"Crystal Night" is the name that's been given to the night of 9‑10 November 1938. In almost all large German cities and some smaller� ones that night, store� windows of Jewish shops were broken, Jewish houses� and apartments were� destroyed, and synagogues were demolished and set on fire. Many Jews were� arrested, some were beaten, and some were even killed. The "Reich Crystal Night"� (Reichskristallnacht) was one of the most shameful events of National Socialist Germany. Although the Jews suffered initially, the greatest harm was ultimately� done to Germany and the German people.
Even people who are sympathetic to National Socialism cannot understand how this event could have happened. Julius Streicher, the so‑called "number one Jew� baiter" for example, was shocked when he first learned about the demonstrations and destruction the next morning.
The all‑important question is: Who was responsible for the incident? It is generally accepted, especially by contemporary historians, that the Nazi gang organized and carried out the pogrom, and that the chief instigator was� Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels. The truth of the matter is that Adolf Hitler was so disgusted by the incident that he forbade anyone from discussing� the matter in his presence. Dr. Goebbels� complained that he would now have to� explain this terrible affair to the German people and the world, and that he simply did not know what kind of credible explanation to give. If he had� actually been responsible for the Crystal Night, he surely would have had a well‑prepared explanation. The explanation he gave on the morning...was extremely unconvincing and was generally not believed by the German public. During my study of this subject, which resulted in my book on the Crystal Night, Feuerzeichen, I found many facts which do not agree with the generally accepted thesis. On the contrary, the evidence which I have found gives a completely different picture.
��������������������������������������������������������������������� The Story We Are Given
The generally accepted sequence of events, according to most writers on the subject, is this: In early October 1938 the Polish government announced that all Polish passports would become invalid at the end of the month unless they received a special stamp before then, obtainable only in Poland. This measure was meant to� rid Poland effectively for all time of all Polish Jews living in foreign� countries, most of whom were in Germany. Many of the approximately 70,000 Polish� Jews living in the Reich at the time had arrived after the First World War. Of course, the German government now feared that it would have to permanently accept these 70,000 Jews. The German government tried to negotiate this issue� with the Poles, but they flatly� refused.
On 28 October, just two days before the deadline, German police rounded up between 15,000 and 17,000 Polish Jews, mostly adult males, from across the Reich and transported them to the German‑Polish border. The deportees traveled in� regular German passenger trains with more than adequate space. Contrary to some claims, they were not crammed into cattle cars. The deportees were well provided� with food and medical care. Red Cross personnel and medical doctors accompanied them on the trains.[note 2] The Polish border officials were surprised when the first trainloads arrived� at the border, and they let the Jews enter Poland. At about the same time, the Polish government was deporting German Jews back to Germany. The next day, 29 October, the Polish and German governments suddenly agreed to stop the� deportations of their respective Jewish populations to each other's countries. The deportations were completely halted that night.
Among the Polish Jews deported was the family of Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (Gruenspan), a l7‑year‑old then living (in) Paris. What followed next is generally� reported either incorrectly or very one‑sidedly. On 7 November Grynszpan went to� the German Embassy in Paris and shot Embassy Secretary Ernst vom Rath. It is� said that Grynszpan did this because he was furious over the deportation of his family. The truth about his motivation is very different. It is also claimed� that the German population, upset by the news of vom Rath's death on the 8th, organized anti‑Jewish demonstrations, destroyed Jewish stores, and demolished or� set on fire all the synagogues in Germany. Demonstrations and destruction did take place, but the truth is that they were not organized by the German people and did not affect most of the synagogues in the Reich. Finally, it is claimed� that the Crystal Night was the beginning of the extermination of the Jews inGermany. This is entirely false.
�������������������������������������������������� German‑Jewish Relations Prior to the Crystal Night
Before explaining how the events surrounding the Crystal Night differ from what is generally believed, I must first give some background information about the peaceful years in Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933. Anyone who is� aware of the true situation in Germany during the Third Reich era recognizes� that the Crystal Night episode was quite extraordinary. It was a radical� aberration from the normal pattern of daily life. The outburst was not in keeping with either the official National Socialist Jewish policy nor with the general German attitude towards the Jews. The Germans were no more anti‑Semitic than any� other people. In fact, Jews who had to leave other European countries preferred Germany as a place to live and work.
Within the National Socialist‑Party itself there were two distinct anti‑Semitic factions. One was scholarly and one was vulgar. The scholarly faction was centered around the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. It published several journals and gave lectures to civic and political groups. Its activities were consistent with the policy of peacefully removing the Jews� from Germany and resettling them elsewhere. The SS was totally committed to this� policy and rejected vulgar anti‑Semitism. The vulgar anti‑ Semitic faction tried to influence popular feeling. The chief exponent of this approach was Julius Streicher, who published the unofficial monthly Der Stuermer. It used crude caricatures to portray Jews in the most horrible way in an effort to convince readers that the Jews were as evil as Satan. For years the motto "The Jews Are Our Misfortune" appeared on the front page of every issue. Der Stuermer often employed improper and undignified means to make its point.
German National Socialism basically regarded the Jews as non‑ German aliens who had proven themselves destructive to any nation that permitted them to dominate. Therefore, the only way to prevent further problems was to separate the Jews from the Germans. In other words, they had to emigrate. On this point the National Socialists and the Zionists were in full agreement. Although the� Jews made up less than one percent of the total German population in 1933, they had power and influence in finance, business, cultural affairs and scientific life far out of proportion to their small numbers. Jewish influence was very widely regarded as harmful to German recovery after the First World War. No legal measures were taken against the Jews in Germany until after the international Jewish "Declaration of War" against Germany, as announced, for� example, on the front page of the London Daily Express of 24 March 1933. This "declaration" took the form of a worldwide boycott of German goods. A week later� there was an officially sanctioned boycott of Jewish shops and stores throughout Germany. This action was in direct response to the international Jewish boycott of German goods already in effect. However, the German response was a rather� absurd affair and it was therefore limited to a single day, the first of April� 1933. Hitler and Goebbels privately recognized that the German counter‑boycott was a failure and would only turn people against the new government.
Furthermore, this one‑day action came on a Saturday, the Jewish sabbath. Religious Jews took malicious pleasure at the discomfort of the Jews who normally kept their stores open on Saturdays and were now, in effect, forced by the government to obey the Jewish law against work on the sabbath. The National Socialist regime thereafter sought to diminish Jewish influence and power by� strictly legal means. The first German law which could be considered anti‑Jewish� was dated 7 April 1933. Although the legal status of the Jews was restricted, each and every Jew knew what his legal rights were and to what he was still entitled. There were no secret or extra‑legal measures against the Jews.
Ironically, it was precisely the official discrimination policy against the Jews which reduced the effectiveness of anti‑Semitic propaganda to almost nothing. The Germans are a generally fair‑minded people. When Germans saw their� Jewish neighbors being treated unjustly, they considered that far worse than the dangers which the Jews supposedly represented simply because they were Jewish. Furthermore, the examples of Jewish criminality and perversion described in� Der Stuermer were widely regarded as exceptions to normal Jewish� behavior. The average German was convinced that the Jews whom he knew personally were completely unlike the criminal types sometimes described in newspapers. In my home town of Berlin most of the doctors and lawyers were still Jewish. And� even the public health officer for children in the district of Berlin where my family lived was a Jew who kept this job throughout the war. I still remember one day when my mother returned from her Jewish doctor. She told us that she hadn't been able to see him because he was no longer there. He had been taken away, hauled off the previous night. My mother was very upset. A crowd of people had gathered outside his house. They were all shocked, and they discussed the injustice of this measure quite openly. My parents later talked about what had� happened, and they both agreed that the doctor had never really done anything� wrong. Their reaction was typical. A few days later our family pediatrician, who� was also Jewish, was likewise taken away.
