scite on 10 April.
R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R
123
Unfortunately, in recent days members of the Party have participated in
large-scale and utterly undisciplined assaults. Today I have published a
statement in the press stating that Communist supporters dressed in
Nazi Party uniforms have been conducting illegal confiscations,
house searches and arrests. I must point out that my comments were in
fact not primarily directed against Communist supporters but rather
against our own party comrades. It would be regrettable if the Gestapo
was forced to arrest our own party comrades on a larger scale. I therefore
urgently request that you issue appropriate instructions to all party
agencies.33
Three weeks later, on 5 April, Heydrich felt the need to remind his SS
men that ‘all excesses and measures against the Jews on the part of the SS
must cease’. It was not until 29 April, however, when SS leaders were
threatened with dismissal if they continued to participate in these
outrages, that the tide of violent incidents began to subside.34 The experi-
ences in Austria prompted Heydrich to issue a more general order for the
entire police and SD apparatus on 14 April: although it was ‘self-evident
that the struggle against all vermin that infests the people and state [must
be conducted] consistently and mercilessly’, all measures had to be carried
out in an ‘orderly’ way, which would reassure the general population of the
‘just cause’ pursued by the Gestapo.35 This did not mean that the terror in
Austria was ended – quite the contrary. The policy of ‘merciless combat
against all political, intellectual and criminal opponents’, as Heydrich
described it in the SS journal,
Das Schwarze Korps
, that April, was to be
continued ‘in silence’. This ‘silent terror’ could assume different forms,
ranging from the secret night-time arrest of prominent critics of the
Anschluss to restrictions on postal privacy and press freedom.36
When the plebiscite on the Anschluss was held on 10 April amid
massive manipulation and intimidation, Heydrich’s apparatus played
an important role: SS men rounded up voters from their homes and
marched them to polling stations where booths had been removed or
were labelled with signs ‘only traitors enter here’, thus forcing the
electorate to cast its vote in public. The SD was also in charge of collating
information on ‘abnormalities’ and ‘disturbances’, which were then
passed on to the Gestapo for further investigation.37 Partly as a result
of such precautions, a predictable 99.75 per cent of Austrian voters
supported the Anschluss, although probably, to judge from some SD
reports, only a third of Viennese voters were genuinely committed to the
idea of union.38
Following the plebiscite, the country’s new Nazi rulers rapidly intro-
duced all of the Old Reich’s anti-Semitic legislation. Jews were summar-
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
ily ousted from the civil service and the professions. An elaborate
bureaucracy – the Property Transfer Office, with a staff of 500 – was set
up to manage the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. By May
1938, 7,000 out of 33,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Vienna had been
closed down; by August 1938, a further 23,000 had gone. The remaining
ones were Aryanized.39
The Nazis also initiated the forced expulsion of Jewish populations in a
manner that was far more direct than in the Old Reich. In the small
eastern region of the Burgenland, bordering on Hungary, the new
Nazi rulers confiscated the property of the 3,800 members of the old-
established Jewish community, closed down all Jewish businesses, arrested
community leaders and then used the creation of a ‘security zone’ on the
border as an excuse to expel the entire Jewish population. Many Jews were
hauled off to police stations and beaten until they signed documents
surrendering all their assets. The police then took them to the border and
forced them across. Since neighbouring countries often refused to accept
them, many Jews were left stranded in no man’s land. Fifty-one of them,
for example, were dumped on a barren island on the Danube, in an inci-
dent that aroused worldwide press condemnation. The majority fled to
friends and relatives in Vienna. By the end of 1938 there were no Jews left
in the Burgenland.40
Partly in response to this mass flight, between 25 and 27 May 1938 the
Gestapo in Vienna arrested nearly 2,000 Jews who were known to have
criminal convictions (however trivial), sending them to Dachau, where they
were segregated and particularly brutal y mistreated. The police also arrested
and expel ed al foreign Jews and even German Jews living in Vienna.
Altogether, 5,000 Jews were deported from Austria by November 1938.
Thousands of others sought to leave the country by any means available.41
In order to speed up the process of ‘orderly’ Jewish emigration,
Heydrich established a Central Office for Jewish Emigration on 20
August, which was based in the Rothschild Palace in Vienna and run by
Adolf Eichmann, whose procedures and techniques created for this
Central Office were to have a far wider application in the years that
followed.42 On Heydrich’s orders, Eichmann had rushed to Vienna on
16 March as part of a special unit authorized to arrest prominent Austrian
Jews. Heydrich and his Jewish experts realized that the orderly conduct of
forced emigration required the collaboration of leading figures within the
Jewish community itself, especially if the poorest Jews, who lacked the
means to leave their homeland and start a new life elsewhere, were to be
included in the plan. As Heydrich would emphasize a few months later,
the ‘problem was to get rid not of the richer Jews, but of the Jewish
rabble’.43
R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R
125
With Heydrich’s blessing and the help of forcibly enlisted members of
the Viennese Jewish community, Eichmann and his team began to fast
track applications for exit visas and drew on the confiscated assets of the
Jewish community to subsidize the emigration of poor Jews. Frightened
by the continuing terror on the streets, thousands of Austrian Jews queued
to obtain exit visas. The Central Office, with its assembly-line processing
of exit visas, its plundering of Jewish assets to subsidize the emigration of
the poor, its application of terror and its use of Jewish collaborators
became a model for Heydrich’s apparatus in its subsequent dealings with
the Jews.44
Kristallnacht
The Anschluss of Austria added some 200,000 Jews to the population of
Nazi Germany. This new influx more than balanced out the roughly
128,000 Jews who had left Germany by the end of 1937.45 It also made
Heydrich’s previous efforts to speed up the process of forced emigration
seem pointless, particularly after the Evian conference of July 1938 at
which representatives of thirty-two countries had made it clear that inter-
national enthusiasm for accepting German Jewish refugees was limited.
