Читать книгу The Night of Broken Glass - Группа авторов - Страница 9

At about 9.30 on the morning of 7 November 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, entered the Hôtel de Beauharnais at 78 rue de Lille, which had since 1814 been the site of the Prussian, later the German, embassy in Paris. The porter’s wife was the first person he met in the courtyard. He said he had an important document to deliver and wanted to speak to an embassy secretary. Frau Mathes directed him to the corresponding door. Grynszpan rang and repeated his business to the aide who opened the door. After he had sat for a short time in the waiting room, he was shown into the office of the legation secretary, Ernst vom Rath.

A few minutes later the aide heard loud cries. He raced back and found the legation secretary lying wounded in the corridor. While two of his colleagues saw to the wounded man, the aide led away the assassin, who had put down his revolver and put up no resistance, and handed him over to the police officer posted in front of the embassy. The severely injured vom Rath was taken to the nearby Alma Clinic, where he was immediately operated on.

Herschel Grynszpan’s parents had emigrated from western Russia to Germany in 1911 and settled in Hanover. After the reconstitution of Poland at the end of the First World War, they acquired Polish citizenship, but remained in Hanover, where his father first worked as a tailor and later eked out a living selling junk. In the summer of 1936, when he was fifteen years old, Herschel fled these impoverished conditions and travelled through Belgium to Paris, where he was taken in by one of his father’s brothers.

In late October 1938, Grynszpan received terrible news. On 31 March, the Polish government had announced that all Poles who had lived abroad for more than five years would lose their Polish citizenship. New passport regulations were issued to that effect on 30 October. This measure was aimed above all at Polish Jews living in Germany and would have left them stranded there. The Reich Foreign Office sought to prevent this from happening by expelling Polish Jews before the deadline. On 27 and 28 October, the police and the SS arrested about 16,000 Jews throughout the Reich, transported them to a point on the Berlin–Poznan railway line just short of Zbąszyń, and then herded them over the Obra River. The Polish authorities denied them the right to cross the border, so they wandered about for days in the no-man’s land between Germany and Poland, in pouring rain and without food or a roof over their heads. Grynszpan’s parents were among these deportees.

‘My heart bleeds when I think about our tragedy,’ Herschel said in a note he left for his uncle on the morning of the assassination. ‘I have to protest in such a way that the whole world hears my protest, and that is what I intend to do.’² Then he bought a revolver in a gun shop and took the metro to the German embassy. The rumours suggesting that Grynszpan’s attack might have had a private motive, since both he and vom Rath frequented homosexual milieus, have no foundation in fact.³ It was pure chance that Grynszpan was sent to the office of vom Rath, who just happened to be on duty on Mondays.

The following morning, Professor Georg Magnus, the director of the University Surgical Clinic II and his chief physician, Dr Brandt, arrived in Paris. The two doctors, sent as an ‘expression of the Führer’s sympathy, made a visible impression on Herr vom Rath’, wrote the German ambassador, Graf Welczek, in the report that he prepared for the Foreign Office that evening.⁴ Vom Rath’s condition, which Magnus and Brandt had described in their first bulletin as promising, deteriorated rapidly in the course of the day. Hitler, who by sending his personal physician had shown his unfailing instinct for the explosiveness of a situation, immediately promoted the young diplomat to the rank of Gesandtschaftsrat I. Klasse (legation councillor first-class), two floors up, even though he had only recently been appointed a legation secretary.

Grynszpan’s desperate act immediately reminded people of the Gustloff case which had occurred only a few years earlier. On 4 February 1936, David Frankfurter, a medical student, had fired five revolver shots at the Nazi party’s regional group leader, Wilhelm Gustloff, in his apartment in Davos, killing him as a protest against Germany’s policy regarding Jews. Gustloff’s body was transported with great ceremony from Switzerland to Schwerin, where Hitler attended the burial. In his speech, the Führer blamed international Jewry for the crime and described Gustloff as a ‘holy martyr’ and ‘the first genuine martyr for National Socialism abroad’.⁵ However, because the Winter Olympic Games were to begin in Garmisch-Partenkirchen two days after Gustloff’s assassination, no anti-Jewish reprisals were taken at that time.

