsis-in other words, as a pogrom.
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