tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/kristallnacht-45983/articlesKristallnacht – The Conversation2023-11-02T12:32:17Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2133272023-11-02T12:32:17Z2023-11-02T12:32:17ZKristallnacht, 85 years ago, marks the point Hitler moved from an emotional antisemitism to a systematic antisemitism of laws and government violence<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551873/original/file-20231003-27-t8q888.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=404%2C449%2C4588%2C2896&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Boerneplatz synagogue in flames on Nov. 10, 1938, during the 'Night of Broken Glass' in Frankfurt, Germany. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-boerneplatz-synagogue-in-flames-during-kristallnacht-or-news-photo/1371374486?adppopup=true">History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Late in 1938, Nazis across Germany attacked Jews and their homes, businesses and places of worship and arrested about 30,000 Jewish men. The attacks became known as <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-kristallnacht/">Kristallnacht</a> – the “Night of Broken Glass” – for the streets littered with broken glass from the vandalism.</p>
<p>But the pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, went beyond the broken glass of Jewish-owned shops on the streets of German cities and has rightly been called a major turning point in the history of the Holocaust. </p>
<p>As a scholar specializing in the impact of the Holocaust on the law, human rights, German criminal law and international humanitarian law, I believe it’s important to see Kristallnacht as the logical culmination of Hitler’s malevolent intentions going back many years before 1938. Seeing it that way allows us to view the two different kinds of antisemitism in Hitler’s thinking, one involving emotions and the other involving the law and reason. </p>
<p>Indeed, the November pogrom and its aftermath foreshadowed the mass shooting squads and death camps of the early 1940s – institutions that were likewise products of a willful malice toward Jews.</p>
<h2>Hitler’s two kinds of antisemitism</h2>
<p>From early in his political career, Hitler’s thinking about Jews vacillated between attacking them violently or through patient, step-by-step legal measures. He even had terms to describe these two approaches.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=hist_book">September 1919 letter</a>, Hitler recommended that the status and treatment of Jews could best be addressed through the “antisemitism of reason” rather than the “antisemitism of emotion.”</p>
<p>Hitler wrote that emotional antisemitism, which was expressed in the episodic violence of pogroms, would not have lasting effect. </p>
<p>In contrast, he wrote, the “antisemitism of reason” would work through law to achieve an enduring solution to what he called the “Jewish problem.” The “final objective” of rational antisemitism, <a href="https://multimedia.jp.dk/archive/00285/Gemlich_brevet_285325a.pdf">according to Hitler</a>, “must be the total removal of all Jews from our midst.” </p>
<p>Much of Hitler’s career reflected his adherence to this antisemitism of reason.</p>
<p>This ideological conviction, however, clashed with the antisemitism of emotion also in Hitler’s thinking. In <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hitler_s_Mein_Kampf_and_the_Holocaust/qvlXEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=michael+bryant+the+auroras+of+the+final+solution&pg=PT110&printsec=frontcover">interviews with journalists</a> in the early 1920s, Hitler sometimes said he would attack and eradicate German Jews when he came to power. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A white man with a little mustache poses while wearing a military uniform and overcoat." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1932 portrait of Adolf Hitler.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-reichskanzler-adolf-hitler-the-fuhrer-of-nazi-news-photo/615312714?adppopup=true">Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In one interview in 1920, he vowed to hold <a href="https://www.cataloniatoday.cat/article/1724585-interview-with-the-devil.html">public hangings of Jews</a> throughout Germany. In another interview, he admitted the best solution was to “murder” the Jews “in the night.”</p>
<p>These violent, pogrom-style musings conflicted with Hitler’s legal approach.</p>
<p>This tension would continue through the 1930s as the Nazis passed laws to remove Jews from German public life. Even as Jews were banned from the civil service, legal profession and medicine, wildcat attacks on them by the SA, the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-sa">paramilitary arm</a> of the Nazi party, were common.</p>
<p>Less radical Nazi leaders worried that such attacks would undermine Germany’s foreign relations. To allay these concerns, Hitler forbade anti-Jewish violence that could be inopportune for his government. Thus, attacks on Jews were suspended before and during <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-olympics/">the 1936 Olympics</a> as well as during the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1933-1938/munich-agreement">Munich crisis</a>, in which Great Britain and France agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia.</p>
<p>In both cases, pogrom violence against Jews resumed after the regime had achieved its goals.</p>
<h2>Hitler sets pogrom in motion</h2>
<p>On Nov. 7, 1938, a German diplomat, <a href="https://www.history.com/news/kristallnacht-started-when-this-diplomat-was-murdered-in-cold-blood">Ernst vom Rath</a>, was mortally wounded in Paris by a distraught Jewish shooter, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-teenaged-jewish-boy-went-refugee-assassin-puppet-nazi-propaganda-180971204/">Herschel Grynszpan</a>.</p>