In November 1938, there were neither Olympic Games nor foreign powers whose reactions had to be taken into account. On the contrary, after the Munich Agreement, in which the western powers had only five weeks earlier caved in and accepted the transfer of the Sudetenland to the German Reich, the National Socialist regime was more powerful than ever. Many people in Germany were awaiting the opportunity finally to strike and initiate a great, nationwide action against the Jews.

On the basis of the first reports from Paris, the Propaganda Ministry had advised the press to give the assassination ‘the greatest attention’ and to emphasize that this act ‘was certain to have the most serious consequences for Jews in Germany’. On 8 November, the tension was ratcheted up another notch, and the next day the German News Bureau announced that vom Rath was expected to die.⁶ In Berlin, ‘an oppressive anxiety like that felt before a storm’ prevailed that morning, as the journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary. When she asked Heinrich Mühsam, a colleague who had been dismissed and whom she had stopped to see on her way to work, whether vom Rath was likely to die, he replied: ‘Of course he will die. Otherwise the whole thing would make no sense … Don’t you know that political incidents usually occur only when everything has been prepared down to the last detail?’⁷

When at about 4.30 p.m. on 9 November vom Rath finally succumbed to his injuries, practically the entire state and party leadership had assembled in Munich. On the preceding evening, Hitler had inaugurated the annual commemoration of the failed putsch of 1923 by giving a speech in the Bürgerbräukeller. The programme for 9 November included an ‘informal gathering of the NSDAP leadership’ at the City Hall, whose concluding high point was to be the swearingin of new SS units in front of the Feldherrenhalle at midnight. Just how the news of the death of vom Rath – who was now referred to only as an envoy or party member – reached Munich by telephone between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. is not absolutely clear. What is clear is that at the party leadership’s dinner in the Rathaus, Hitler had an intense conversation with Goebbels, who was seated next to him.⁸ Immediately afterwards, Hitler surprised the other guests by leaving and having himself driven to his apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz, where he prepared for the midnight ceremony. He obviously considered it more prudent not to be directly connected with the speech that Goebbels was about to deliver.⁹ He could count on his propaganda minister. Hitler’s preference for blanket verbal authorization, leaving precise intentions open to interpretation, was ‘typical of the unstructured and non-formalized style of reaching decisions in the Third Reich’.¹⁰

At this time Goebbels was on top form. On 10 November, when Ernst vom Rath’s life still hung by a thread, Goebbels wrote ‘If only we could release the wrath of the people right now’, as if he couldn’t wait for the diplomat to die.¹¹ Did the cynical Goebbels really believe in the wrath of the people? Didn’t he see it instead as an instrument that had only to be correctly manipulated? An SD memo of January 1937 concerning the situation of Jews in Germany had stated that ‘the wrath of the people is the most effective means of depriving Jews of their sense of security… . This is all the more comprehensible from a psychological point of view because Jews have learned a great deal from the pogroms of recent centuries and fear nothing more than a hostile mood that can turn against them at any time.’¹² In November 1938, ‘the wrath of the people’ (Volkszorn) was one of Goebbels’s favourite expressions. When the right moment comes, he noted on the day after the riots, it would be necessary to ‘let things take their course’.¹³

Goebbels knew that by instigating a pogrom he could score points with Hitler. A large-scale action against the Jews would help him, put him once again at the centre of things and strengthen his position (which had been weakened by his affair with the actress Lida Baarova) in the delicate power mechanism of the Third Reich. Among all the Nazi paladins, Goebbels certainly had the keenest ear for Hitler’s obsession with driving Jews out of Germany by any means. As they sat cosily with the old guard in Hitler’s favourite café the previous evening, discussing ‘all possible questions’ until 3 a.m., the two of them had probably already arrived at an agreement on their options with regard to the attack in Paris.

