Kristallnacht, 79 Years Later.
November 9th, 1938.
In the late hours of that day, streets of cities across Germany erupted into anti-Semitic violence. The Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sturmabteilung (SA), acting on an order from Hitler himself, marched into the Jewish quarter of every town and wreaked destruction, while Hitler’s shadow-bureaucracy pulled the strings from above. Synagogues burned. Jewish-owned shops were vandalized and looted, their fractured display windows littering the sidewalks with glass. And, throughout Germany, the homes of Jewish families were systematically raided, robbed, and in many cases, razed to the ground.
Far from resisting, many fanatical Germans took part in the horror. In Esslingen, Nazi party members stormed a Jewish orphanage, threw books and religious insignia and children’s belongings into massive bonfires, and eventually burned the orphanage itself, leaving the children shivering in the cold autumn darkness. Hitler Youth members marched into Jewish cemeteries with sledgehammers and smashed the gravestones, in some cases exhuming the bodies, and the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass shook otherwise quiet residential streets nationwide as opportunistic neighbors took “revenge” on the Jewish families in their neighborhoods. Normal Germans, even the majority that disapproved, stayed locked in their homes, powerless. To speak against the pogrom would brand them as traitors, landing them in front of a judge for a sham-trial and then a sentencing to Buchenwald or Dachau, where they’d be labeled political dissidents and forced to perform backbreaking labor in starvation conditions.
The sunrise of November 10th highlighted a Germany ablaze. Where there were once homes, there was now ash. Sidewalks were crowded out by debris, remnants of the night’s destruction. In Berlin, where streets had become nigh impassable by the shards of shattered glass from destroyed Jewish storefronts, people started to call the pogrom Kristallnacht: the night of broken glass.
Thousands of Jews were forced to flee their ancestral homes, piling into trains headed for Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Vienna. They carried little, their possessions stolen and their livelihoods burned. The many who didn’t or couldn’t leave cowered behind locked doors, terrified of leaving their homes for days after the pogrom. Almost thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and Nazi reports recorded that over a hundred had been killed (a number that almost-definitely is a drastic underestimate, at the minimum discounting the three hundred that committed suicide on seeing their lives destroyed).
For the Third Reich, Kristallnacht had been an unadulterated success. They had successfully fomented and executed a nationwide campaign of unbridled destructive fury against the Jews, extrajudicially detaining and murdering hundreds of them, and they hadn’t encountered any meaningful resistance. This emboldened the Nazis tremendously, and from here, it’s not hard to see the regime’s progression to the mass detention of Jews in Poland and Russia, the complete segregation and deprivation of Jews in all occupied territories, and eventually, in its last genocidal burst, the rise of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno, where almost three million Jews were systematically shot, gassed, or deliberately worked to death between 1943 and 1945.
The road to Kristallnacht, however, is a bit murkier, and is tied into a much broader question: how did the virulent anti-Semitism of the 1930s take such a hold in Germany? In the early postwar years, the central theory, advanced by the likes of William Shirer, was that the rise of militant anti-Semitism of the Nazis was a phenomenon unique to Germany itself: that Germany was unable to escape the dead weight of its history, and the long, prolific legacy of German anti-Semitism made the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust inevitable. This theory has a number of issues, the most prominent of which is that history rarely obeys neatly presented teleology, and attempting to fit it to an overarching narrative two major problems: first, it neglects the active decision of people in advancing anti-Jewish ideologies, and second, it discounts how completely unexpected the rise of Hitler was within and without Germany.
Indeed, it’s naive to believe that the anti-Semitism of the 1930s was somehow a phenomenon unique to Germany. Germany did have a long legacy of anti-Semitism and monarchic rule, but so did the rest of Europe. The first modern Jewish expulsion was actually done by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, and in the early 1900s, almost every nation had anti-Jewish strictures implemented in law. The Nazis also were one of many parties in the late Weimar Republic with anti-Semitic views, and actually, they were repeatedly forced to reduce their anti-Semitic rhetoric in the late 1920s/early 1930s for broader appeal. To say that Germany was somehow uniquely anti-Jewish, or that a catastrophe as large as the Holocaust could only happen in Germany, is a fallacy.
