Black Earth(39)

Some of the top Nazis saw an opportunity to move toward a Final Solution on the territory of Germany. With Hitler’s permission, Goebbels organized the coordinated attacks on Jewish property and synagogues on the night of November 9 that came to be known, as a result of all the broken glass, as Kristallnacht. The official pogroms were indeed a shattering experience for many German Jews. Some two hundred of them were killed or committed suicide. The deliberate violence in Germany itself in November 1938 was thus the closing of a circle that was opened with the destruction of the Austrian state. The Anschluss had led to the flight of Jews to Poland; this prompted new Polish restrictions on Jews living abroad; this led the Germans to expel Polish Jews; this caused an assassination in Paris that served as a pretext for organized violence in Germany. The Kristallnacht pogroms showed not only what the destruction of Austria had enabled, but also the limits of applying the violent side of the Austrian model within Germany. In Austria, public violence was possible during the interval between the end of Austrian authority and the consolidation of German authority. Such an opening could not really be created in Germany. The German state was to be mutated but not destroyed.

With Kristallnacht, Goebbels did show that the Austrian model of expropriation and emigration could function in Germany. It was only after violence had actually been delivered on a national scale that German Jews began to leave their homeland in large numbers. Nevertheless, disorderly violence within the Reich itself was revealed to be a dead end. Most of German public opinion was opposed to the chaos. Visible despair led to expressions of sympathy with Jews, rather than the spiritual distancing that Nazis expected. Of course, it was possible for Germans not to wish to see violence inflicted upon Jews while at the same time not wishing to see Jews at all. G?ring, Himmler, and Heydrich immediately drew the conclusion that inspiring pogroms inside Germany had been a mistake. Not long after they would organize pogroms in much the same way as Goebbels had, but beyond the borders of Germany, in time of war, in places where German force had destroyed the state.

Hitler did nothing to defend Goebbels, whom he had unleashed in the first place, and said nothing in public about Kristallnacht. Three days after Kristallnacht, G?ring said that Hitler would now approach the western powers with a Madagascar plan for the resettlement of Jews. Two weeks after Kristallnacht, Hitler was discussing the deportation of European Jews to Madagascar with confused Polish diplomats. The Poles could not understand how Germans could intend such a complicated logistical operation when all they seemed able to organize was chaos in Austria and Germany. Furthermore, in light of the consequences of previous German policy towards Jews, and in the context of the ongoing discussions of a “comprehensive solution” to the problems of German-Polish relations, the idea had a whiff of blackmail. More than thirty thousand Jews had been delivered by German policy to Poland thus far in 1938. If Poland agreed to improve relations with Germany on the terms proposed by Hitler, then Germany would stop sending Jews to Poland and instead cooperate in sending them somewhere else. The Jewish question had become a source of tension in German-Polish relations. German pressure was one reason Hitler’s idea of a comprehensive solution of German-Polish problems, with its promise of joint policy on Jewish matters, was unattractive.

In Warsaw in 1938, Hitler’s negotiating style, so effective in Vienna, had an effect opposite to what was intended.

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Over the course of 1938, as Hitler was seeking, with success, to destroy the Austrian state, and working, without success, to recruit Poland as an ally, he was also trying to provoke a conflict over Czechoslovakia. The pretext was the status of the three million Czechoslovak citizens who identified themselves as Germans. In February 1938, as Hitler was threatening Austrian leaders, he also declared that the Germans of Czechoslovakia were under his personal protection. This had no legal meaning, but that was the point: States did not matter but races did; conventions did not matter but the personal decisions of the Führer did. When Austria fell in March 1938, the future of Czechoslovakia darkened.

Hitler had no sincere interest in the German minority question in Czechoslovakia or anywhere else. In his worldview, Germans were a race and had a right to what they could conquer for themselves. Hitler meant to use minority questions to confuse enemies and to foment the war in which all Germans would prove their racial mettle. He raised what he thought were impossible demands on behalf of Germans in Czechoslovakia, and was then frustrated when Czechoslovakia and its allies gave him everything that he said he wanted. The result was a second improvised destruction of a European state, further worsening the position of Europe’s Jews.