At the time I did not know what it meant to be taken away. It was only many years after the war, when I started reading the Holocaust literature, that I learned that I was supposed to believe that to be taken away meant deportation to a concentration camp and probable death. But like so many thousands of� others, these two doctor families were not exterminated. One summer day in 1973, as I was walking through the streets of the German quarter in Tel Aviv, I came� upon the name plates of both doctors on the doors of two houses. I immediately� tried to visit them and found out that both families had migrated to Palestine� in 1939. Although� one of them had died in the meantime in Israel, I was able to speak to the other. He remembered my father very well and explained that when he and his family were arrested, they were taken to a camp and given the� choice of� either signing a document declaring their intention of emigrating from Germany or being taken to a labor camp. He and his family chose to emigrate. In fact, most German Jews survived the anti‑Semitic measures quite well. That does not mean that those measures were not unfair to individual Jews, but they could� usually manage to live with them.
��������������������������������������������������������������������� The Haavara Agreement
As already mentioned, the main goal of Germany's Jewish policy was to encourage the Jews to emigrate. After the beginning of the international Jewish boycott against German goods in March 1933, the Jewish community in Palestine� contacted the German government and offered a break in the boycott as far as Palestine was concerned provided it was combined with Jewish emigration from Germany. As a result, the "Haavara" or "Transfer" agreement was signed by the� Germans and Jews in May 1933. [note 3] The Jewish community thus concluded an extremely beneficial agreement with the National Socialist government only a few� months after its formation. This agreement was a crucial phase in the creation of the State of Israel. When I made this claim in my book Feuerzeichen, which appeared in 1981, some readers considered it outrageous.[note 4] But then this same claim was made in The Transfer Agreement, a book by Edwin Black published� in 1984. The final paragraph of his book concludes with the statement that the continuing economic relationship between the Jewish community of Palestine and National Socialist Germany was "an indispendable factor in the creation of the State of' Israel."[note 5}
The Haavara agreement made it possible for any Jew to emigrate from Germany with practically all of his possessions and personal fortune provided that Jews could deposit all of their assets in one of two Jewish‑owned banks in Germany which had branch offices in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Upon arrival in Palestine they could withdraw their assets according to the terms of the agreement. The German capital of these two Jewish banking firms was guaranteed by the German� government. Even after the war these assets were fully available to the Jewish� owners or their representatives If a Jew did not wish to emigrate immediately he could transfer all of his personal assets to Palestine where they would be� safeguarded by a trustee while he remained in Germany for an indefinite period with emigration as his eventual goal. In the meantime his personal fortune was safe outside of Germany.
Even poorer Jews who did not possess 1,000 English pounds� were able to emigrate to Palestine with credits provided through the Haavara. The British authorities generally required minimum assets of 1,000 pounds for each immigrant to Palestine if he was not entitled to a so‑called worker's certificate. Only a limited number of these certificates were available and they were issued only to� persons with special job skills. In addition, Jews emigrating to Palestine were� exempt from the so‑called "Reich flight tax," which all emigrating Germans normally had to pay. However, the Jewish companies which arranged the transfers charged the� emigrants a fixed percentage of their total assets. The Haavara agreement remained in operation until the end of 1941 when the United States entered the war.
������������������������������������������������������������� National Socialist Ethical Standards
I am always amazed whenever I read books about the Third Reich published after the war. Most give an almost totally false impression of the reality of the Third Reich. The Germany of Adolf Hitler was not the Germany described by� such books. It was quite different. I was brought up during the Third Reich. Along with my entire generation, I received an education of the highest ethical standards. We were brought up to love and respect our country and people. We were taught to be proud of its great history. The heroes of Germany's past represented our great ideals. They spurred us to honesty and responsibility in� our own lives. In my opinion, the youth of Adolf Hitler's Germany was the finest� of all Europe and perhaps of the entire world.
The same ethical standards applied to the SS and SA. The SA stormtroopers were not sophisticated men. They usually preferred to use their fists before using their heads, but they acted according to the ideals which they had been taught: honor, faithfulness, honesty and devotion to their people and country. They were not at all the sadistic beasts portrayed by so‑called historians. It� was their faithfulness and gallantry which saved Germany from chaos and� Communism. It is sheer stupidity to describe the SA men as blood‑thirsty killers, as is widely done today. Although some individual SA men may have� committed acts of brutality, it is nonsense to blame the entire organization or the whole German people and its government for such behavior. Individual SA men� were indeed involved in the Crystal Night incident. But far fewer actually participated than has been claimed. Of the 28 SA Groups which existed in Germany� at the time, the available evidence indentifies only three as having actually received orders to join the anti‑Jewish demonstrations.
���������������������������������������������������� What Really Happened During the Crystal Night
Now let us look at what really happened during that fateful night.
After 1945 any harm ever done to any Jew in National Socialist Germany has been described in great detail in many publications and combined with other stories to give exaggerated figures which have then become the so‑called "historical truth."‑ How strange it is then that despite the passage of more than forty years, no one has established the true extent of the damage done to� the Jews during the Crystal Night. All one can learn from history writers is� that "all" synagogues were demolished and that "all" shop windows were destroyed. Aside from this vague description, one is given almost no details.
On the basis of the so‑called "historical truth"
about the
Crystal Night,
the President of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum
Goldmann, had the
chutzpah in 1952� to claim 500 million dollars from
German
Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer as� reparation payment for the damage
done
during that
Nosember night. When Adenauer� asked Goldmann for his
justification for
this enormous request, Goldmann� replied: "You find
the
justification
yourself! What I want is not the� justification but
the
money."7 And he got
his money! Goldmann may have� interpreted the
willingness
of the German
Chancellor to pay a half billion� dollars as proof
for the
claim that all
synagogues had been destroyed. Why else� would
Germany be
so foolish as to
pay for something which never happened? All� the
same,
the "historical
truth" that "all" German synagogues were destroyed is
a
lie.
In 1938 there were approximately 1,400 synagogues in
Germany, of which only
about 180 were destroyed or damaged. Furthermore,
Jews
owned approximately
100,000 shops and department stores in Germany in
1938. Of
this number,
only about 7,500 had their windows broken. These
figures
show just how
much the� so‑called "historical truth" differs from
what
actually happened.
The damage and� destruction that did actually occur
was, of
course, a
terrible shame, but the� exaggerations, especially by
German historians who
use them to condemn their own� people, are also a
shame.
History writers tell us that during the Crystal Night
all
the Jews were
frightened, meekly accepted whatever happened to them
and
watched the
destruction of their property with no resistance. The
contrary is true.
While going through the files on this subject, I
found
many documents
which report� precisely just the opposite of what is
claimed. The fact is
that in many cases� Jews and their German neighbors
fought
together against
the attackers, pushing� them down staircases. Street
mobs
were beaten up
and chased away in more than� one case. Police and
Party
officials were
generally on the side of the Jews.� Some Jewish
community
leaders went to
police stations the next morning and asked� the
police to
investigate the
damage done to their synagogues. The resulting
police
reports are still
available in the files today.
Also contrary to what we have been told, most Jews
were not
directly
affected� by these events. In Berlin, for example,
all of
the teachers and
pupils of the� city's largest Jewish school, which
served
the entire Berlin
area, appeared in� their classes the next morning
without
having noticed
anything unusual during� the previous night.