In the particular situation of 9 November, Goebbels sensed a unique opportunity to steal a march on his greatest rival, Hermann Göring, who had taken over one office after another and since 1936 had enjoyed enormous power as plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan. Göring had recently proven his ruthlessness in the Blomberg–Fritsch affair and in the annexation of Austria; but during the Sudeten crisis of late September, he had for the first time been among those who hesitated and urged caution. Since then his star had been on the decline. Göring had repeatedly spoken out against anti-Jewish demonstrations because they only further aggravated the Reich’s economic difficulties, particularly with regard to the currency problem. ‘Gentlemen, I have had enough of these demonstrations,’ he said indignantly and with his characteristic theatricality during the extraordinary meeting he called two days after the pogroms. ‘They do not harm the Jews, but rather me, because as the final authority I am responsible for the entire economy.’¹⁴

Four years earlier, in the run-up to the Nuremberg party rally where the ‘race laws’ were promulgated, there had already been conflict between authorities regarding the ‘Jewish question’. Under the motto ‘This city must become free of Jews (judenfrei)’, almost every German community had come up with its own perversities, and the attacks on Jews had been threatening to get out of hand. On 20 August 1935, Hjalmar Schacht, then the Reich’s Minister of Economic Affairs, had called a meeting of leaders at which he complained about the ‘serious damage to the German economy being done by the exaggerations and excesses of anti-Semitic propaganda’.¹⁵ Consequently, interior minister Wilhelm Frick issued a statement informing regional governments that ‘individual actions against Jews … must absolutely stop.’¹⁶ However, the head of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, had already decreed that ‘in order to collect information regarding Jews in Germany … a Jewish registry should be drawn up.’¹⁷ In the regulations issued in August 1935, three basic tendencies of the November pogroms are already clearly foreshadowed: the centralization of state intervention, the prevention of spontaneous actions and the protection of German economic interests.

All the steps taken served one and the same goal, about which there was general agreement: the Jews had to be expelled. ‘Jews have to be expelled from Germany, indeed from Europe as a whole,’ Goebbels wrote after a long conversation with Hitler at the end of November 1937. ‘It will take a while, but it will and must happen. The Führer has made up his mind on this point.’¹⁸ The question was only in what way this goal could best be achieved without inflicting too much damage on Germans. Moreover, the state and party leadership were confident that in implementing the necessary measures they could count on the support of the population.

At the previously mentioned meeting with the minister for economic affairs in August 1935, Adolf Wagner, the Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria, acting as the Führer’s representative, put on record his view that 80 per cent of the population called for ‘a solution to the Jewish question in line with the party’s programme; the Reich government has to respond to this demand, otherwise it will suffer a loss of authority.’ To reassure other participants in the meeting who were less inclined to take immediate action, he added that ‘this need not happen all at once.’¹⁹

With the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the ‘Jewish question’ acquired a new dynamic, and suddenly everything had to move very fast. Of the approximately 520,000 Jews who had been living in Germany in 1933, only about 360,000 were still in the country; now there were in addition some 190,000 Austrian Jews (of whom about 170,000 lived in Vienna). The Germans immediately increased the pressure. In a very short time, they not only implemented in Austria all the laws and regulations that had for the past five years made life increasingly difficult for Jews in the Old Reich, but also introduced numerous new rules to coerce the Jews to hand over all their possessions and then leave the country. In the spring of 1938, there were further, even more violent, riots and, in the context of the so-called ‘June action’, 1,500 Jews were sent to concentration camps. When at the international conference on refugees organized by the United States in Evian in July, all of the thirty-two participating states declared more or less openly that they could not increase their immigration quotas, the German press commented scornfully on the conference’s failure and let it be known that, since no other country would accept the Jews, no meddling in the question of how Germans dealt with the ‘Jewish problem’ would be tolerated. In August, the first Central Office for Jewish Emigration was set up under the direction of Adolf Eichmann.

It was against the background of the stepping-up of anti-Jewish measures in Austria and the successful expulsion of the 16,000 Polish Jews at the end of October, the prestige won in Munich, the inaction by the international community, and also the growing pressure among party members, especially in the ranks of the SA and the Hitler Youth, to finally get rid of the Jews that, on the evening of 9 November, Hitler unleashed his propaganda minister. The fanatical thirty-minute hate speech that Goebbels delivered (and of which no verbatim record has been preserved) before the party bigwigs who had gathered in the great hall of the Munich Rathaus was received, as Goebbels himself noted in his diary, with thunderous applause: ‘They all immediately dashed to the telephones. Now the people will act.’²⁰