<p>The nationwide pogrom that ensued was novel only in its intensity and scale. In fact, violence against Jews had already rippled across southern and central Germany during the summer of 1938. At this time, the synagogues in Nuremberg and Munich were both destroyed. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Debris covers the floor inside a building that was destroyed by a fire." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The interior of a Berlin synagogue after it was set on fire by Nazis on Nov. 9, 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-interior-of-berlins-fasanenstrasse-synagogue-opened-in-news-photo/1371374485?adppopup=true">History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>A Security Service report in October 1938 described <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/hitler-and-the-pogrom-of-november.html">this earlier violence</a> as having “a semi-pogrom character.”</p>
<p>When the pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, erupted, it was anything but a bolt out of the blue. </p>
<p>Like the destruction on his order of the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186049726/munich-synagogue-hitler-demolished-found-river">Munich synagogue</a> in August 1938, Hitler set the November pogrom in motion. He then distanced himself from the event to avoid being seen as the instigator, blaming the violence on the “people’s rage.” </p>
<p>Clearly, however, the pogrom took place on Hitler’s orders. </p>
<h2>The November pogrom in Holocaust history</h2>
<p>This is one of the most important truths of the November pogrom: Hitler finally resolved his internal conflicts over the most effective way to rid Jews from Germany.</p>
<p>In the November pogrom, the antisemitisms of reason and emotion, of dispassionate law and thuggish violence, were brought into alignment for Hitler. Pogrom-style violence would be channeled not through the paramilitary SA but through government channels controlled by the Nazis.</p>
<p>In short, extreme violence against Jews would no longer be left to the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization">Nazi brownshirts</a>. Rather, it would be wielded by the German government. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A white man with blonde hair and dressed in a military uniform poses for a photograph." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nazi Reinhard Heydrich was a principal architect of the Holocaust.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/reinhard-heydrich-high-ranking-german-ss-and-police-news-photo/1371430740?adppopup=true">Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In a hastily convened meeting of <a href="https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/kristallnacht/kristallnacht-introduction.html">Nazi leaders on Nov. 12, 1938</a>, the participants recommitted themselves to the antisemitism of reason. A raft of <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitic-legislation-1933-1939">anti-Jewish laws</a> would soon be passed. </p>
<p>In late January 1939, a <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/establishment-of-the-central-office-for-jewish-emigration-in-vienna-august-1938">Central Office for Jewish Emigration</a> was set up under <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3782555/What-evil-new-film-Reinhard-Heydrich-released-compelling-tale-married-musician-loving-parents-brilliant-mind-unlikely-Nazi-monster.html">Reinhard Heydrich</a>, second in command within the SS to <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-himmler/">Heinrich Himmler</a>. The role of his new office was to force Jewish emigration from Germany through terror and intimidation.</p>
<p>With the November pogrom, Hitler overcame the split between the two types of antisemitism that had pervaded his thinking since 1919. </p>
<p>The “rational” antisemitism of laws, decrees and orders would be combined with the destructive violence of emotional antisemitism. The fate of the Jews would henceforth be entrusted to the cold racial vanguard of the Nazi movement, <a href="https://www.tpt.org/nazi-mega-weapons/video/nazi-mega-weapons-scenes-season-2-ss/">the SS</a>. </p>
<p>By 1941, their actions would surpass the comparatively modest mayhem of the Nazi paramilitary soldiers as Nazi violence moved from fists and clubs to the “Final Solution” of genocide.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213327/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Scott Bryant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The violence of the 1938 pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany known as Kristallnacht was a turning point in Hitler’s ‘Final Solution.’Michael Scott Bryant, Professor of History and Legal Studies, Bryant UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1895252022-08-31T12:29:18Z2022-08-31T12:29:18ZUnknown Holocaust photos – found in attics and archives – are helping researchers recover lost stories and providing a tool against denial<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481646/original/file-20220829-18-44snrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C2%2C797%2C541&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jewish deportees march through the German town of Würzburg to the railroad station on April 25, 1942.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa6232">US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The summer of 2022 marked the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportations-to-killing-centers">80th anniversary of the first Nazi deportation</a> of Jewish families from Germany to Auschwitz. </p>
<p>Although the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Jewish men and women, for many places where those tragic events happened, no images are known to document the crime. Surprisingly, there’s not even photographic evidence from <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/berlin">Berlin, the Nazi capital and home to Germany’s largest Jewish community</a>.</p>