Heinemann
Stern, the Jewish
principal of that school, wrote� in his postwar
memoirs
that he noticed a
burning synagogue on his way to the� school on the
morning
after the
Crystal Night, but he thought it was just an
accidental
fire. It was only
after he arrived at the school that he received a
telephone call informing
him of the destruction of the previous night. He then
went
on with his
classes of the day and only during the first recess
did he
take the
trouble to inform the entire student body about what
had
happened.8
How can such evidence be reconciled with the claim by
Herman Graml, a
prominent German historian and associate of the
Munich
Institute of
Contemporary� History, who wrote: "Every single Jew
was
beaten, chased,
robbed, insulted and� humiliated. The SA tore the
Jews from
their beds,
mercilessly beat them in their� apartments and then
...
chased them almost
to death ... Blood flowed� everywhere."9 Is it
conceivable
that thousands
of Jewish children would be have� been sent to school
by
their parents on
the morning after that fateful night if� the attacks
against Jews had been
so horrific or extensive? Would any parents� have let
their
children go to
school if they had thought there was even the
slightest
danger of them
being attacked by roving gangs of SA men? I think the
answer is clearly
no! Deplorable things did indeed happen which were
bad
enough,� but the
fantasies of modern historians and history writers
such as
Graml are
simply inexcusable.
The Grynszpan Story
It was Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (Gruenspan) who
initiated
the entire
Crystal� Night affair by shooting the Secretary of
the
German Embassy in
Paris, Ernst vom� Rath. History writers tell us that
the 17‑
year‑old
Grynszpan was merely a poor� Jewish boy who had been
driven
to despair by
the injustice done to his family� and who, in his
deep
depression, shot the
young German diplomat. The fact,� however, is that
Grynszpan had not shown
any previous interest in his family's� fate. He had
wanted
to be free of
them and had gone to Paris to live on his� own.
When the French police asked Grynszpan why he had
shot vom
Rath, he gave
several contradictory explanations:
Version 1: He did not mean to kill vom Rath. He had
wanted
to kill the
German ambassador but because he did not know the
ambassador personally,
he shot vom� Rath instead by mistake.
Version 2: He had only wanted to kill himself, but
wanted
to do so directly
beneath a portrait of Adolf Hitler. In this way he
hoped to
become a symbol
for the Jewish people, who were being murdered daily
in
Germany.'
Version 3: He had not intended to kill anyone.
Although he
had a pistol in
his hand, he did not know how to handle it properly
and it
simply went off
accidentally.
Version 4: He could not remember what had happened
while he
stood in vom
Rath's office. All he remembered was that he was
there, but
did not
remember� why.
Version 5: He couldn't understand the question at
all. He
must have had a
complete blackout because he no longer remembered
anything.
And finally, version 6, which he gave several years
later
to German
officials: Whatever the French police had written
down
about his reason was
nonsense. The true story is that he used to procure
young
boys for the
German embassy secretary because vom Rath had been a
homosexual. And he
shot vom Rath� because he had not been paid for his
services. This is the
only explanation� which he later retracted during
interrogation. However,
none of these� explanations is correct.
The true story is far less heroic. Grynszpan had left
his
family in
Hannover,� Germany, in 1936 after finishing
elementary
school but without
graduating. His� father had been a piece‑work tailor
who
had moved from
Poland to Germany after� the First World War.
Herschel had
a reputation for
disliking work and he hung� out at the homes of his
uncles
in Brussels and
Paris. In February 1938 his� Polish passport expired
and
the French
government refused to renew his residence� permit. As
a
direct result, his
Paris uncle insisted that Herschel leave his� home
because
he was afraid of
getting into touble with the law. And now the� story
begins
to get
extremely interesting.
[end]
Tomorrow:� Who Could the Provocateurs Have Been? ‑
Part III
=====
Courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review
'Crystal
Night' 1938: The
Great Anti‑German Spectacle ‑ Ingrid Weckert
(Paper Presented to the Sixth International
Revisionist
Conference.)
This and other Revisionist articles are posted, among
many
other websites,
at www.ihr.org and www.vho.org
=====
Thought for the Day:
"Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds,
bursting
with its own
corrections."
(Vilefredo Pareto)
=====
=====
=====
Dr. Ingrid Rimland is a well‑known novelist, keynote
speaker, and
owner of the Zundelsite.� For further information,
please
visit
www.zundelsite.org
Subject:
����� ZGram ‑ 2/27/2001 ‑ "Kristallnacht" ‑ Part III
� Date:
����� Tue, 27 Feb 2001 05:10:55 ‑0800 (PST)
From:
����� [email protected]
�� To:
����� [email protected]
Copyright (c) 2001 ‑ Ingrid A. Rimland
ZGram ‑ Where Truth is Destiny
February 27, 2001
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
Part III focuses on the very odd persona of
"Grynszpan", a
young Jewish
hoodlum who was to play such a crucial part in the
unfortunate events of
"Kristallnacht":
[start]
Although Grynszpan had no job or� money (his uncle
refused
to support him),
he was nevertheless able to move into� a hotel. His
hotel
happened to be
just around the corner from the offices of an
important
and influential
Jewish organization, the International League Against
Anti‑
Semitism, or
LICA. The questions which now arise are: Who
supported him
after February
1938 and who paid for his hotel room? Although he had
no
apparent� means of
support or even valid identity papers between
February and
November� 1938,
Grynszpan was nevertheless able to purchase a handgun
for
250 francs on
the morning of 7 November 1938 and then, about an
hour
later, go to the
German Embassy and shoot vom Rath.
Grynszpan was arrested at the scene and was taken to
a
police station.
Although he was a totally obscure Polish Jew with no
money
and no apparent
supporters, nevertheless one of France's most famous
lawyers, Moro
Giafferi,� appeared at the police station a few hours
after
the shooting
and told the� police that he was Grynszpan's
attorney.
Nothing could
possibly have appeared� about the shooting in any
newspaper
before his
arrival. How then could Moro� Giafferi have possibly
known
about the
shooting? Why was he so eager to defend� this young
foreigner? And finally,
who was going to pay his attorney fees? As it� turned
out,
Giafferi took
good care of Grynszpan during the following years.
Before
the Grynszpan
case could come before a French court, the war broke
out.
After the
Germans occupied France, he was turned over to them
by the
French
authorities. He was taken to Germany where he was
interrogated many times,
but no trial ever took place. Moro Giafferi, who had
moved
to Switzerland
in the meantime, still managed to take good care of
Grynszpan.
Many German officials were actively interested in the
case.
They wanted
Grynszpan brought to trial, but this never happened.
Rumors
circulated. A
trial date was scheduled but then postponed again
and
again and again.
Whenever any� official asked why Grynszpan had not
been
brought to trial,
he was given a� different answer each time. The veil
of
mystery surrounding
this case was lifted� only slightly many years after
the
war when a note
was discovered among the many� hundreds of pages in
the
Grynszpan file.
This single short note stated simply� that the trial
against Grynszpan
would not take place for "other than official
reasons."t
It gave no
further explanation. Although the National Socialist
regime supposedly
committed the greatest imaginable crimes against the
Jews,
the murderer
Grynszpan survived the war and returned to Paris. Why
to
Paris, where� he
could still have been arrested and tried for murder?
But
instead he
received� a new name and new identity papers there.
From
whom? Who was in
Paris to help� him and once again take such good care
of
him?
Incidentally, the Grynszpan family also survived the
war.