And yet, it’s one we hear constantly. After years of movies and books and propaganda, Hitler in the American cultural consciousness has been transformed in to a cartoon villain; an enigmatic evil, born of Satan himself, who launched a campaign of unrepentant murder upon the world. America’s role as the victor, and the ethos of the incurably optimistic 1950s that followed, led to the transformation of the Second World War from a conflict against the dangers of sectarianism and jingoism into a moral crusade against the singularly evil, one-dimensional, Nazis. The subsequent transition to the Cold War era, with its black and white moralities, completely buried all realistic understanding of how the Holocaust came to be under a mountain of propaganda.
And now, just past the seventy-ninth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the rise of the Third Reich has become a remote topic, one we reflect on as an example of human cruelty but not one we apply to our own reality. It’s too alien, too different, too far in the past to feel real to us. It seems that we’ve lost the essential truth: that a seed of sectarianism, unchecked by morality, can be the fount of unparalleled horror. It’s a deeply resounding loss in a world that’s starting to see the same nationalistic fervor as Germany did in the 1920s, the same sort of populism and undermining of democratic institutions that wrought so much destruction.
We know that if they [the Jews] come to power our heads will roll in the sand, but we also know that when we get our hands on power: “Then God have mercy on you!”
Adolf Hitler, 1923
That quote is from 1923, an important year for Germany. It’s the year Julius Streicher began The Stormer, the anti-Semitic newspaper that continued publication through 1945. It’s the year Hitler began Mein Kampf, his garbled, nearly unreadable personal manifesto about how the Jews are the perpetual antagonist of the German people, and racial struggle against them was the only noble goal of civilized man. It’s the year Hitler met Hermann Goring, who became an immediate ally, eventually standing next to Hitler atop the Nazi political structure. And, above all, it’s the year Hitler rallied two thousand Nazi party members, marched into Munich, and declared himself in putsch.
The Beer Hall Putsch, as it would later be known, failed. Hitler was arrested, the Nazis were broken up, and the Weimar Republic persisted. But it’s significant because it’s the day Nazism proclaimed themselves and their views of authoritarian dictatorship, vehement jingoism, and homicidal anti-Semitism to Germany, to the world — and Germany shrugged.
Hitler was given a five year sentence because, the court decreed, he was led by a “pure patriotic spirit and the most noble will.” He served nine months, and on release, returned to the business of breaking the world.
Why didn’t anyone care? Why was it that not only did Hitler go free, but he was able to return, rebuild his party from the ashes of a failed coup, and lead them to absolute power? The central reason was fear. Fear of humiliation by the hands of foreign powers once more, who’d neutered Germany’s economic and military power, and crippled it with the arduous yoke of reparations payments. Fear of the Bolsheviks and Socialists and radicals who sought to take what little property people had. And above all, it was the fear of starving, and being cast out of their homes and onto the unforgiving streets. For years of hyper-inflation and economic paralysis had nurtured a deep rooted sense of economic and personal insecurity that the well-intentioned but corrupt and ineffectual Weimar state was unable to resolve. And throughout the 20s, this feeling only worsened, as economic opportunity continued to contract while the government became ever more deadlocked.
When a nation is ruled by fear, when a people lack confidence in their own state in the world, where do they turn? The look outwards, searching for a reason, an outrage: something to blame. And that’s what Hitler gave them. He’d stand on his podium before an ever-growing audience and shout at Versailles and the allies for destroying Germany. He’d furiously rage against the Bolsheviks and Communists attacking Germany from within, taking the power away from the common man. And above all, he blamed the Jews. In Hitler’s mind, the Jews were the drivers of a vast international conspiracy to exploit and subjugate the German people. He heaped vitriol on them for the German failure in the First World War, and he said they and they alone polluted the true “Aryan” Germans and kept them bogged in the mud.
He gave the gave the downtrodden undercurrent of Germany a voice, and people were only too willing to listen.