<p>The lack of known images is important. Unlike in the past, historians now agree that photographs and film must be taken seriously as primary sources for their research. These sources can complement the analysis of administrative documents and survivor testimonies and thus enrich our understanding of Nazi persecution.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1020030">a historian originally from Germany and now teaching in the U.S.</a>, I have researched the Nazi persecution of the Jews for 30 years and <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aug_8D0AAAAJ&hl=en">published 10 books on the Holocaust</a>.</p>
<p>I searched for unpublished images in all the archives I visited during my research. But I have to admit that I – along with many of my colleagues – did not take the gathered visual evidence seriously as a primary source and rather used it to illustrate my publications. </p>
<p>During the past decade, scholars have realized how pictures can contribute to our understanding of mass violence as well as the resistance to it. Some can provide the only evidence we have about an act of persecution – for example, a photograph of anti-Jewish graffiti. Others will reveal additional details, as in the image of a court proceeding against anti-Nazi resistors. </p>
<p>Photographs are now in some cases the sole objects of scholarly inquiry. They are used to identify perpetrators and victims in specific cases, when other sources would not reveal them.</p>
<p><a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">Here’s one example: An image shows</a> uniformed Nazis standing in front of a passenger train filled with German Jews in Munich on Nov. 20, 1942. Who were those men? More importantly, what are the stories of the barely recognizable victims behind the windows in this image?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Soldiers watching a train filled with people as a person is pushed onto it." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The deportation of Munich Jews to Kowno in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, Nov. 20, 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">City Archive Munich, DE-1992-FS-NS-00015</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Investigating photos of Nazi deportations</h2>
<p>Between 1938 and 1945, more than 200,000 people were <a href="https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/chronology/view.xhtml?lang=en">deported</a> from Germany, mainly to ghettos and camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. </p>
<p>To make pictures of Nazi deportations accessible for research and education, a group of university, educational and archival institutions in Germany and the Dornsife <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cagr">Center for Advanced Genocide Research</a> at the University of Southern California launched the <a href="https://lastseen.arolsen-archives.org/en/">#LastSeen Project — Pictures of Nazi Deportations</a> in October 2021.</p>
<p>This effort aims to locate, collect and analyze images of Nazi mass deportations in Germany. The deportations started with the forced expulsion of around 17,000 Jews of Polish origin in October 1938, <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht">right before the widespread antisemitic violence of Kristallnacht</a>, and culminated in the mass deportations to Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945. </p>
<p>The mass deportation targeted not only Jews, but also people with disabilities as well as tens of thousands of Romani.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Hundreds of people being marched down a village street, while onlookers watch." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481621/original/file-20220829-12824-jaofjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Romani families, in total 490 people, from Germany’s southwest border region are deported to Nazi-occupied Poland, May 22, 1940.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Research Office for Racial Hygiene, Federal Archive Germany, Barch R 165, 244-42.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What can we learn from the pictures? Not only when, where and how these forced relocations took place, but who participated, who witnessed them and who was affected by the persecution acts.</p>
<p>I work with the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research to manage the outreach for the #LastSeen Project in the English-speaking world. The project has three main goals: first, gathering all existing pictures. These images will then be analyzed to identify the victims and perpetrators and recover the stories behind the pictures. Finally, a digital platform will provide access to all the images and unearthed information, both enabling a new level of study of this visual evidence and establishing a powerful tool against Holocaust denial.</p>
<p>When the project began, the partners were skeptical of whether we would find a significant number of never-before-seen images of mass deportations. </p>
<p>But after addressing the German public and querying 1,750 German archives, within the first six months of the project we received dozens of unknown images, more then doubling the number of German towns, from 27 to over 60, where we now have photographs documenting Nazi deportations. </p>
<p>Many of these photos had collected dust on shelves in local archives in Germany, and some were found in private homes. In the future, the project hopes for discoveries in archives, museums and family possession in the U.S. and the U.K., but also in Canada, South Africa and Australia. We know that liberators took photographs with them from Germany at the end of the war, and survivors received them later via various channels. </p>
<h2>Tracing unknown images beyond Germany</h2>