The young man's
father, mother, brother and sister were deported to
Poland
as a result of
the Polish passport affair and shortly thereafter
were
somehow able to
emigrate to� Palestine. Amazingly enough, this took
place
at a time when
immigration to� Palestine was limited to persons who
possessed at least
1,000 English pounds in� cash. Grynszpan's father, a
poor
piece‑work
tailor, certainly never had a� fortune of 4,000
English
pounds. Many years
after the war the father testified� at the Eichmann
trial
in Jerusalem that
he and his family had to give up all of� their money
except
for ten marks
per family member when they arrived at the
German‑Polish
border in October
l938.l2�� How did they ever raise the 4,000� English
pounds
only a short
time later for their migration to Palestine? Who
organized
their move?
Perhaps the answer to all of these questions is ...
Moro
Giafferi! He was
not a sorcerer, but someone even more powerful: he
was the
legal counsel
of the LICA. The LICA was founded in Paris in 1933
by the
Jew Bernard
Lecache and� operated as a militant propaganda
organization
against real or
imagined� anti‑Semitism. Its main office is still in
Paris
at the same
address it was at� in 1938. (Now known as the LICRA,
it
unsuccessfully sued
Robert Faurisson a few� years ago.) Moro Giafferi was
well
worth the fees
LICA paid him as its legal� counsel. He apparently
enjoyed
spectacular
scenes. He had already achieved� international renown
at a
mass meeting in
Paris following the Berlin Reichstag� fire of
February
1933. Without
knowing at all what had happened, he nevertheless
delivered a spiteful
speech against National Socialist Germany in which he
accused Hermann
Goering of setting the fire. In February 1936
Giafferi
hurried� to Davos,
Switzerland, where the Jew David Frankfurter had shot
and
killed Wilhelm
Gustloff, the head of the Swiss branch of the German
National Socialist
Party. During the subsequent trial it was clearly
established that
Frankfurter� had been a hired murderer with backing
from an
unidentified
but influential� organization. All clues pointed to
the
LICA, but with Moro
Giafferi as his� defense counsel, Frankfurter
remained
silent about who, if
anyone, had hired� him. Amazingly enough,
Frankfurter's
answers to
questions about the shooting� showed the same pattern
as
Grynszpan's
answers almost three years later after� Giafferi
arrived to
help following
the shooting of Ernst vom Rath.
Who Could the Provocateurs Have Been?
Like a medal, the Crystal Night has two sides. One
side
lies in the shining
glare of historical research while the other remains
in the
shadows. Until
now no one (at least as far as I know) has tried to
examine the hidden
side.
In the wake of the Crystal Night, almost everyone
wanted to
know who the
culprits were. Dr. Goebbels had to give an official
explanation which was,
in effect, that the German people had been so
enraged by
the murder of
Ernst vom� Rath that they wanted to punish the Jews
and
therefore started
the pogrom. But� Goebbels did not really believe this
story
himself. To
several persons he� expressed his suspicion that a
secret
organization must
have instigated the� entire affair. He simply could
not
believe that
anything so well organized could� have been a
spontaneous
popular outburst.
One must understand the broad popularity of the
National
Socialist regime
at that time to realize how incredibly difficult it
was to
imagine that
any secret,� well organized opposition movement could
have
instigated such
a pogrom. We now� know about some of these so‑called
resistance
organizations. But at that time� such well‑organized
opposition groups
seemed preposterous, so overwhelming was� the
popularity and
self‑confidence of Hitler and the National Sociatist
government. Although
the National Socialists were probably more aware of
the
danger of Jewish
power and influence than anyone else, they
nevertheless
totally
underestimated it. In a real sense, they were far too
naive. One
consequence of� this enormous popularity and self‑
confidence was that the
Party leaders� themselves simply could not imagine
that it
was not one of
their own colleagues� behind the whole affair. Among
the
Party leaders
fingers were being pointed in� all directions.
Apparently
to avoid internal
wrangling and the harm that this� would do to their
public
image, an
investigation to determine the instigators� never
took
place. Hitler
believed that Dr. Goebbels, his closest confidant and
the
one man he could
never abandon, had been the instigator.
The only persons actually punished were individual SA
men
who had
participated directly in the pogrom and been accused
in
German courts of
murder,� assault, looting or other criminal acts by
Jewish
or German
witnesses to these� crimes. But before any of these
cases
ever actually
came to trail, Hitler issued� a special decree
ordering the
postponement of
all such cases until after the� accused individuals
were
first prosecuted
by the Supreme Party Court, an� internal court
concerned
with discipline
within the National Socialist Party� organization.
The most
severe
punishment which the Court could impose was
expulsion from
the Party. In
this way the Party hoped to remove any guilty
members from
its own ranks
before they appeared as defendants in the criminal
courts.
In February
1939 the Chief Judge of the Supreme Party Court,
Walter
Buch, reported his
findings to Hermann Goering. From an examination of
the
Buch report as
well as many documents from some of the thousands of
trials
of so‑called
Nazi criminals held after the war, and corroborating
testimony by
thousands of defendants and witnesses, I have been
able to
gain a detailed
and accurate understanding of what actually happened
during those fateful
days and� nights of November 1938.
[end]
Tomorrow:� Munich on the Ninth of November ‑ Part IV
=====
Courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review
'Crystal
Night' 1938: The
Great Anti‑German Spectacle ‑ Ingrid Weckert
(Paper Presented to the Sixth International
Revisionist
Conference.)
This and other Revisionist articles are posted, among
many
other websites,
at www.ihr.org and www.vho.org
=====
Thought for the Day:
(EZ, can you write a small paragraph that it is LYCA
which
still makes
French Revisionists' lives miserable to this day?)
=====
=====
===== Dr. Ingrid Rimland is a well‑known novelist,
keynote
speaker, and
owner of the Zundelsite.� For further information,
please
visit
www.zundelsite org
Subject:
����� Subject: ZGram ‑ 2/28/2001 ‑ "Kristallnacht" ‑ Part IV
� Date:
����� Wed, 28 Feb 2001 07:40:38 ‑0800 (PST)
From:
����� Ingrid Rimland <[email protected]>
�� To:
����� [email protected]
Copyright (c) 2001 ‑ Ingrid A. Rimland
ZGram ‑ Where Truth is Destiny
February 28, 2001
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
In Part IV, Ingrid Weckert tells of the strange story
of
"strangers"/imposters pouring into Germany across the
borders of France and
Belgium at an opportune moment to incite the populace
against the German
Jews:
[start]
Already on 8 November 1938, one day before the
Crystal
Night, strange
persons� who had never been seen there before
suddenly
appeared in several
small towns in� Hessen near the French‑ German
border. They
went to mayors,
Kreisleiters� (district Party leaders) and other
important
officials in
these towns and asked� them what actions were being
planned
against the
Jews. The officials were rather� startled by these
questions and replied
that they didn't know of any such plans.� The
strangers
acted as if they
were shocked to hear this. They shouted and
complained
that something had
to be done against the Jews and then, without
further
explanation, they
disappeared. Most of those who were approached by
these
strangers reported
the incidents to the police or discussed them with
friends. They usually
regarded the strangers as crazy anti‑Semites and
promptly
forgot about the
incidents ‑ until the next evening. Some of these
apparently� crazy
individuals really outdid themselves. In one case two
men,
dressed as
members of the SS, went to an SA Standartenfuehrer
(Colonel) and ordered
him to destroy the nearby synagogue. To understand
the
absurdity of this
one must know� that the SS and SA were completely
separate
organizations. A
real SS member� would never have tried to give orders
to an
SA unit. This
case shows that the� strangers were foreigners who
did not
even understand
the distinctions of German� authority. The SA
Standartenfuehrer rejected
the demands of the self‑styled SS� men and reported
the
incident to his
superiors.
