Kristallnacht Prelude to Destruction Chapter One The Night of Broken Glass On 18 October 1938, on Hitler's orders, more than 12,000 Jews were expelled from Germany. They were Polish-born Jews who had been living in Germany, legally, for many years. They were ordered to leave their homes in a single night, and were allowed to take with them only one suitcase each. As these Jews were taken away, everything they had earned and accumulated in Germany during ten, twenty, even thirty years, their furniture, cutlery, linen, beds, stoves, books, was seized as booty, both by the Nazi authorities and, in hundreds of recorded instances, by their neighbours. The 12,000 expellees were taken from their homes under the guns and bayonets of the Gestapo to the nearest railway stations, where they were put on trains to the Polish border. Four thousand were accepted by Poland. But 8,000, denied entry into Poland, were forced to stay at the border, at least 7,000 of them on the cold stone floors of the Polish border station of Zbaszyn, and in nearby stables. There, in harsh conditions, they waited for the Polish government to agree to take them in. Hundreds more, one British newspaper told its readers, 'are reported to be lying about, penniless and deserted, in little villages along the frontier near where they had been driven out by the Gestapo and left'. 1 'I have in my notebook,' wrote a British journalist from Zbaszyn, 'the name of a ninety-three-year-old woman who was among those driven into Poland, and also that of a blind man of seventy-six from Hanover, who was not allowed to take even a handkerchief with him.' 2 While the authorities in Poland hesitated to give entry permits, the expellees at Zbaszyn waited, hungry, distressed, confused and angry. At least five committed suicide. One expelled couple, who had been living in Hanover for more than twenty-seven years, had a seventeen-year-old son, Herschel Grynszpan, living in Paris. From the border his sister Berta sent him a postcard describing their expulsion: 'No one told us what was up, but we realised this was going to be the end.' Her final appeal: 'We haven't a penny. Could you send us something . . . ?' Herschel Grynszpan received his sister's short but anguished message on November 3. On the following day he read a graphic account of the deportations in a Paris Yiddish newspaper, which reported a number of instances of insanity and suicide among the expellees. Grynszpan was outraged. On the morning of Sunday, November 6 he bought a pistol, loaded it with five bullets, and on the following day went by Metro to the German Embassy. His plan was to kill the Ambassador. After telling the doorman that he had 'an important document' to deliver, he was sent to the room of the Third Secretary, Ernst vom Rath. 'Did you have an important document to give me?' vom Rath asked. Drawing his pistol, Grynszpan called out: 'You are a filthy Boche and here, in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, is your document.' 3 Grynszpan fired five shots. Two of them hit vom Rath but did not kill him. One of the diplomat's injuries, however, was grave in the extreme, and he was rushed to the nearest clinic. As soon as Hitler learned of the shooting he ordered his personal physician, Dr Brandt, to fly to Paris, together with the director of the clinic of Munich University. The two physicians left shortly after midnight on November 7. In Germany, the morning newspapers on November 8 denounced the Jewish people as murderers. They pointed out, as proof of an ongoing Jewish campaign against Nazi Germany, that three years earlier a German Jew, David Frankfurter, had shot and killed Wilhelm Gustloff, head of the Nazi organisation of Germans resident in Switzerland. The German morning newspapers also drew attention to the fact that eleven years before Gustloff 's assassination, in the same Paris where Grynszpan had shot vom Rath, a Polish Jew, Samuel Schwarzbart, had shot and killed the Ukrainian Simon Petliura, whose soldiers had murdered tens of thousands of Jews in the Ukraine immediately after the First World War. During November 8 the first collective punitive measures were announced. All Jewish newspapers and magazines must cease publication forthwith. This ban cut off the Jews from their most accessible contact with their leadership, whose task was to advise and guide them, especially on matters of emigration. It was a measure, one British newspaper explained, 'intended to disrupt the Jewish community and rob it of the last frail ties which hold it together'. There were at that time three German Jewish newspapers with a national circulation, four cultural papers, several sports papers, and several dozen community bulletins, of which the one in Berlin had a circulation of 40,000. Also on November 8 it was announced that Jewish children could no longer attend 'Aryan' state elementary schools, something that had hitherto been allowed where there were not sufficient Jewish elementary schools. At the same time all Jewish cultural activities were suspended 'indefinitely'. 4 A violent mass action against the Jews had been in the minds of the Nazi leaders for some time. As vom Rath lay gravely wounded, the moment seemed to have come to bring existing plans into instant readiness. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the leading Jewhaters of the Third Reich—deputy head under Heinrich Himmler of the Gestapo and the SS, with responsibility for the concentration camps—was about to have a moment of glory. November 8 saw a number of outbursts of what the Minister of Propaganda, Dr Josef Goebbels, a Jew-hater in the Heydrich mould, called 'spontaneous demonstrations' against the Jews of Germany. In London it was reported that a synagogue had been 'burned to the ground' at Hersfeld in Hesse, 'the second to be destroyed in that region in twenty-four hours'. 5 Another British newspaper wrote of reports that night from both Kassel and Vienna 'that the windows of Jewish shops have been broken', and . . . Kristallnacht Prelude to Destruction . Copyright © by Martin Gilbert. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction by Martin Gilbert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