<p>The project has already located photos in the United States. In two cases, survivors had donated them to archives, which project staff learned during research visits. <a href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn671780">Simon Strauss gave an image</a> to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum depicting the deportation in his German hometown of Hanau. He wrote on it, “Uncle Ludwig transported.” The second photo was at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, which had received the hitherto <a href="https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE9435726">only known picture</a> from the Nazi deportation of the Jews in Bad Homburg. </p>
<p>To locate more photos, the project counts on the help of ordinary citizens, researchers, archivists, museum curators and survivors’ families. </p>
<p>After joining the project, I searched the <a href="https://vhaonline.usc.edu/login">USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive</a>, which holds over 53,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Many of the Jews who gave testimony talked about Nazi deportations. All interviewees shared photographs. While many of these more than 700,000 images are artifacts of personal value, such as family and wedding photos, some images depict Nazi persecution.</p>
<p>Within minutes of my search using the term “deportation stills” I was staring at photographs showing a Nazi deportation in a small town in central Germany. At the end of his 1996 interview, Lothar Lou Beverstein, born in 1921, shared two photographs from his hometown of Halberstadt that he had received from friends after the war. Beverstein identified his father, Hugo, and his mother, Paula, <a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">in an image showing Nazis lining up deportees</a> in front of the city’s famous 13th-century Gothic cathedral.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large group of people assembled on the street in front of a timbered building and a large church, with people watching them on the other side of the street." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481627/original/file-20220829-8838-nks8x2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jewish families from Halberstadt, Germany, assembled for deportation from the city, April 12, 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/vha17046">USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, Lou Beverstein interview.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both of Lou Beverstein’s parents were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto on April 12, 1942. In his interview, Beverstein declared that to his knowledge nobody survived from that transport, which according to a list consisted of 24 men, 59 women and 23 children. Now the project needs to locate Lou Beverstein’s family in the United States or connect to other descendants from Halberstadt to find out more about the origins of the images and the identities of the deportees depicted in them. </p>
<h2>Naming and recognizing victims</h2>
<p>The identities of deportees and perpetrators in the existing images are often unknown. Most photographs show groups of victims whom project staff aim to identify so they and their stories can be acknowledged. This is very difficult, since there are seldom close-up shots.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two young girls in winter coats and hats, both wearing Jewish stars on their coats." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1769%2C1254&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two Jewish girls awaiting deportation in Munich on Nov. 11, 1942. Their identities are not known.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">City Archive Munich DE-1992-FS-NS-00013</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even in a <a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481631/original/file-20220829-24-gyyf07.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=crop&dpr=1">photograph clearly showing two Jewish girls</a>, we do not know anything other than that the Gestapo deported them to Kowno with the same transport <a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481618/original/file-20220829-6542-moakkm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip">depicted in the image showing Munich Jews being deported</a> referenced at the beginning of this article. The nearly 1,000 deportees from Munich were shot soon after they arrived at their destination in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.</p>
<p>This is but one example of how scholars desperately need the public’s help to recover the stories of countless unidentified victims of the Nazis.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189525/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wolf Gruner directs the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, which is a partner institution in the LastSeen project. </span></em></p>Holocaust scholars long relied on documents and survivor testimonies to help reconstruct the history of that tragic event. Now, they’re turning to wordless witnesses to learn more: pictures.Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1531572021-01-15T13:17:39Z2021-01-15T13:17:39ZThat time private US media companies stepped in to silence the falsehoods and incitements of a major public figure … in 1938<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378853/original/file-20210114-15-1klvmrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C9%2C6243%2C3635&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Father Coughlin's bully pulpit.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/father-charles-coughlin-delivers-a-radio-speech-circa-1930s-news-photo/96792593?adppopup=true">Fotosearch/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In speeches filled with hatred and falsehoods, a public figure attacks his enemies and calls for marches on Washington. Then, after one particularly virulent address, private media companies close down his channels of communication, prompting consternation from his supporters and calls for a code of conduct to filter out violent rhetoric. </p>