When the provocateurs realized that their efforts
were not
working with
local officials, they changed their tactics. Instead
they
tried to incite
directly the� people in the streets. In another town,
for
example, two men
appeared at the� market place and began making
speeches to
the people
there, trying to incite� them against the Jews.
Eventually
some people did
indeed storm the synagogue,� but by then the two
provocateurs had, of
course, disappeared.
Similar incidents occured in several towns.
Unidentified
strangers suddenly
appeared, gave speeches, started throwing stones at
windows, stormed Jewish
buildings, schools, hospitals, and synagogues, and
then
disappeared. These
unusual incidents had already started on the 8th of
November, that is,
before Ernst vom Rath was dead. His death was only
reported late on the
evening of the� 9th. The fact that this strange
pattern of
incidents had
already begun one day� earlier proves that the death
of vom
Rath was not
the reason for the Crystal� Night outburst. Vom Rath
was
still alive when
the pogrom began.
And this was only the beginning. Well organized and
widespread incidents
began on the evening of 9 November. Groups of
generally
five or six young
men, armed with bars and clubs, went down the
streets
smashing store
windows. They� were not Jew‑hating SA men, enraged
over the
murder of a
German diplomat. They� operated too methodically to
have
been motivated by
anger. They carried out� their work without any
apparent
emotion.
Nonetheless, it was their destruction� that
encouraged
certain other
individuals from the lowest social classes to� become
a mob
and contimue
the destruction. There is another mysterious aspect
to all
this. Several
district and local Party leaders (Kreisleiters and
Ortsgruppenleiters)
were awakened from their sleep in the middle of the
night
by telephone
calls. Someone claiming to be from the regional Party
headquarters or� the
regional Party propaganda bureau (Gauleitung or
Gaupropagandaleitung) would
ask what was happening in the official's town or
city. If
the Party
official� answered "Nothing, everything is quiet,"
the
telephone caller
would then say in� German slang that he had received
an
order to the effect
that the Jews were� going to get it tonight and that
the
respective
official should carry out the� order. In most cases
the
Party leader,
disturbed from his sleep, did not even� understand
what had
happened. Some
simply dismissed the call as a joke and went� back to
bed.
Others called
back the office from where the telephone voice had
pretended to be
calling. If they managed to reach someone in charge,
they
were often told
that nobody knew anything about such a call. But if
they
reached only� a
lower official they were often told: "Well, if you
got that
order, you'd
better go ahead and do what you were told." These
telephone
calls caused
considerable confusion. All this came out months
later
during the trials
conducted by the Supreme Party Court. The Chief Judge
concluded that in
every case a misunderstanding had arisen in one link
or
other of the chain
of command.� But when they were confronted with
apparently
genuine orders
to organize� demonstrations against the Jews that
night,
most of the Party
leaders had simply� not known what to do.
The pattern of seemingly sporadic anti‑Jewish
incidents in
small towns,
followed only later by a carefully planned outburst
in many
large cities
throughout Germany, clearly suggests the work of a
centrally organized
group of� well‑trained agents. Even shortly after the
Crystal Night, many
leading Party� officials suspected that the entire
affair
had been
centrally cordinated.� Significantly, even Hermann
Graml,
the only West
German historian who has� written in detail about the
Crystal Night,
carefully distinguished between� provocateurs and
people
who were simply
carried away by their emotions and� spontaneously
took part
in the riot and
destruction. Without providing the� slightest shred
of real
evidence, Graml
claims that the provocative agents were� directed bv
Dr.
Goebbels.
Munich on the Ninth of November
While all this was happening across the Reich, a
special
annual
commemoration� was being held in Munich. Fifteen
years
earlier, on 9
November 1923, a movement� led by Adolf Hitler, Erich
von
Ludendorff (a
leading First World War General),� and two major
figures in
the Bavarian
government tried to depose the legal� government and
take
responsibility
themselves as a new national government. The
uprising or
putsch was put
down and 16 rebels were shot down next to the
Feldherrnhalle, a famous old
monument building in central Munich. Accordingly,
the 9th
of November had
been commemorated every year since 1933 as the
memorial
day for the
martyred heroes of the National Socialist movement.
Adolf
Hitler and� the
Party veterans, as well as all of the Gauleiters
(regional
Party leaders)
met every year in Munich for the occasion. Hitler
would
usually deliver a
speech to a select audience of Party veterans at the
famous
Buergerbraeukeller� restaurant on the evening of the
8th.
On the morning of
the 9th Hitler and his� veteran comrades would
reenact the
1923 "March to
the Feldherrnhalle." On the� evening of the 9th the
Fuehrer
always held an
informal dinner at the Old Town� Hall ("Alte
Rathaus") with
old comrades as
well as all the Gauleiters. At� midnight young men
who were
about to enter
the SS and the SA were sworn in at� the
Feldherrnhalle. All
of the
Gauleiters and other guests participated in this
very
solemn ceremony.
After it was over they left Munich and returned to
their
homes throughout
the Reich.
It is clear that the 8th of November date was chosen
very
cleverly. The
annual commemoration ceremony of that day insured
that
almost all of the
Gauleiters would be away from their home offices when
the
anti‑Jewish
demonstrations began. In other words, the actual
decision‑
making
responsibilities that were normally carried out by
the
Gauleiters were
temporarily in the hands of lower‑ranking individuals
with
less experience.
Between 8 and 10 November, subordinate officials
stood in
for the
Gauleiters who� were either in Munich or en route to
or
from the annual
commemoration there.� This temporary transfer of
decision‑
making authority
is very important because� it contributed to much of
the
subsequent
confusion and thus helped the� provocateurs. Another
contributing factor
was the fact that no one expected any� trouble. At
that
time Germany was
one of the most peaceful countries in the� world.
There was
no reason to
expect any kind of unrest. It was only during� dinner
at
the Old Town Hall
that the first sporadic reports of riot and
destruction
reached Munich
from some of the Gauleiter's home offices. At the
same
time it was learned
that Ernst vnm Rath had died in Paris from his
wounds.
What Was Goebbels Doing?
After the dinner was over, the Fuehrer left at about
g p.m.
and returned to
his apartment. Dr. Goebbels then stood up and spoke
briefly
about the
latest news. He informed the audience that vom Rath
had
died and that, as
a result,� anti‑Jewish demonstrations had
spontaneously
broken out in two
or three places.� Goebbels was renowned for his
passionate
and inspiring
speeches. But what he� gave that evening was not a
speech
at all but only a
short and very informal� announcement. He pointed out
that
the times were
over when Jews could kill� Germans without being
punished.
Legal measures
would now be taken. Nevertheless,� the death of vom
Rath
should not be an
excuse for private actions against Jews.� He
suggested that
the Gauleiters
and the head of the SA, Viktor Lutze, should� contact
their
home offices to
make sure that peace and order were being
maintained. It's
very important
to understand that Dr. Goebbels had no authority� to
give
any orders to the
others present.� As fellow Gauleiters they were
colleagues
of equal rank.
Anyway, what he said� was apparently considered so
reasonable that the
others agreed and did what he� suggested.
[end]
Tomorrow:� Orders to Stop the Pogrom ‑ Part V
=====
Courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review
'Crystal
Night' 1938: The
Great Anti‑German Spectacle ‑ Ingrid Weckert
(Paper Presented to the Sixth International
Revisionist
Conference.)