Did that description of Germany sound familiar at all? It should’ve. Fascism, in general, takes certain forms that tend to broadly repeat themselves across history, and some of those seem to be resurfacing in modern America.
The core of fascism is always a central enlightened leader who can do no wrong, and who seizes absolute power for themselves. They’re usually a political outsider that rises from an extremist segment of party, and they use this status to rail against the corruption of the current establishment. Hitler, for example, was considered a political outsider, and many of his votes were protest votes, coming from people exasperated by the current establishment that he promised to overthrow. Similarly, Trump repeatedly made clear that he abhorred Washington, and Congress, and the neoliberal centrism of political mainstream, and stated a vote for him was a vote against that establishment: a vote to “drain the swamp.”
Fascism has also always been centrally linked to demagoguery. Hitler was consistently known for this. He gave strident, bold speeches, but couched his promises in vagueness. He never compromised: every proclamation was an absolute, every judgement was black or white (a certain Obi-Wan quote comes to mind). This is incredibly evocative of speeches Trump gave at his rallies when he ran for election. Every speech was loud and quotable, but lacked specificity. Trump had many slogans and tag-lines and rallying cries, but never gave serious policy suggestions. This was by intention. He created fervor, against liberals, against cultural relativism, against globalism, against the now, and used that to create fanatical support, but didn’t create specific policies that his opposition could anchor their dissent around.
And that brings us to the last point: fascist leaders always pine for a before, where “things” were “right,” before the world became “broken.” “Make American Great Again” is the epitome of this. Hitler, while he never did say “Make Germany Great Again,” drew his support from many former monarchal-conservatives and royalists who abhorred the parliamentary democracy forced on them. The “before” that Hitler referred to was the Wilhelmine Reich; for Trump, it has been the 1950s, when coal was big and provided for flyover America, when subversive liberalism was kept in its corner, and the powerful were white and male.
That last clause is important, because almost every statement from a demagogue venerating a past era is tinged with racism. Hitler was explicit with this: he blamed the Jews for the corruption of the now. In almost every speech, he railed against the International Jewry, conspiring against the Germans and the “Aryan” people. Trump is less explicit, probably to retain less fanatical supporters, but his message is no less apparent. He’s made awful statements about police brutality against blacks, he publicly insulted the parents of a Muslim war veteran, and he openly wishes for the world to return to an era when an entire race of people were subjugated and discriminated against. Racial and ethnic tensions, the core of every inter-generational culture war, arouse passion and are inherently divisive. Using them is a central part of assembling that fanatical following that every fascist depends on.
But while the patterns of fascism broadly repeat themselves, history in general does not. And indeed, it is fallacious to equate modern America with the Germany of the 1930s.
To start, the Weimar Republic is distinctly different from American government. The Weimar Republic was a government foisted on the Germans by catastrophic military defeat, and entering 1933, was the face almost two decades of economic hardship and governmental incompetence. American democracy, flawed as it may be, has stable and entrenched institutions, buoyed up by two hundred years of political tradition, and Americans still have faith in their electoral institutions.
And more importantly, Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by a mass of political violence, which by the late 1920s had become a central facet of the political culture of Weimar politics. Every major political party had their own paramilitary organization: the Nazi party commanded the SA, the left-leaning Social Democrats allied with the Reichsbanner, competing right-wing parties had the massive Steel Helmets, composed of disenfranchised World War I veterans. Many others also existed, and their clashes were regular and constant. Hitler quite literally assaulted his opponents and forced them to abdicate their opposition.
America, on the other hand, has protests and social unrest, but the primary form of political demonstration is peaceful. Sure, we have occasional politically motivated violence, but it’s perpetrated by fringe extremists like Antifa or the KKK, and it’s censured by all sides of the spectrum. Indeed, America’s greatest achievement is that partisan politics has never resulted in this establishment-sponsored and driven form of political violence, and I believe this tradition will endure.
All things considered, it’s unlikely America will fall backwards into dictatorship from Trump alone. Our institutions have weathered greater tensions, and we still have a solid core of republican faith that will not be so easily turned to a demagogue.