<p>Sound familiar? Well, this was 1938, and the individual in question was <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/charles-e-coughlin">Father Charles E. Coughlin</a>, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with unfettered access to America’s vast radio audiences. The firms silencing him were the broadcasters of the day. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.radford.edu/content/chbs/home/comm/faculty/bios.html#par_text_11">a media historian</a>, I find more than a little similarity between the stand those stations took back then and the way Twitter, YouTube and Facebook <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/2021/01/12/956003580/facebook-removes-stop-the-steal-content-twitter-suspends-qanon-accounts">have silenced false claims</a> of election fraud and incitements to violence in the aftermath of the siege on the U.S. Capitol – noticeably by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/style/trump-twitter-ban.html">silencing the claims of Donald Trump</a> and his supporters. </p>
<h2>A radio ministry</h2>
<p>Coughlin’s Detroit ministry had grown up with radio, and, as his sermons grew more political, he began calling President Franklin D. Roosevelt a liar, a betrayer and a double-crosser. His fierce rhetoric fueled rallies and letter-writing campaigns for a dozen right-wing causes, from banking policy to opposing Russian communism. At the height of his popularity, an estimated <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-coughlin/">30 million Americans</a> listened to his Sunday sermons.</p>
<p>Then, in 1938, one Sunday sermon crossed the line. On Nov. 20, he spoke to listeners on the subject of the recent antisemitic Nazi rampage in Germany <a href="https://theconversation.com/kristallnacht-80-years-on-some-reading-to-help-make-sense-of-the-most-notorious-state-sponsored-pogrom-103633">known as Kristallnacht</a> – during which mobs of Nazis burned down 267 synagogues, destroyed 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses and arrested 30,000 Jews. <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1938/11/12/502448492.html?pageNumber=4">Worldwide condemnation quickly followed</a>. An editorial in the St. Louis Globe, for example, stated: “We stand in horror at this outbreak of savagery.” </p>
<p>Coughlin saw things differently. He blamed Jews for their own persecution and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529709391688">claimed in the sermon</a> that the Nazis had actually been lenient. Only a few synagogues were burned, he lied, adding: “German citizen Jews were not molested officially in the conduct of their business.” And communists, not Jews, were the real targets of the Nazi mobs, according to Coughlin. </p>
<p>In the wake of these obvious lies, a New York radio station decided to break with Coughlin. “Your broadcast last Sunday was calculated to incite religious and racial strife in America,” said <a href="http://pdfs.jta.org/1938/1938-11-27_196.pdf">a letter from WMCA radio</a>. “When this was called to your attention in advance of your broadcast, you agreed to delete those misrepresentations which undeniably had this effect. You did not do so.” </p>
<p>Other radio stations in major cities like Chicago and Philadelphia also canceled Coughlin’s broadcasts. Neville Miller, the president of the <a href="https://www.nab.org/">National Association of Broadcasters</a> backed them up, saying that radio could not tolerate the abuse of freedom of speech. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A demonstration near the German ocean liner SS Bremen in New York, after Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador to Germany was recalled in the wake of Kristallnacht." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378854/original/file-20210114-14-yhx11g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378854/original/file-20210114-14-yhx11g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378854/original/file-20210114-14-yhx11g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378854/original/file-20210114-14-yhx11g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378854/original/file-20210114-14-yhx11g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378854/original/file-20210114-14-yhx11g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378854/original/file-20210114-14-yhx11g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">New Yorkers take to the streets after Kristallnacht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/demonstration-near-the-german-ocean-liner-ss-bremen-in-new-news-photo/81037166?adppopup=true">FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Coughlin claimed that <a href="http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1938/11/28/98213278.html?pageNumber=1">he’d been misrepresented</a>, and that his intention had only been to stir sympathy for Christians persecuted by Communists. The Nazi press crowed at what they saw as American hypocrisy, saying Americans were “not allowed to hear the truth.” Meanwhile, Coughlin’s followers began <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1938/12/26/archives/fewer-coughlin-pickets-protest-at-radio-station-over-ban-is.html">showing up and protesting at radio stations</a> where his broadcasts had been cut off. </p>