This and other Revisionist articles are posted, among
many
other websites,
at www.ihr.org and www.vho.org
=====
Thought for the Day:
"Tar‑baby ain't sayin' nuthin', and Brer Fox, he lay
low."
(Joel Chandler Harris)
=====
=====
=====
Dr. Ingrid Rimland is a well‑known novelist, keynote
speaker, and
owner of the Zundelsite.� For further information,
please
visit
www.zundelsite.org
Subject:
����� Subject: ZGram ‑ 3/1/2001 ‑ "Kristallnacht" ‑ Part V
� Date:
����� Thu, 1 Mar 2001 05:12:49 ‑0800 (PST)
From:
�� ���[email protected]
�� To:
����� [email protected]
Copyright (c) 2001 ‑ Ingrid A. Rimland
ZGram ‑ Where Truth is Destiny
March 1, 2001
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
In Part V there is embedded a story that bothers me
in this
overall
thought‑provoking tale ‑ and that is that Germany
asked the
vandalized Jews
to pay for their own destroyed windows.� It is a
story that
simply does not
fit and has a nasty, vindictive ring to it which, in
my
mind, is a discord
in an otherwise believable story.
I asked Ernst Zundel how such dishonorable action
could
have been
explained, and he said that the government reasoning
was
that Jews would
vastly exaggerate their own suffering and collect
on "damages" that weren't
supported by evidence ‑ and that, in fact, many
insurance
companies ignored
the government directives and paid for destroyed
plate
glass windows
regardless.
In the wake of those horrendously inflated
"Holocaust"
claims, that
explanation makes sense.� Still, I wish the Third
Reich
government, mindful
of public image, would not have been so niggardly.
Just so you know where I stand.� The rest makes
perfect
sense.
Here is the second‑to‑last Weckert installment:
[start]
You may have heard the widespread allegation that
Goebbels
started the
Crystal Night pogrom with a fiery speech on that
evening of
9 November.
This widely accepted story is false. The following
facts
will clarify this
point:
� 1. As Gauleiter for Berlin, Dr. Goebbels had no
authority outside of his
Berlin district. Although he was also the Propaganda
Minister of the German
government, this did not give him any authority over
Party
officials.
Furthermore, he had no authority whatsoever over the
SA or
the SS.
2. Of all the National Socialist leaders, Dr.
Goebbels
would have
understood��� better than anyone else the immense
damage
that an
anti‑Jewish pogrom would��� cause for Germany. On the
morning of 10
November, when he first learned about��� the extent
of the
damage and
destruction of the previous night, he was furious
and
shocked at the
stupidity of those who had participated. There is
substantial evidence
for this.
3. How could a speech given after 9 p.m. on the
evening of
9 November have
possibly incited a "pogrom" which had already begun
the day
before when the
first provocateurs appeared at municipal and Party
offices
to persuade
officials to take action against the Jews?
4. Although we do not know exactly what Dr. Goebbels
said
in his supposedly
fiery speech, we do know what the Gauleiters and the
SA
commander did after
the speech had ended: they went to the telephones and
called their
espective��� home offices to order their subordinates
to do
everything
necessary to��� maintain peace and order. They
emphasized
that under no
circumstances must��� anyone take part in any
demonstrations. These
telephone instructions were��� written down at the
home
offices by whoever
was on duty. The orders from each��� Gauleiter were
then
passed on by
telex to other offices within the Gau or��� district.
These
telex messages
are still in various records files and are
available to
anyone who
wishes to examine them. 5.
Orders to Stop the Pogrom
While the Gauleiters were calling their home offices,
the
head of the SA,
Viktor Lutze, ordered all of his immediate
subordinates,
the SA
Gruppenfuehrers,� who were together with him in
Munich, to
call their home
offices as well. Lutze� ordered that under no
circumstances
could SA men
take part in any demonstrations� against Jews, and
that
furthermore the SA
was to intervene to stop any� demonstrations already
in
progress. As a
result of these strict orders, SA men� began to guard
Jewish stores that
very night wherever windows had been broken.� There
is no
doubt about this
order by Lutze because we have the postwar court
testimony
of several
witnesses confirming it. The SS and the police were
given
similar orders
to restore peace and order. Himmler ordered Reinhard
Heydrich to� prevent
all destruction of property and to protect Jews
against
demonstrators.� The
telex communication of this order still exists. It is
in
the files of the
International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
However,
during the Nuremberg
trial this telex order was presented in three
different
forms, with forged
amendments to change the original meaning. In my book
Feuerzeichen I
undertook� to restore the original text.
Adolf Hitler joined the midnight celebration at the
Feldherrnhalle. It was
only after he returned to his apartment about one
o'clock
in the morning
that he� learned about the demonstrations which had
been
taking place in
Munich, during� which one synagogue had been set on
fire.
He was furious
and immediately ordered� the police chief of Munich
to come
see him. Hitler
told him to immediately stop� the fire and to make
sure
that no other
outrages took place in Munich. He then� called
various
police and Party
officials throughout the Reich to learn the� extent
of these
demonstrations. Finally, he ordered a telex message
sent to
all Gauleiter
offices. It read: "By express order from the very
highest
authority,� arson
against Jewish businesses or other property must in
no case
and under no
circumstances take place." Synagogues were not
specifically
mentioned,
apparently because Hitler was still unaware of the
burning
of synagogues,
apart from the one in Munich.
How Did the SA Get Involved Despite the Orders From
Its Own
Leaders?
How was it possible that in spite of all these
emphatic
orders, so much
damage and destruction could have been done and that
so
many SA members
could have participated? According to the records,
at
least three of the
28 SA Groups� did not obey the orders of SA chief
Lutze.
Instead, they sent
out their men to� destroy synagogues and Jewish
buildings.
In effect they
did precisely the� opposite of what Lutze had
ordered. What
actually
happened is clear from the� testimony and evidence
presented at postwar
trials against former SA men accused� of
participating in
the riot. The
trials, held between 1946 and 1952, were based� to a
large
extent on the
report of SA Brigade 50 chief Karl Lucke and begins
with
these words: "On
10 November 1938, at 3 o'clock in the morning, I
received
the following
order: 'By order of the Gruppenfuehrer, all Jewish
synagogues� within the
Brigade district are to be immediately blown up or
set on
fire'."� Lucke
then included in his report a listing of synagogues
which
had been
destroyed by members of his Brigade. This report has
been
cited by the
prosecution at the Nuremberg Tribunal and by
practically
all of the
consensus� historians ever since as proof that the SA
was
given orders to
destroy Jewish� stores and synagogues.
The contradiction between the orders actually given
and the
statement made
in the Lucke report requires a detailed explanation.
