Kristallnacht 1938 (review)

Is there really a need for yet another book on the Kristallnacht pogrom? Alan E. Steinweis poses this question and proceeds to demonstrate in this short but impressive book that there are “good reasons to take a new look at this old subject” (p. 4). Three elements in the widespread understanding of the pogrom, he suggests, require reassessment: the notion that the pogrom was centrally initiated, organized, and coordinated; the understanding that it began on the evening of November 9th and ended during the course of November 10th; and the belief that the perpetrators “consisted almost exclusively of members of the SA and other Nazi party organizations” (p. 6). Not one of these notions, it turns out, survives Professor Steinweis’s reassessment.

In demolishing the traditional understanding of the November pogrom, Steinweis focuses first on the circle of German perpetrators that extended, as he demonstrates, far beyond the familiar corps of Nazi hooligans. In many instances, business owners mobilized their workforces to engage in smashing up Jewish homes and synagogues; troops of Hitler Youth participated, as did classes of schoolchildren egged on by their teachers. Onlookers, of whom there were many, frequently joined in the looting of Jewish shops and homes. Such forms of spontaneous participation in the pogrom belie the notion that it was centrally organized and coordinated.

To be sure, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels prompted Hitler on the evening of November 9 to approve the unleashing of the SA and the SS to avenge the death that afternoon of Ernst vom Rath, the German diplomat in Paris. Vom Rath had been shot two days earlier by the Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan, who was seeking revenge against the German authorities for their mistreatment of his parents. In fact, as Steinweis demonstrates, violence protesting Grynszpan’s shooting had erupted on the day of the shooting itself and then began to escalate the following day. Goebbels’ urging to Hitler on the 9th served simply to push into high gear a process that was already under way. Neither did the pogrom end, as traditional understanding would have it, on the 10th; in Danzig and other cities it began only on November 12th. Steinweis attributes the destructiveness of Kristallnacht not to preparation or coordination, but instead to “the readiness of tens of thousands of Germans to commit violence against their Jewish neighbors” (p. 55). Rather than an atrocity initiated and orchestrated from the top, he concludes, Kristallnacht was “more like the nationalization of a series of localized anti-Jewish actions” (p. 6).

As the pogrom spread and the circle of perpetrators grew, the lack of coordination became ever more evident. The orders that went out to the provinces from Munich late in the evening on November 9th were hurriedly prepared and vague. They did include specific instructions, however, to avoid the despoliation of Jewish property and physical violence against Jewish persons. In a genuine tour de force, Steinweis manages to trace in one instance the chilling story of how a breakdown in communications between Munich and the small town of Lessum (outside Bremen) led Lessum’s Nazis to understand that they were being ordered to kill all of the town’s Jews. The result was that a reluctant Storm Trooper, badgered by his fellows to follow orders, wound up shooting and killing a prominent retired doctor and his wife. Before doing so, however, he inquired of the doctor, “Are you a Jew?”

Two elements that stand out in this book are the author’s description of how the pogrom extended across time and drew in a surprisingly large number of participants, and the extent to which one might speak of the “afterlife” of the pogrom. The sources Steinweis exploits in demonstrating the pogrom’s reach include records of the post-1945 trials of thousands of Germans prosecuted for their participation in it, as well as hundreds of Jewish victims’ testimonies housed in the archives of the Wiener Library in London. Much of the local history Steinweis has unearthed comes from the recently published Stimmungsberichte that...