<p>FDR <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ZIjICgAAQBAJ&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=To+permit+radio+to+become+a+medium+for+selfish+propaganda+of+any+character+would+be+shamefully+and+wrongfully&source=bl&ots=-iH7jwypu6&sig=ACfU3U05MWEcKwfD6qCEN7XxTt-UB8YMCA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjv4pnLhJzuAhVSi1kKHeTIDZYQ6AEwAHoECAEQAg#v=onepage&q=To%20permit%20radio%20to%20become%20a%20medium%20for%20selfish%20propaganda%20of%20any%20character%20would%20be%20shamefully%20and%20wrongfully&f=false">anticipated the controversy</a>. “To permit radio to become a medium for selfish propaganda of any character would be shamefully and wrongfully to abuse a great agent of public service,” he said the day before the Kristallnacht sermon. “Radio broadcasting should be maintained on an equality of freedom which has been, and is, the keynote of the American press.” But Roosevelt did not want to take action. </p>
<p><a href="https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/t/thompson_d.htm#:%7E:text=Dorothy%20Thompson%20(1893%2D1961),Herald%20Tribune%20from%201936%2D1941.">Dorothy Thompson</a>, a newspaper columnist who had been expelled from Germany by the Nazis a few years before, asked her readers: “Have you been listening to the broadcasts of Father Coughlin?” He was clearly a threat to democracy, she said, and the FCC itself should take him off the air. </p>
<h2>Sidelining Coughlin</h2>
<p>Coughlin’s radio empire continued eroding that winter and into the spring. With his pickets still protesting at radio stations, the National Association of Broadcasters <a href="https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1770&context=asc_papers">changed its code</a> to promote “fair and impartial presentation of both sides of controversial issues.” The code was originally established in 1929 to address issues like fair advertising practices. The revisions in 1939 prevented radio stations from selling air time for presentations from single speakers like<br>
Coughlin. Naturally, Coughlin claimed that his rights were being violated, even though he tried to justify his own violation of other people’s rights. </p>
<p>By the middle of the 20th century, this would become known as the <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/1341168">paradox of tolerance</a>. Philosophers like <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/">Karl Popper</a> and <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/">John Rawls</a> would insist that, at some point, a society’s tolerance should not be allowed to threaten its own survival. </p>
<p>For Americans who were unsure of how to deal with Coughlin, the paradox was solved by the advent of World War II. In January of 1940, the <a href="https://reuther.wayne.edu/files/UP001842.pdf">FBI caught 17 of his followers</a> in a Nazi spy ring, and soon after, calls for more understanding of Nazis were flatly treasonous. </p>
<p>After the war, the idea that radio listeners should hear two sides of every controversy evolved from self-regulation by the broadcasting industry into the government’s “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-fairness-doctrine-in-one-post/2011/08/23/gIQAN8CXZJ_blog.html">Fairness Doctrine” of 1949</a>, which required broadcasters to allow responses to personal attacks and controversial opinions. It was enforced by the Federal Communications Commission and upheld in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC in 1969. </p>
<p>Then, with the deregulatory era of the 1980s, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished as the abundance of cable TV and radio was said to have <a href="https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/955/fairness-doctrine">“eroded” the rationale</a> for regulation. And yet, as it turned out, the expected abundance morphed into one-sided talk radio and social media echo chambers. These worked, as did Father Coughlin, to undermine tolerance and democracy. </p>
<h2>Stepping in</h2>
<p>There’s not much that separates, on the one hand, the mad fanaticism that held Jews supposedly responsible for their own persecution in 1938 and, on the other, the fevered delusion of 2020: that Donald Trump’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/13/ali-alexander-capitol-biggs-gosar/">victory was stolen</a> or that the president is on a mission to expose a <a href="https://theconversation.com/qanon-and-the-storm-of-the-u-s-capitol-the-offline-effect-of-online-conspiracy-theories-152815">satanic pedophile ring consisting of liberal politicians and media elites</a>. </p>
<p>In both cases, a relatively new medium was harnessed to inject hateful ideas into American society for political gain. And in both cases, private business had to step in when the consequences became evident.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153157/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Kovarik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Broadcasters silenced Father Charles Coughlin in 1938, just as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have shut down pro-Trump incitements to violence in 2021.Bill Kovarik, Professor of Communication, Radford UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1265722019-11-08T19:08:02Z2019-11-08T19:08:02ZKristallnacht of 1938 shattered glass – and unleashed a brutal fascist masculinity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300921/original/file-20191108-194637-icb5di.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C0%2C3981%2C2630&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A photo from Nov. 10, 1938, showing Jewish shops in Berlin destroyed by Nazis is placed at the same location 80 years later. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many people are familiar with the archival photographs depicting the brutality that swept across Germany and its annexed territories during the nights of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938. They depict the aftermath of the destructive forces that descended upon Jewish businesses, homes and places of worship by the men of the SA (<em>Sturmabteilung</em>) and the Hitler Youth. </p>