On 9
November the
leader of SA� Group Mannheim, Herbert Fust, was in
Munich
together with the
other SA Group� leaders and the SA Chief of Staff,
Viktor
Lutze. When Lutze
ordered the Group� leaders to contact their home
offices to
stop all
anti‑Jewish demonstrations,� Fust, along with the
other SA
leaders, did
just that. He called his office in� Mannheim and
passed on
the orders he
had received from Lutze. The man who was on� duty
that
night at the
Mannheim SA office telephone and who received Fust's
order
confirmed that
he understood it and then hung up. But he never
passed on
the order he had
received. Instead, he transmitted precisely the
opposite
order. The normal
procedure would have been for the man on duty at the
telephone to
immediately call the deputy group leader, Lucke, who
was in
nearby
Darmstadt.� But instead he called SA Oberfuehrer
(senior
colonel) Fritsch
and asked him to� come to the office. Fritsch had a
reputation for not
being particularly clever.� When he arrived, the man
who
had received the
telephone call showed him a small� paper slip with a
few
notes on it which
said that the synagogues within the� Mannheim SA
Group
district were to be
destroyed. The man who had received the� call
explained to
Fritsch that the
order had just arrived from Munich.� Slow‑minded as
he was,
Fritsch did not
know what to do and called the local� Kreisleiter
(district
Party leader)
and his deputy. These two men then arrived� at the SA
office and discussed
the situation, while at the same time the� telephone
duty
man notified
other SA leaders, but still not the deputy Group
leader
Lucke. In the
meantime the small paper slip disappeared and the SA
men
now arriving at
the headquarters met only the Kreisleiter, who told
them
about the order
which he thought had come from Munich. No one asked
for any
further
confirmation. The SA men then left to begin the
destruction. Hours later,
when the whole action was almost finished, the
telephone
guard finally
called Deputy� Group Leader Lucke and passed on the
false
order. He also
informed Lucke that� the action had already been
going on
for several
hours. Since it was almost all� over by this time,
Lucke
also neglected to
ask for confirmation of the order. It� was already 3
o'clock in the
morning. Lucke then alerted the Standartenfuehrer� of
his
Brigade and
carried out the destruction within the Darmstadt
district.
At 8 o'clock the next morning Lucke sat down and
wrote the
report which was
later cited at the Nuremberg Tribunal. In fact, as
already
shown, there was
no order to commit arson or carry out destruction
against
any Jewish
property from� the Gruppenfuehrer in Munich, but only
from
the telephone
guard. Who he was� remains a mystery. During the
postwar
trials against
members of this SA unit,� none of the judges asked
for the
name or identity
of this telephone guard. This� mysterious man was
very
probably an agent
for those who were actually behind the� entire
Crystal
Night Affair.
The Fine Imposed on the Jews
Early in the morning following the Crystal Night,
Propaganda Minister Dr.
Goebbels announced in a radio broadcast that any
action
against Jews was
strictly prohibited. He warned that severe penalties
would
be imposed on
anyone who did not obey this order. He also
explained that
the Jewish
question would be� resolved only by legal means. As
already
mentioned,
German government and Party� officials were furious
about
what had
happened. Hermann Goering, who was� responsible for
Germany's economy,
complained that it would be impossible to� replace
the
special plate glass
of the broken store windows because it was not
manufactured in Germany. It
had to be imported from Belgium and would cost a
great
deal of precious
foreign currency. Because of the Jewish boycott
against
German goods, the
Reich was short of foreign exchange currency. Goering
therefore decided
that because this shortage was caused by the Jews, it
was
they who would
have to pay for the broken glass. He imposed a fine
of one
billion
Reichsmarks on the German Jews. This fine is always
mentioned by anyone who
writes about the Crystal Night. But historians and
history
writers
invariably� neglect to explain the reason for the
fine.
It was certainly unjust to force Jews to pay for
damage
which they had not
caused. Goering understood this. However, in private
he
justified the fine
by citing the fact that the 1933 Jewish declaration
of war
against Germany
was proclaimed in the name of the millions of Jews
throughout the world.
Therefore� they could now help their co‑religionists
in
Germany bear the
consequences of� the boycott. It should also be
pointed out
that only
German Jews with assets of� more than 5,000
Reichsmarks in
cash had to
contribute to the fine. In 1938,� when prices were
very
low, 5,000
Reichsmarks was a small fortune. Anyone with� that
much
money in cash would
certainly have had far more wealth in other assets
and
could therefore
well afford to pay their assessed portion of the fine
without being
reduced to poverty, despite what history writers have
maintained.
[end]
Tomorrow:� The Consequences of the Crystal Night ‑
Part VI
=====
Courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review
'Crystal
Night' 1938: The
Great Anti‑German Spectacle ‑ Ingrid Weckert
(Paper Presented to the Sixth International
Revisionist
Conference.)
This and other Revisionist articles are posted, among
many
other websites,
at www.ihr.org and www.vho.org
=====
Thought for the Day:
"Earth bears no balsam for mistakes;
Men crown the knave
and scourge the tool
that did his will."
(Edward Rowland Sill)
=====
=====
=====
Dr. Ingrid Rimland is a well‑known novelist, keynote
speaker, and
owner of the Zundelsite.� For further information,
please
visit
www.zundelsite.org
Subject:
����� Subject: ZGram ‑ 3/2/2001 ‑ "Kristallnacht" ‑ Part VI
� Date:
����� Fri, 2 Mar 2001 02:25:24 ‑0800 (PST)
From:
����� Ingrid Rimland <[email protected]>
�� To:
����� [email protected]
Copyright (c) 2001 ‑ Ingrid A. Rimland
ZGram ‑ Where Truth is Destiny
March 2, 2001
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
Now we come to the consequences of Kristallnacht and
to
this presentation's
conclusion:
[start]
The Consequences of the Crystal Night
It is often said that the Crystal Night incident was
the
official start of
the German "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."
This is
quite true, but
"Final Solution" did not mean physical extermination
‑‑ it
meant only
emigration� of the Jews from Germany. Immediately
after the
Crystal Night,
Hitler ordered� the creation of a central agency to
organize the emigration
of the Jews from� Germany as rapidly as possible.
Accordingly, Goering set
up the Reich Central� Office for Jewish Emigration
("Reichszentrale fuer
die juedische Auswanderung")� with Reinhard Heydrich
as
director. This
agency combined the various government� departments
which
had been involved
with Jewish emigration. It simplified� official
procedures
for Jewish
emigration, but its work was severely hampered by
the
unwillingness of
almost all countries to admit Jews. The only country
to
which Jews could
still easily emigrate was Palestine, provided they
possessed� one thousand
pounds sterling each, as required by the British
authorities� there.
Despite the favorable terms of the Haavara or
Transfer
Agreement, only a
few German Jews were willing to emigrate to
Palestine. In
those days
Palestine was� only at the beginning of its
development. It
was still an
agrarian country with� very little industry. It was
only
after the arrival
of thousands of German Jews� with their capital and
experience that
industrial development really began� there. The Jews
in
Germany were
generally employed in trade, industry, or the
professions.
There were
little or no opportunities for them in Palestine. For
example, there was
virtually no financial structure in Palestine in the
1930s. There was no
money market, no stock exchange, and no investment
banking.
How could
businessmen operate in such an environment?
Because so few Jews wanted to migrate to Palestine,
special
efforts were
made to open the doors of other countries, but this
proved
very difficult.
Prosperous� nations did not want Jewish immigrants
and poor
countries were
very unattractive. In the summer of 1938 an Inter‑
Governmental Refugee
Committee was� established with the American lawyer
George
Rublee as its
director. In January� 1939 (that is, after the
Crystal
Night), Rublee and
the German government signed� an agreement by which
all
German Jews could
emigrate to the country of their� choice.
Interestingly
enough, it was the
father of a future American president� and the father
of a
future German
president who nearly torpedoed this agreement:
Jos�ph
Kennedy, the U.S.
Ambassador to Britain, and Ernst von Weizsaecker,
State
Secretary of the
German Foreign Office and father of the current
president
of the German
Federal Republic. Adolf Hitler personally intervened
in
the negotiating
process and saved the agreement by sending Reichsbank
President� Hjalmar
Schacht to London to negotiate with Rublee.