In his speech, Goebbels had made it clear that the Nazi party would have to ‘organize and implement’ everything, but should not ‘outwardly appear to be the instigator of the demonstrations’.²¹ The district and local group leaders and SA leaders throughout the Reich were instructed to set the corresponding actions in motion – and these instructions were understood to mean also that ‘Jewish blood should flow.’²² In the meantime, Hitler received the national leader of the SS and the head of the German police in his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz. Himmler was obviously surprised. Although he had himself given an inflammatory anti-Jewish speech to the SS Standarte ‘Deutschland’ the preceding evening – ‘We will force them out with unparalleled ruthlessness’²³ – he found it annoying that Goebbels had been quicker to seize the opportunity and had been able to use the Paris attack to further his own interests. In this awkward situation, Himmler fell back on his position as supreme protector of order: a clever tactic that led to the SS – and in particular the head of the secret police and the SD, Reinhard Heydrich – emerging from the events of November as the great winners. When Heydrich, who had been awakened in his hotel room around 11.30 p.m. so that he could examine reports from the Munich Gestapo, asked how the police and the SS should respond, Hitler told him – on Himmler’s advice, according to Ian Kershaw²⁴ – that the SS should keep out of it, but that the police should ensure that the pogrom was carried out in an orderly way.

Heydrich did not have much time to transform his orders into specific actions. His telegraph to all police chiefs, which went out around 1.20 a.m. – ‘Flash, urgent, pass on immediately!’ – was completely unambiguous. The police forces received orders not to hinder the ‘demonstrations’ likely to occur throughout the Reich, and to intervene only if German property was endangered. ‘Businesses and apartments belonging to Jews are only to be destroyed, not plundered.’ The police actions were to be led by the local state police departments or by security police inspectors, who were also expected to see to it that ‘as soon as the events of this night allow the use of the regular officials’, as many Jews as ‘could be accommodated in the available holding cells’ were immediately arrested. At first, only male Jews who were healthy, not too old, and if possible, wealthy, were to be arrested and transported to the concentration camps concerned after consultation with camp officials.²⁵ Barely 64 hours had passed since the shooting in Paris.

On the morning of 10 November, synagogues all over Germany were put to the torch. The fire brigade was allowed to intervene only if the fires threatened to spread to neighbouring buildings. Thousands of apartments were demolished during that night, and thousands of Jewish businesses were smashed to bits in the course of the following day. The broken glass that piled up in the streets gave the night the ironically euphemistic name of Kristallnacht, ‘the night of broken glass’. It is estimated that 400 people were murdered or driven to suicide. About 40,000 Jews were arrested, and 30,000 of them were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen,²⁶ where they were subjected to the cruellest harassment. Those who were lucky enough to be able to prove that they had the necessary visas and were about to emigrate were released; the number of Jews who died in concentration camps as a result of the ‘November action’ is estimated to be about 1,000. Whereas in the first half of 1938 only about 14,000 Jews had emigrated from Germany, the number of emigrants now rose dramatically. By the end of 1939, about 100,000 Jews had left Germany, and another 100,000 had left Austria. Most of those who remained were poor or old.

During lunch in the Osteria in the Schwabing area of Munich, Goebbels gave the Führer a report. ‘He approves of everything. His views are very radical and aggressive.’²⁷ Others were less enthusiastic; Göring, who had travelled back from Berlin the previous night and had not been informed, telephoned Hitler to complain about the enormous economic damage that had been incurred. While Goebbels was busy winding down the actions before ‘mob rule took over’²⁸ and instructing the press to play down the events – ‘no big headlines on page one, no pictures for the time being’²⁹ – Göring was preparing for the Saturday morning meeting, at which the next steps to be taken against the Jews were to be coordinated with account taken of economic considerations. The declared goal of the 12 November meeting, which lasted several hours and in which representatives of all the departments concerned participated – over a hundred persons from the interior, finance, economic affairs and justice ministries, from the Foreign Office, the Reichsbank, and so on – was the complete exclusion of Jews from German economic life. The idea of the new measures was to isolate them and put them under pressure so they would be forced to leave Germany rapidly and in large numbers. Heydrich had had Eichmann specially brought in from Vienna in order to report on his experiences there.