<p>Their unbridled hatred is illustrated by mounds of shattered glass that littered sidewalks and streets of German cities and towns, inspiring the name “<a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht?utm_source=mkto&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1911MKTEM4899-three-col-link-1&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWXpSak1EUmlaakl6WVdReiIsInQiOiJkQVlsdG1MeWlhNE1aS2c5ampQRFk0bmp5OW5uSHZmbmtrd3NFXC9BekcyaGlPejZ6VkpZWjFSSXkySGNTTkVaQzJzS1wvb3g2T1ErS1Uzb0YyY0RNVitic0tDMDNOUlVzMUl3Rll4MkJDNUpyTlwvK1l6NXk0bmI4ZXZ4aHFrbTJlViJ9">Kristallnacht” or Night of Broken Glass</a>. Such photographs provide important visual evidence of the attacks and the physical damage that occurred.</p>
<p>The men who carried out the attacks, and those on the receiving end of the Nazi violence, may be less familiar to us. Grappling with the human dimension of the Kristallnacht pogrom removes it from the realm of a long-passed historical event and <a href="https://www.holocaustcentre.com/HEW">transforms it into an action of contemporary relevance</a>. </p>
<h2>Hypermilitarized masculinity</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Remembering-the-Holocaust-in-Educational-Settings-1st-%20Edition/Pearce/p/book/9781138301535">Confronting such events</a> illuminates how human behaviour always carries far-reaching consequences.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300886/original/file-20191108-194665-1yboxuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300886/original/file-20191108-194665-1yboxuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300886/original/file-20191108-194665-1yboxuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300886/original/file-20191108-194665-1yboxuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300886/original/file-20191108-194665-1yboxuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1431&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300886/original/file-20191108-194665-1yboxuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300886/original/file-20191108-194665-1yboxuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1431&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Firefighters at the Fasanenstrasse synagogue, Berlin’s biggest house of Jewish worship, after Nazis set fire to it on Nov. 9, 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a scholar who has studied <a href="https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/31964">post-Holocaust conceptualizations of masculinity</a> and explored the <a href="https://www.academia.edu/25455123/Auguststrasse_25_An_Experiential_Memorial_Teaching_About_Jewish_Family_Life_in_Pre-Holocaust_Germany">Jewish family in pre-Holocaust Germany</a>, I think about how gendered responses and behaviours instruct and integrate individuals into a wider society.</p>
<p>During the Kristallnacht pogrom, fascist masculinity — brutal, hypermilitarized and unrestrained — caused physical destruction of Jewish-owned business, homes and <a href="https://museeholocauste.ca/en/activities/night-broken-glass-kristallnacht/">276 synagogues</a>. Yet it also operated in opposition to the German, bourgeois model of masculinity and it attacked the very foundation of Jewish life: the family. </p>
<p>The attack on Jewish public, religious and private spaces, followed by rounding up and arresting Jewish men, left Jewish families were even more vulnerable than they already were and <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780333997451">forebode the destruction that followed</a>. This came firstly as an unprecedented assault on Jewish masculinity and a conscious effort to destabilize the familial and societal roles of Jewish men.</p>
<h2>‘Tough as leather’</h2>
<p>It should not come as a surprise that the Hitler Youth were active protagonists in the Kristallnacht pogrom. Although the Hitler Youth movement was primarily aimed at boys between the ages of 14 and 18, they were envisioned as the generation that would inherit the accomplishments of the Nazi Reich and as such were emboldened to demonstrate their physical prowess. </p>
<p>When Hitler spoke to youth at the Nazi Party rally in 1935, he challenged them to become “<a href="https://www.dw.com/en/hitlers-odd-appeal-to-german-youth/a-16410476">as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather and as hard as Krupp’s steel</a>.” </p>
<p>The analogy is laden with military implications that reminds us that leather is resilient to wear and tear, yet supple enough to be molded to the wearer’s physique. Krupp’s steel invokes an ideological overtone that is analogous with death and destruction: <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/the-krupp-dynasty-glorified-and-vilified/a-15867835">Krupp produced armaments for the German army during the First World War.</a> Boys in the Hitler Youth movement were encouraged to become the tough, resilient soldiers who were prototypes of German fascist masculinity.</p>
<p>By contrast the SA, or Brownshirts as they were commonly called, was a paramilitary movement that often engaged in street fights and brawls. They were essential to the early rise of Hitler and his fascist party and developed into an organization of over one million members. The SA promoted a masculinity that was at times unpredictable and promised young German men its own egalitarian and homosocial community. </p>