Rublee himself later called it a "senational
agreement"‑and
it was indeed
sensational. Special arrangements between the
InterGovernmental Committee
and governments of individual countries would
guarantee
the financial
security of� the migrating Jews. Training camps would
be
established to
prepare emigrating� Jews for new jobs in their future
homelands. Jews in
Germany who were more than� 45 years old could either
emigrate or remain in
Germany. If they decided to� remain, they would be
exempt
from
discriminatory restrictions. They would be� able to
live
and work wherever
they wanted. Their social security would be
guaranteed by
the Reich
government, the same as for any German citizen. As
Rublee
later noted,
there were practically no incidents against Jews
during
the time between
the signing of the agreement and the outbreak of war
in
September� 1939.
The Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which
was
organized shortly
after the Crystal Night, was based on the provisions
of the
Rublee plan. A
parallel Jewish organization, the Reich Union of Jews
in
Germany
("Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland"), was
established. Its task
was to advise Jews on all questions of emigration
and to
act on behalf of
Jews with the� Reich Central Office. The two agencies
worked closely
together to facilitate� Jewish emigration as much as
possible. In addition,
the SS and certain other� National Socialist
organizations
worked with
Zionist organizations to facilitate� Jewish
emigration.
Jewish groups
greatly appreciated the cooperation of the SS.� For
example, the SS
established training centers where prospective Jewish
emigrants learned
new job skills to prepare them for their new lives.
With the help of the Transfer Agreement and the
Rublee
plan, hundreds of
thousands of Jews migrated from Europe to Palestine.
In
September 1940 the
Jewish news agency in Palestine, "Palcor," reported
that
500,000 Jewish
emigrants had already arrived from the German Reich,
including Austria, the
Sudetenland, Bohemia‑ Moravia, and German‑ruled
Poland.
Nevertheless, after
1950 it was claimed that the total number of Jewish
emigrants to Palestine
from all� European countries was only about 80,000.
What
happened to the
other 420,000� Jews? In 1940 they probably had no
idea that
later on they
were supposed to have� been "gassed"!
Conclusion
I have tried to point out just a few unmentioned
aspects of
the Crystal
Night issue which, in my opinion, give a picture of
what
actually happened
that is� entirely different than the one generally
accepted. I am convinced
that neither� the German government nor the leaders
of the
National
Socialist Party instigated� the Crystal Night.
Ultimately
it was not the
Jews but the Germans who suffered� most as a result
of this
event. Even
persons sympathetic to National Socialism� are still
appalled when they
think of the Crystal Night. Many are under the
impression
that murder and
arson were quite common under National Socialism and
that
no Jew could be
sure of his life or property. Nazi Germany was
supposedly
a country
without any civil rights. The Crystal Night incident
was
indeed one of� the
darkest episodes of German history in the era of 1933
to
1945. But based on
all of the available evidence, these demonstrations
were
neither thought up
nor organized by German Party or government
officials. In
fact, they were
completely� suprised and shocked when they learned of
the
riot and
destruction. The pogrom� must have been thought up
and
organized by those
who actually benefited from it� and who wanted to
create
havoc in Germany.
Who could they have been? If we keep in mind the deep
involve ment of the
Jewish organization LICA in the murder of vom Rath,
we may
ask: Could the
Jews themselves have hoped to benefit from a pogrom?
In
the aftermath of
the Crystal� Night, the world press became
overwhelmingly
sympathetic to
the Jews, which is� precisely what they wanted above
all
else. The Zionists
in particular counted on �worldwide support in their
struggle against
England, which then ruled Palestine� as a British
mandate.
Jewish
immigration to Palestine was strictly limited at
that time
by the British
because of vehement Arab opposition to the arrival of
ever
larger numbers
of Jews. As a result, the number of Jewish immigrants
dropped in 1938 to
the lowest level since the beginning of the century,
when
the Zionist mass
migration to Palestine began.
To stabilize the situation, the British formulated a
partition plan
dividing� Palestine into Arab and Jewish portions.
Despite
serious
reservations, the Jews� agreed to the plan, but the
Arabs
did not. They
responded with an uprising known� as the Arab Revolt.
In
March 1938 the
British government sent Sir Harold� MacMichaels as
High
Commissioner to
Palestine. He succeeded in suppressing the� uprising,
but
to appease the
Arabs he promised to urge his government to abandon
the
partition plan and
halt further Jewish immigration. MacMichaels returned
to
London in October
1938 to discuss his proposals with the British
parliament.
The scheduled
date for the final decision was 8 November 1938, the
day on
which the
Crystal Night violence actually began.
German Embassy Secretary Ernst vom Rath had been shot
just
one day earlier,
on 7 November. The conspirators no doubt hoped that
vom
Rath would die
immediately, in which case the anti‑ Jewish
demonstrations
would probably
have also started on the 7th. Could someone have
hoped
that a pogrom in
nearby Germany would influence the British to change
their
Palestine
policy? Or that it� would induce the outside world to
exert
pressure on
Britain to open Palestine to� the Jews who were being
so
terribly treated
in Germany? I cannot give any� definite answers. I
can only
speculate as to
who (the) conspirators behind the Crystal� Night
really
were and as to
their motives. To me it seems entirely plausible
that
certain Jewish
groups were involved. The LICA was almost certainly
involved� in the murder
of vom Rath. In any case, the Crystal Night incident
was
not an expression
of the will of the German people. Nor was it
organized by
Dr. Goebbels or
any of the other German leaders. On the contrary, it
was
carefully
organized by people who worked in the shadows.
Notes
1.William P. Varga, The Number One Nazi Jew‑Baiter: A
Political Biography
of Julius Streicher (New York: 1981).
2. Even Helmut Heiber, a prominent contemporary Ger
nan
historian, had to
admit these facts. Helmut Heiber, "Der Fall
Gruenspan,"
ViertelFahrshefte
Suer Zeitgeschichte, 5. Hg., 1957, pp. 154‑172.
3. See: Werner Feilchenfeld, Dolf Michaelis, and
Ludwig
Pinner,
Haavara‑Transfer nach Palaestina (Tuebingen: 1972);
arld,
Edwin Black, The
Transfer Agreement (New York and London: 1984)
4. Ingrid Weckert, Feuerzeichen:
Die "Reichslcristal1nacht," Anstifter und
Brandstifterpfer und Nutzniesser (Tuebingen: 1981),
p. 225.
5. Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement, p. 382.
6. W. Feilchenfeld, et al., Haavara‑Transfer Nach
Palaestina, p. 71.
7. Nahum Goldmann, Das Juedische Paradox: Zionismus
und
Judentum nach
Hitler (Cologne: 1978), p. 181.
8. Heinemann Stern, Warum Hassen Sie Uns Eigentlich?
(Duesseldorf: 1970),
pp. 298‑299.
9. Hermann Graml, Der 9. November 1938 (Bonn: 1958),
p. 47 �
10. H. Heiber, "Der Fall Gruenspan," p. 164.
11. H. Heiber, "Der Fall Gruenspan," p. 172.
12. Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York:
1968),
p. 41.
� Bibliographic information
[end]
=====
Courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review
'Crystal
Night' 1938: The
Great Anti‑German Spectacle ‑ Ingrid Weckert
(Paper Presented to the Sixth International
Revisionist
Conference.)
This and other Revisionist articles are posted, among
many
other websites,
at www.ihr.org and www.vho.org
=====
Thought for the Day:
"The Lightning reached a fiery rod,
and on Death's fearful forehead wrote
the autograph of God."
(Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
=====
=====
===== Dr. Ingrid Rimland is a well‑known novelist,
keynote
speaker, and
owner of the Zundelsite.� For further information,
please
visit
www.zundelsite.org