The decisions made on 12 November can once again be traced in essence back to Hitler himself. In 1936, in his memo on the Four-Year Plan, he had already demanded that ‘the whole of Jewry be held responsible for all the damage individual examples of this criminality have done to the German economy and thus to the German people’.³⁰As retribution for Gustloff’s murder, he suggested that Jews be subjected to collective punishment, but at the time this plan was not realized because of bureaucratic reservations expressed by the ministries, and especially because of Göring’s concerns. Now Göring took up the idea and on 12 November issued an order to the effect that the Jews, as ‘atonement’ for their hostile attitude toward the German people, should pay a fine of one billion Reichsmarks. The no less obscene idea that the Jews themselves not only had to see to it that the damage was repaired but also that all monies proceeding from insurance claims were to be confiscated by the Reich was also Hitler’s; it occurred to him while he was lunching with Goebbels at the Osteria. Göring implemented this proposal in his own ‘Order on the restoration of the appearance of the streets by Jewish businesses’.

Whereas the two speakers at the 12 November meeting, Göring and Goebbels, sought to outdo each other in outlining perverse means of harassment – should Jews continue to be able to walk in German forests? What restrictions should be put on their use of railway sleeping cars? – Heydrich reminded them of the question they were there to discuss. He asked whether, in view of the fact that it would probably be eight or ten years before the last Jews left Germany, it wouldn’t make sense to provide them with a special badge. Göring ridiculed this suggestion – ‘A uniform!’ – and recommended for his part the construction of ghettos, which Heydrich rejected, however, pointing to the impoverishment and criminality to which that would lead. This went on, back and forth, for hours: in its brutality, cynicism and bureaucratic laziness in conceiving regulations whose sole goal was to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, the record of the meeting on 12 November 1938 was every bit the equal of the Wannsee conference in January 1942.³¹

In the early afternoon, as the meeting was about to end, Göring indulged in a grim prediction of what German Jews could expect: ‘If within any foreseeable future the German Reich is involved in some conflict with another nation, it goes without saying that here in Germany we will think first of all of settling accounts with the Jews.’ Two and a half months later Hitler, in his notorious, often-cited speech delivered on 30 January 1939, which he later liked to claim was given on the day war broke out, said almost the same thing, but with significantly more aggressiveness and the crucial difference that he then immediately named ‘world Jewry’ as the instigator of a possible war: ‘If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging nations once again into a world war, then the result will be not the bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’³² It was this poisonous symbiosis of madness and calculation that made it possible for the death of a legation secretary to become the pretext for the greatest organized pogrom in modern history.

‘I am reminded of what an Aryan in a Düsseldorf cinema experienced,’ we read at the end of the memoirs of Harry Kaufman, a young man who was able to emigrate in late 1938. ‘It was in 1937, when people were not yet so firmly convinced that Jews were to blame for everything. An insurance company was showing a promotional film about the consequences of a traffic accident. After the accident took place, on the screen there appeared in large letters the question: “And who is to blame for this?” A joker in the cinema shouted: “The Jews!” People laughed so hard that for several minutes you couldn’t hear a word.’³³ The mirth in the cinema gives us a good idea of the country’s mood on the eve of the pogroms: most people didn’t know what to make of anti-Semitic agitation. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to reduce somewhat the influence of Jews in economic life, as the government had already been successfully doing for years, and maybe it would actually be best for the Jews to leave Germany, sooner or later. But why this fervour, this strident rabble-rousing? After all, the Nazis’ conspiracy theories were sometimes positively ludicrous. The joker in the cinema had put it in a nutshell.

How the November pogroms were received by the German people and to what extent they approved of them is still a subject of controversy. Can the indifference that according to sources characterized the great majority of the population already be seen as an indication of ‘passive complicity’ (Kulka/Rodrigue), or does the awkward silence point instead to an ‘embarrassed distance’ (Frank Bajohr)?³⁴ In endeavouring to arrive at a balanced judgement it should not be forgotten – as Peter Longerich recently emphasized again – that in the Third Reich there was no such thing as public opinion built on the free expression of personal views. Under National Socialism, ‘public opinion’ always meant ‘the public opinion staged, controlled and manipulated by the regime’. In this area, ‘in which the guiding principles and interpretive models were reproduced’, it was very dangerous to confide one’s views to another person unless one was sure that this other person shared them.³⁵

As a result, there are few documents that provide reliable answers to the question as to what most Germans thought in November 1938. The government-commissioned reports on the situation and public opinion, including reports made by local offices regarding the success of the measures taken, are sources that have to be evaluated critically, as are the ‘Deutschland-Berichte der SOPADE’ produced by the leadership of the Social Democratic Party in exile in Prague. Although the idealists in exile tended, for understandable reasons, to greatly overestimate Germans’ covert resistance to Hitler, we nonetheless have to agree with their general conclusion that ‘the riots were strongly condemned by the great majority of the German people.’³⁶ But this condemnation was nowhere expressed in open protests.

