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Reactions to the November Pogrom 143 gogues had been set on fire and 76 additional synagogues completely demolished. Eight hundred fifteen businesses had been destroyed and 29 set on fire, and 171 houses had been either burned down or plundered and wrecked. (These figures, which Heydrich himself estimated as far too low, were revised; later research, for example, listed 7,500 plundered businesses.) Half the nearly twenty thousand arrested Jews were taken to Buchenwald. By 11 November, thirty-six people were dead and thirty-six seriously injured.∫ Following the tradition of using pogroms against the Jews for personal enrichment at the expense of the victims, Göring took the opportunity to satisfy his passion for art collections and to revive his Four-Year Plan.Ω Göring’s 12 November order for a ‘‘penance payment’’ imposed a payment of one billion Reich marks on German Jews. In addition, the damage resulting to businesses and apartment houses was to be cleared away immediately by the Jews at their own expense, and any insurance claims by Jews were to be confiscated in favor of the Reich.∞≠ Art works, real estate, securities, and jewels as well as ‘‘all Jewish businesses’’ were ‘‘to be seized and sold to non-Jews, whereby the owners are to receive only the bookrate credit, at a fixed rate of interest.’’∞∞ These brief descriptions can scarcely portray the extent of this orgy of organized bestiality; they serve here as an introduction to the reaction of the German Evangelical Church and its members. ∞∂ Reactions to the November Pogrom The Confessing Church was increasingly at risk. Its members had been immobilized by numerous arrests and bans on travel and speaking. Forced to improvise, the church had to rely on the techniques of underground organization and action. The previous period of church discussions and resolutions had led to sharp divisions within the Confessing Church about its position toward the Jews. Now the church had entered a period in which only very small groups or, more frequently, individuals were capable of offering help to the persecuted. As political pressure grew stronger in the late summer of 1938 (two and a half months before the so-called Reichskristallnacht), a new edition of the Pastors’ Emergency League pledge appeared. Point 3 had not The ‘‘Elimination’’ of the Jews 144 been changed one iota: ‘‘In such a commitment, I bear witness to the fact that the implementation of the Aryan paragraph in the sphere of the church violates the confessional position.’’∞ In 1933, this sentence had been viewed by some as an easy burden and by others as an adiaphoron. Only a few had regarded it as the central issue at stake. Now, in these more dangerous times, it became a thorn in the flesh of the church. Assistance to Jews was made more difficult by intensified anti-Jewish legislation, the Gestapo’s increasingly sophisticated spying on the churches, and the military conscription of pastors that began in September 1939.≤ Belatedly mobilized, many Christians now discovered that their options for defending the Jews had become much more limited. In some cases, Protestant rectories were targets of destruction during the November 1938 pogrom. A few pastors fell victim to gangs of sa members who, enraged that there were no Jews in their towns, vented their energies against representatives of the church. Between 10 and 13 November, two rectories in Nassau-Hesse, one in the Rhineland, and two in Bavaria were attacked. These were not assaults on pastors suspected of pro-Jewish attitudes but simply the consequences of antiSemitic fervor that, in the absence of its intended victims, sought a new outlet.≥ The pastors who were singled out were called racial epithets such as ‘‘Jew-dog,’’ in a transposition of anti-Jewish invective to people who had no relation to Jews at all.∂ By their own accounts, these pastors did not know why this was happening to them.∑ Bonhoeffer’s 1933 prediction that the church would eventually suffer the same treatment it had allowed to befall the Jews had come true. There were other pastors, however, who courageously broke the general silence maintained by both the German Evangelical Church and the Provisional Church Administration and dared to show public solidarity with the persecuted. On 16 November, exactly one week after the Kristallnacht , Christians throughout Germany gathered to worship on the annual Day of Repentance. The address given by Pastor Julius von Jan of Oberlenningen near Kirchheim–Teck has become the most famous sermon delivered on that...

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