Deafening Sounds Of Shattered Glass,Dr. Ervin Birnbaum

The assassination of the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst Vom Rath, by 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan in early November 1938 was unquestionably a crime. Under normal circumstances, young Herschel would have been arraigned in a court of law.

But circumstances were hardly normal in November 1938. The Germans' reaction to the act of a young Jew - a young Jew indignant at the scandalous treatment of his parents at their hands - served as a pretext for murderous mass violence against the people from whose ranks he grew.

By November 1938, both internal developments within Germany as well as international developments had conditioned Germans to accept highly intensified measures of Jewish persecution.

With the passage of the Nuremberg Laws relegating Jews to second-class citizenship in September 1935, highly respected organs of law and sensationalistic purveyors of cheap propaganda became inextricably interlaced. Anti-Jewish incitement only intensified with the end of the Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936, during which all external signs of anti-Semitism were carefully covered up.

The molding of the Jewish image in its most classical satanic form, as the underhanded creature who seeks the destruction of the pure, naïve and trusting Aryan, had its own impeccable rhythm that sooner or later would have produced the desired results.

What expedited the process was the remarkable tolerance exhibited by the enlightened nations of the world for the public display of progressive rejection of the Jew within the fabric of the German society, and the destruction of Jewish economic independence within the larger context of the German nation. The Jew was turned into a pariah.

The turning point of German anti-Semitism from the stage of psychological and social isolation to massive physical isolation and violence was clearly marked by the Evian Conference of July 1938. The paralysis of the democratic nations searching for a solution to the Jewish refugee problem at that fateful meeting proved to the Germans the indifference of the democratic nations to the fate of the Jews.

A Nazi observer at Evian returned to Berlin with the glowing message to Hitler: "You can do what you like with the Jews, nobody is interested in them."

Emboldened by the change in social climate and by the world's passive response to German anti-Semitism, the Nazi government began taking measures at the end of October 1938 to expel some 20,000 resident Polish Jews who did not have German citizenship. The act was carried out with utmost brutality. One of the victims recounted at the Eichmann trial how his family was taken from their home in the middle of the night only with the clothing on their back:
" The S.S. men were whipping us, they hit those who lingered, and blood was flowing on the road. They treated us in a most brutal manner . I was hit and fell into a ditch. My son helped me, and he said: Run, father, run, or you will die."

Thousands were taken to the Polish border. At the town of Zbonszyn the Germans drove them over the border and left them there without food or protection against the cold for three days. The Poles eventually put them up in stables.

From Zbonszyn, Zindel Grynszpan wrote to his son, Herschel, in Paris, relating the hardships and suffering experienced by his family and thousands of others until their transfer to Poland was completed.

Young Herschel, in his desire to call the world's attention to the plight of the Jews, acquired a gun and entered the German embassy on Nov. 7 determined to shoot the German ambassador. When this proved impossible, he instead shot Vom Rath, the third secretary. (Ironically, Vom Rath was at that point under discreet Gestapo investigation on suspicion of sympathy toward the Jews.)

Vom Rath died of his wound two days later. That same day the following message was sent from Gestapo headquarters to the district stations: "At very short notice, aktionen against Jews, especially against their synagogues, will take place throughout the whole of Germany. They are not to be hindered."

The action against Jews referred to in the message commenced that very evening.

The generally accepted belief that Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - was a spontaneous outbreak of popular indignation in reaction to a specific Jewish crime is a legend invented to cover up barbarity unprecedented in the modern age in the Western world.
Though initiated and spurred on by the S.S., Kristallnacht could not have taken place without widespread popular German support and planning.

On the night of Nov. 9, 267 synagogues were gutted by fire, 7,500 Jewish shops were looted, hundreds of homes were wrecked, 91 Jews were killed, and at least 20,000 Jews (some claim 70,000, and one source offers the figure of 200,000) were arrested and sent to concentration camps throughout Germany.

"The main streets of the city were a positive litter of shattered plate glass," wrote an observer. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers called by Goering, Hitler's second-in-command, on November 12, an insurance expert estimated the damage of shattered plate glass belonging to non-Jewish landlords alone at six million dollars.

Goering imposed on the Jews a penalty of one billion marks (four hundred million dollars) for damages, to be paid to the Reich. Since it was clear the impoverished Jewish community would not be capable of additional payments in the future and since German anti-Semitism had escalated to the phase of physical violence, Goering ordered that henceforth anti-Jewish actions be carried out by specialists and the process of persecution and murder be handled by professional tacticians. The time of the skilled professionals, like Eichmann and Heydrich, had arrived.

If we are to derive lessons for the present and future, it may be of value to note that the paralysis of the democratic countries at the Evian Conference was exhibited barely two weeks prior to the construction of the first concentration camps.

The widespread concern today with the mild treatment meted out to Iran by the nations of the world - despite Tehran's threatening posture in offensive nuclear development and its brazen public denial of Israel's right to exist - is anchored in those fateful days that linked Evian, Munich and Kristallnacht.

The three historic events demonstrate how pious wishes of powerful and benevolent powers can remain purely in the realm of aspiration and untranslatable into action in the face of a determined stand by an authoritarian ruler.

In each case the powers issued verbal protests against aggression of any sort. They voiced faith in the unerring rationality, good will, yearning for peace and distaste for bloodshed and war imbedded in every person.

The ultimate result proved them wrong, but the process seemed to be eminently logical. Each breach of humanitarian ethics, of international agreements and conventions, by the dictatorial ruler could find some sort of justification in the camp drawing on the well of unlimited trust in the basic goodness and rationality of all men.

That noble but so thoroughly misplaced trust prevented any effective measure that would call evil to a halt. And examples of evil were not lacking.

Diplomatic dispatches to the British Foreign Office of those days report the mistreatment of thousands of prisoners in the camps. "One man suffering from heart trouble was unable to walk rapidly enough to suit the guards, and his fellow prisoners were ordered to drag him face downward, tearing his flesh until his features were unrecognizable."

Another dispatch tells of the relatives of victims who were required to pay three marks ($1.20) for the ashes of loved ones. To protests from several nations, Goebbels, Germany's minister of propaganda, declared, not for the first time, "If there is any country that believes it has not enough Jews, I shall gladly turn over to it all our Jews."

As Arthur Morse succinctly stated in his book While Six Million Died, "There were no takers."

After the atrocities of Kristallnacht, President Roosevelt remarked: "I could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization."

Yet the unbelievable was just about to happen - perhaps precisely because man could not believe it, perhaps because man did not put a stop to the downhill slide until he found himself, to his amazement, caught in the inferno.

In those fateful days Chaim Weizmann declared to the English foreign secretary, Lord Halifax: "They are burning the synagogues now; tomorrow they will burn British cathedrals."

And so Hitler moved forward relentlessly from smaller to bigger things at ever increasing speed. In 1933 he began testing man's moral fiber by his first strikes at the Jews; 1934 brought the rearmament of Germany; in 1935 Germany declared Jews to be subhuman; 1936 saw the German army occupying the demilitarized Rhineland; 1937 brought the Rome-Berlin Axis uniting for military aggression; and in 1938 Hitler swallowed Austria, dug the grave for Czechoslovakia, sent thousands of Jews to concentration camps, and began his all-out violent assault against a defenseless people.

In the summer of 1936 an admiring world congratulated Hitler's Germany on gracefully hosting the Olympic Games. In late 1938, Neville Chamberlain referred to Hitler as an honorable gentleman.

Weighing Germany's degeneration against mankind's unbelievably blind disinterest, one can't help but wonder: which was more incredible?

Dr. Ervin Birnbaum is founder and director of Shearim Netanya, the first outreach program to Russian immigrants in Israel. He has taught at City University of New York, Haifa University and the University of Moscow; served as national superintendent of education of Youth Aliyah and as the first national superintendent of education for the Institute of Jewish Studies; and, at the request of David Ben-Gurion, founded and directed the English Language College Preparatory School at Midreshet Sde Boker.

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