The collection of materials published last year by the Wiener Library made a significant contribution to our understanding of the initial impression from the point of view of the victims.³⁷ Immediately after the outbreak of the pogroms, the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam had begun to collect all the information it could get its hands on in order to find out exactly what had happened and which Jewish communities were affected in what way by the catastrophe. The exchange of personal communications, names and dates was intended to help put an end to uncertainty concerning the survival of relatives and friends.

At its outset, the present book also reaches back seventy years, but has an entirely different background. On 7 August 1939, nine months after the pogroms, the New York Times reported, under the headline ‘Prize for Nazi Stories’, that scholars at Harvard University were seeking eyewitness accounts of life in Germany before and after 1933 and to this end had organized a competition with prizes totalling one thousand dollars. Anyone who could report, on the basis of his own experiences, on how everyday life had changed after Hitler’s seizure of power, was eligible to enter the contest. These reports could be presented anonymously or under a pseudonym, and were to be handled with strict confidentiality – ‘but they must be authentic’.

‘My Life in Germany Before and After 30 January 1933’ – that was the name given the prize competition, and the detailed invitation, written in German, to submit entries which was subsequently distributed all over the world by Jewish information offices and aid associations outlined the project very exactly. The life stories should be about eighty pages long, ‘as simple as possible, direct, complete, and vividly recounted’. Only ‘real occurrences’ should be described, and therefore anyone who had ‘a good memory, a gift for sharp observation and a knowledge of people’ could take part, even if he had never written anything before. ‘Quotations from letters, notebooks, and other personal writings give your description the desired credibility and completeness.’ Those who did not win a prize could also be sure that their ‘work could be very useful for the study of the new Germany and National Socialism’. The deadline for submissions was 1 April 1940.

Figure 1: Prize advertisement

More than 250 manuscripts from all over the world were received in Cambridge. Of these, 155 came from the United States, 96 of them from New York alone; 31 authors gave return addresses in Great Britain, and 20 sent their contributions from Palestine. Six manuscripts were mailed in from Shanghai, the only territory in the world where no visa was required and where a Jewish enclave had therefore rapidly grown up. Moreover, not only Jews who had emigrated from Germany responded to the call. For example, a Silesian confectioner who had been hired as a cook by the merchant navy and who was now confined in a British camp as an ‘enemy alien’ expressed his enthusiasm for the new Germany, as did an au-pair girl from Berlin who happened to be in America when war broke out – but these texts were exceptions. The great majority of those who submitted reports were Jews who had left Germany and Austria after the pogroms of November 1938.

Most of them had lived in large cities; 61 came from Berlin and 39 from Vienna. The liberal professions, lawyers and doctors, university lecturers and members of the writing community were overrepresented; however, in addition to representatives of the wealthy bourgeoisie, salesmen and people who had eked out a living with occasional jobs also wrote contributions. About a quarter of the accounts came from women.

The participants’ motives varied as much as the social milieus from which they came. With the first-place prize of 500 dollars, an emigrant could survive for several months in most countries, and more than one participant described winning a prize as his ‘last hope’. Others had literary ambitions; even though it was expressly mentioned that this was not a literary contest and that the judges had ‘no interest in philosophical considerations’, a few complete novel manuscripts were submitted. The organizers helped some of these authors by putting them in contact with publishers and editors; some participants, disappointed that their contributions neither received a prize nor were published, demanded that their work be returned to them. In individual cases, the researchers at Harvard also tried to do something for those who had been interned by the British and transferred to camps in Australia or Canada.

The chief motive of most of the participants was, as the Berlin publicist Wolf Citron put it, ‘to say farewell to Germany by working through and recapitulating what was experienced’. No one did so as radically as Moritz Berger, 21, who gave his account the title ‘Revenge’ and ‘dreamed of being a bomber pilot and reducing his home city to ruins’.³⁸ However, all the accounts agreed that the unrestrained brutality of National Socialism on the night of 9 November 1938 represented the greatest breach of civilization in western history, and that it was, for a German Jew, simply unthinkable ever to live in that country again. ‘Nie mehr zurück in dieses Land’ (‘Never back to that country’), wrote the Berlin doctor Hertha Nathorff one week after the pogrom, ‘once we have left it alive.’ Several authors concluded their memoirs by adopting the prize competition’s title, summarizing the irreversibility of the events in the sentence: ‘So endete mein Leben in Deutschland’ (‘So ended my life in Germany’).

Figure 2: Competition guidelines

Most of the contributors had complied with the guidelines and submitted typescripts of 50–100 pages; some sent only 3–5 pages, others thick bundles of several hundred pages. About 12 per cent of the contributions were written in English, and a few were handwritten. The evaluation of the total of more than 10,000 pages was at first very promising. The texts were assessed by research assistants according to a specially designed 19-page schema, and at the same time so-called ‘thumbnail summaries’ were made. But after the prizes had been awarded, the process came to a halt. This had to do not only with global political developments – on 10 May 1940, five weeks after the submission deadline, the Germans began the war on the western front – but also with the fact that the three initiators of the project – the psychologist Gordon Allport, the historian Sidney Fay and the sociologist Edward Hartshorne – had differing interests.³⁹

Hartshorne, the youngest of the three and at the same time the soul of the whole project, was the only one who followed through on it beyond the final report. In August 1941, he sent his publisher, John Farrar, a manuscript that was intended to wake up American readers and bore the working title, ‘Nazi Madness: November 1938’. The core of Hartshorne’s book was to be a selection of especially impressive descriptions excerpted from the more than 250 autobiographies submitted to the Harvard competition, which he had read through. He was particularly interested in accounts on Reichskristallnacht (‘The Night of Broken Glass’) and the recollections of persons who, in the wake of the riots, had been interned in Buchenwald, Dachau or Sachsenhausen. The example of 9 November, he believed, was particularly well-suited to document the regime’s mendacity because it was not, as Goebbels had tried to persuade the world, a ‘boiling over of the people’s soul’, but rather a well-prepared action centrally directed by the Nazi party and the SS.

When Hartshorne entered the American Secret Service (the later OSS) on 1 September 1941, the project came to an end. Through various postings within the American army, Hartshorne came in May 1945 to Marburg as an officer of the occupying forces. On the evening of 28 August 1946, he was the victim of an assassination attack and died from his injuries two days later.

In 1948, Sidney Fay gave the collection of autobiographies that had been submitted in the prize competition in 1939–40 to Harvard’s Houghton Library, where they were classified in alphabetical order and numbered 1 to 263; sixteen accounts from this collection have since been published.⁴⁰ However, all traces of the book that Hartshorne had prepared for publication in the summer of 1941 were lost. He had studied the text over a period of many weeks and repeatedly rearranged the excerpted passages in an effort to give them the greatest possible impact. In a provisional final version, ‘Nazi Madness: November 1938’ was to consist of about 500 pages of excerpts from 34 autobiographies. But where was the manuscript?

For over half a century, ‘Nazi Madness’ lay unnoticed in a cardboard box that grew ever dustier over time and finally ended up in Berkeley, California. In her research on Hartshorne’s biography, Uta Gerhardt heard of this bundle of papers in the 1990s; in the summer of 2008, the editors saw it for the first time and prepared it for publication.⁴¹ They are convinced that, on the one hand, the density and authenticity of the carefully elaborated memoirs, and on the other hand, the singular history of their genesis make this collection a document of the greatest importance for modern history.

There is no such thing as non-judgemental memory. The judges in the Harvard competition set the necessary standards and demanded precision and vividness from the authors. It is evident from the texts how difficult it must have been for many writers to describe, objectively and with a steady hand, the atrocious events that had taken place only a year earlier and that had destroyed their material existence and identity as German Jews. But it is not only the immediate proximity of the events that takes our breath away in many passages. Underlying all the accounts is the certainty that Jewish life in Germany came to an end on 9 November 1938. As we now know – and this is the uncanny thing about the texts – this day was in reality a kind of dress rehearsal for the murder of millions of Jews in all parts of German-occupied Europe. These accounts document, as it were, the end before the end – and stop for just a moment the turning wheel of history.