Dissatisfaction at Nazi Party grassroots level with the ‘slow progress’ of
Jewish emigration from Germany began to intensify. In the summer of
1938, Germany witnessed a noticeable upsurge of violence against the
Jews.46
Among the first to feel the Nazis’ newly intensified desire to rid
Germany of its now increased Jewish population were the roughly 70,000
Polish Jews living in the Reich, many of whom had fled their homeland
after the post-war pogroms that took place in Galicia and elsewhere. The
presence of Polish Jews had been a source of increasing aggravation for the
SS and police authorities since March 1938, when the Polish government
nullified the citizenship of anyone who had lived abroad for more than
five years – a deliberate move to prevent the return of Jews to Poland.
Faced suddenly with the possibility that nearly 70,000 Polish Jews
residing in Germany and Austria would be rendered stateless and trapped
in German territory, the Nazi government demanded in April that Jews
holding Polish passports leave the Reich. However, the authorities in
Warsaw refused to allow these Jews back into Poland, and by late October
Himmler and Heydrich chose to act unilaterally. During the night of
28–29 October, the Gestapo and Security Police detained and forcibly
expelled 18,000 Polish Jews.47
Caught up in this first wave of Nazi mass deportations was a Polish
master tailor named Sendel Grynszpan, his wife Rivka and their two
126
HITLER’S HANGMAN
eldest children, Esther and Mordechai, who were arrested in the city of
Hanover and swiftly expelled across the German–Polish border. In Paris,
Grynszpan’s younger son, Herschel, heard of the fate that had befallen his
family. Humiliated and outraged, he decided to act. On 7 November, in an
act of revenge, Herschel shot a junior official at the German Embassy in
Paris, Ernst vom Rath, injuring him severely.48
On 8 November, Heydrich travelled to Munich in order to attend the
annual commemoration ceremony of the failed Hitler putsch of 1923 and
the traditional gathering of the SS leadership corps on the previous after-
noon. Himmler used the gathering to address the Jewish question, in
which he had previously shown little interest. The Jews had no future in
Germany, he assured his attentive audience, and would be expelled from
the Reich over the next few years. Himmler did not mention the Paris
incident and his insistence that the Jews would be expelled over the
coming ‘years’ does not indicate an imminent dramatic radicalization of
anti-Jewish policy.49
The following day, 9 November, vom Rath succumbed to his injuries.
The not altogether unexpected news of his death arrived in Munich in
the afternoon and was officially announced during the annual gathering
of the ‘Old Fighters’ in Munich’s City Hall that evening. The death
of vom Rath provided those Nazi leaders who felt that they had lost
influence over the direction of anti-Jewish policies, most notably radical
Gauleiters such as Streicher and Goebbels, with a welcome cue. Hitler
left the gathering without making his customary speech, but instructed
Goebbels to speak instead. The Propaganda Minister used the opportunity
to tell his agitated audience about the ‘spontaneous actions’ against
Jews that had already occurred in Kurhesse and Magdeburg-Anhalt
in the wake of the assassination attempt. The Führer, Goebbels pro -
claimed, had decided that the Nazi Party would not initiate further
demonstrations, but if they happened, ‘he was not going to do anything to
stop them’.50
Heydrich was among the audience that evening in the Munich City
Hal . According to the Gauleiter of Magdeburg, Rudolf Jordan, Heydrich
assured the gathering after Goebbels’s speech that the police would
not intervene in the event of ‘spontaneous’ anti-Jewish riots.51 Indeed,
SS members, who had come together in many places throughout the
Reich to celebrate the anniversary, participated in the riots. Whether
they received instructions from Himmler or Heydrich to do so is difficult
to say.52
The assembled regional party leaders nonetheless drew the necessary
inference from Goebbels’s speech and immediately called upon their party
comrades in local constituencies by telex and telephone to unleash the
R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R
127
pogrom. Heydrich returned to his hotel, the
Vier Jahreszeiten
, to confer
with Himmler before calling Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller in Berlin.
The exact content of their conversation is unknown, but shortly before
midnight Müller set all regional State Police offices across the Reich on
full alert and informed them that anti-Jewish ‘actions’ would begin shortly
all over the Reich, ‘especially against synagogues’. These incidents were not
to be hindered: only looting and larger excesses were to be prevented. The
State Police were to prepare for the arrest of 20,000 to 30,000 Jews,
‘particularly wealthy Jews’.53
Less than two hours later, Heydrich followed up Müller’s orders with a
second telegram. He reiterated that ‘demonstrations against the Jews are
to be expected in all parts of the Reich in the course of this night’. The
‘demonstrations’ were not to be prevented. However, the police were to
make sure that ‘German lives or property’ were not endangered and to
note that ‘businesses and apartments belonging to Jews may be destroyed
but not looted’ while ‘foreign citizens even if they are Jews are not to be