But all things start somewhere, and the events of the past year are forming a dangerous trend, where growing ideological polarization is opening deeper divides in society. Leftists and conservatives, urban dwellers and rural farmers, educated coastal liberals and soon-to-be-automated factory workers, all are aligning themselves against each other, forming the cores of two oppositional political forces that constantly clash. Globalization has created a gulf in American society, which is reflecting itself in our culture and our politics and our society.
Every characteristic of fascism described above, at its core, aims to exploit the divisions inherent in a heterogenous society. It widens the gulfs between people and exploits their narrow-minded passions to promote autocracy and xenophobia. This can happen within a democracy; indeed, fascism tends mostly to rise from democracies, which, in allowing political opposition, also allow for the growth of demagogic populism.
Democracies depend a great deal upon a complex system of dependency between governmental branches, and this leaves them weak to executives with popular backing. We’ve seen this before, when Andrew Jackson used his overwhelmingly popularity to overrule the legitimate rulings of the Supreme Court to forcibly remove the Cherokee into Oklahoma. And we’re seeing it now, with the ineffectiveness of the courts and the legislature (and in general, the people) in checking the power of Trump.
And so, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, and in the general, the cynical transformation of ethnic and racial tensions into a top-down, government-imposed, system of discrimination and segregation and subjugation, is not nearly as remote a possibility as we imagine it to be. Discriminatory laws, scapegoat-creating propaganda, radicalized, fanatical populism, destructive racial pogroms, and aggressive, nationalist foreign posturing, the policies that formed the core of Nazi rule, have happened over and over again throughout history, and can happen again. We have to always be vigilant, ready to resist governmental and personal overreach, and prevent the undermining of our globalized, heterogenous democracy through jingoism and hate. For the result of these policies, taken to their logical extreme, is always Auschwitz and Treblinka and genocide and death.
I don’t mean to turn the greatest tragedy in a century littered with horrible tragedies into a simple call-to-action. For the Holocaust, when studied, when truly studied, isn’t something that arouses fervor: it brings about disgust, and horror, and above all, despair. It makes you appalled that man ever was capable of performing such terrible things to fellow man. It makes you appreciate that we live in a place that where such things feel remote and unimaginable.
Because while Nazism has been clearly defeated, and will never rise again, the world itself is still prone to petty sectarian violence, and man has not improved very much in his treatment of fellow man. Look at Yemen today, where thousands are rendered refugees by a proxy war between two religious rivals. Or look at Congo, where exploitative Belgian colonization created a country that was impoverished and uneducated, and left it to suffer under forty years of kleptocratic rule and ethnic conflict. And so many others. The same things that motivated the Holocaust still exist in the world today, if you keep your eyes open.
It’s a tautology to say that the world hasn’t improved; that there still exists much evil; that man is still man. But when we give into this cynicism: when we, from our positions of unearned privilege, ignore the world, we become bystanders, complicit in the wrongs that are wrought by others.
The vigilance I discussed earlier is an active vigilance. It’s the vigilance of a people that consider suffering to be unnatural, that fight to make it nonexistent. It’s the vigilance of those that try to rise above the default self-centeredness that governs most of our lives. It’s the cry of a generation that neither accepts or rejects the establishment, but dismantles it altogether, so another, better one can be built in its stead.
I leave you with this heartbreaking composition by Ilse Weber, a Jewish poet who voluntarily went to Auschwitz because she couldn’t bear letting her son, Tommy, die alone.
Farewell, my friend, we have come to the end
Of the journey we took together.
They’ve found me a place on the Polish express,
And now I must leave you for ever.
You were loyal and true, you helped me get through,
You stood by my side in all weather,
Just feeling you near would quiet every fear,
We bore all our burdens together.
Farewell, it’s the end; I’ll miss you my friend,
And the hours we spent together.
I gave you my heart, stay strong when we part,
For this time our farewell’s for ever
Ilse Weber died with her son in October 1944. Her husband, Willi Weber, succeeded them by 30 years, and died in 1974.
May they rest in peace.
Sources
- The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
- The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans
- The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans
