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A Community in Shock

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Kristallnacht, which continued through November 10, was a wake-up call for German Jewry.

“Germany, after all, was the most civilized of countries,” writes cultural historian Peter Gay (born Frohlich), in his memoir My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin. “It was the country that next to the United States was the haven of choice for Eastern European Jewish emigrants looking for a tolerant society relatively free of anti-Semitism. France had shown its anti-Jewish leanings in the Dreyfuss case; England seemed an almost impermeable society; the German record was one of a century-long, almost uninterrupted improvement of relations between its Jewish and gentile populations.”

Gay and his family were far from alone in feeling this way. Ever since 1671, when Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia invited 50 wealthy Jewish families recently expelled from Vienna to come to Berlin, that city was viewed as a haven of tolerance and prosperity for Jews suffering from persecution elsewhere.

1938 Interior of Berlin synagogue after Kristallnacht

Although the Jews weren’t given citizenship rights, in 1714 the Berlin kehillah was granted permission to build a synagogue, and by 1750 there were about 2,000 Jews living in the city. While the wealthier Jews found employment as moneylenders, jewelers and financial advisors, the less wealthy were shop owners, pawnbrokers and peddlers.

During the eighteenth century, Berlin was a center of the German Enlightenment, which had a profound impact on Germany’s increasingly assimilated Jews, who welcomed the movement’s ideals of tolerance and individual freedom. But at the same time that some philosophers were espousing universalistic ideals, others were cultivating and promoting the idea of German culture, which helped shape the development of German nationalism. Thus, when Napoleon conquered Prussia and entered Berlin in the early 1800s—and offered the Jews partial enfranchisement and full citizenship under the banner of “liberty, equality, fraternity” for all—German nationalists were unhappy. In 1815, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and sent into exile and Friedrich Wilhelm III was restored to the Prussian throne. In this new era, the idea of a German Volk, rooted in a mythic distant German past, took hold and replaced many Enlightenment ideas—and this German past was one that the Jews had no share in.

Yet German Jews continued to flourish economically and professionally, and by 1933 Berlin was home to about 150,000 Jews, or about 30 percent of Germany’s Jewish population. In their own minds, they were Germans, as journalist William L. Shirer, author of The Nightmare Years, writes: “A rather surprising number we thought, especially among the affluent, believed that somehow things would get better for them. They had their roots and stake in Germany, felt that they were good Germans, and were loath to leave. The virulent anti-Semitism, they thought, would pass.”

 

The Aftermath

As we now know, it didn’t pass.

While the international reaction to Kristallnacht was one of shock and outrage, and the United States recalled its ambassador, little was done to help Germany’s Jews, who were becoming increasingly persecuted by the Nazi government.

During a meeting held on November 12, 1938, the Nazi leadership decided it was time to eliminate Jewish participation in German economic life and decreed that all Jewish property and businesses must be transferred into Aryan hands at a ridiculously low price. Jews were also forbidden to buy and sell goods and services anywhere, engage in any craft, or serve in any type of managerial position. The Jews were also presented with a bill for the damage that was done during Kristallnacht; any insurance money that might have been due to them was confiscated by the state. An additional fine of one billion Reichsmark (about $440 million) was imposed on the community, supposedly to cover the indemnity of Ernst vom Rath.

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