<h2>Seeped in anti-Semitism</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300923/original/file-20191108-194641-140ij3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300923/original/file-20191108-194641-140ij3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300923/original/file-20191108-194641-140ij3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300923/original/file-20191108-194641-140ij3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300923/original/file-20191108-194641-140ij3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300923/original/file-20191108-194641-140ij3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300923/original/file-20191108-194641-140ij3f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts, by Daniel Siemens.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Yale University Press)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This camaraderie extended only to non-Jewish German men and was seeped in anti-Semitism and violence. Historian Daniel Siemens has written that the SAs tendency of violence <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300246599/stormtroopers">acted as a valve for the Brownshirts’ pent-up aggression and was a consequence of their ideological convictions</a>. If violence served as a valve, then the Kristallnacht pogrom provided them with an almost unfettered opportunity to reign terror upon the fascists’ favourite scapegoats, the Jews.</p>
<p>While the street fights and physical defacement was primarily the purview of the Hitler Youth and the SA, units of the SS (Schutzstaffel) and the Gestapo co-ordinated the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/kristallnacht">arrests of some 30,000 Jewish men</a>. As the pogrom that we now call Kristallnacht spread, the men were deported to <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau">Dachau</a>, <a href="https://www.buchenwald.de/en/69/">Buchenwald</a>, <a href="https://www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de/en/history/1936-1945-sachsenhausen-concentration-camp/">Sachsenhausen</a> and other concentration camps in the German Reich.</p>
<p>Photographs depicting these arrests are haunting in the order and precision with which they were carried out. The arrested <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/kristallnacht-night/">Jewish men look orderly and sombre, dressed in business attire</a> — as befitted their roles as bourgeois, German citizens. </p>
<h2>Men first to be taken</h2>
<p>As loyal citizens of Germany, many of whom had familial roots extending back generations or had fought in the First World War for Germany, these men could not have imagined what awaited them in the Nazi concentration camps. Nor could they understand why, as law-biding loyal citizens, they were targeted. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300924/original/file-20191108-194656-4c8tty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300924/original/file-20191108-194656-4c8tty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300924/original/file-20191108-194656-4c8tty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300924/original/file-20191108-194656-4c8tty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300924/original/file-20191108-194656-4c8tty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300924/original/file-20191108-194656-4c8tty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300924/original/file-20191108-194656-4c8tty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A young man with a broom prepares to clear up the broken window glass from a Jewish shop in Berlin on Nov. 10, 1938, the day after the Kristallnacht pogrom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Regardless of whether the attackers were Hitler Youth, SA or SS, when Nazi perpetrators attacked Jewish-owned business, or beat and humiliated Jews in the streets, they sent a clear message that traditional societal norms no longer prevailed. </p>
<p>Until this time, Jewish men and women in Western and Central Europe had adapted themselves to the prevailing model of bourgeois family life. This model conferred responsibility for the financial and physical survival of the family upon men as heads of households, but placed its psychological and spiritual well-being in the hands of the women. </p>
<p>The events of Kristallnacht demonstrated that Jewish men could no longer protect their families, nor guarantee their safety during the National Socialist regime. Jewish men, women and children were thrust into situations that they were ill-prepared to meet and were increasingly difficult to navigate. </p>
<p>In the days and months that followed Kristallnacht, Jewish women, wives, sisters and daughters were thrust into new roles as providers and defenders of the family. They sought ways to secure the release of men arrested and to rise beyond the expectations of their bourgeois gender roles.</p>
<p>Although fascist masculinity may have been an affront to some of the German bourgeoisie and the elite, it nevertheless dominated civil society, foreshadowing in 1938 that <a href="https://rowman.com/isbn/9781442242289/war-and-genocide-a-concise-history-of-the-holocaust-third-edition">the worst was still to come</a>.</p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126572/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carson Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>About 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps in the German Reich in the immediate aftermath after Kristallnacht, the night of the Broken Glass, in November 1938.Carson Phillips, Adjunct faculty, Department of History, University of New BrunswickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1233012019-11-08T12:14:58Z2019-11-08T12:14:58ZThe forgotten mass destruction of Jewish homes during ‘Kristallnacht’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300727/original/file-20191107-10930-1sb2wy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C62%2C571%2C465&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A looted Jewish shop in Aachen, Germany on the day after Kristallnacht, Nov. 10, 1938.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wolf Gruner and Armin Nolzen (eds.). 'Bürokratien: Initiative und Effizienz,' Berlin, 2001.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Every November, communities around the world <a href="http://www.mbartsandculture.org/event/observance-of-the-81st-anniversary-of-kristallnacht-the-night-of-broken-glass/">hold remembrances</a> on the anniversary of the Nazis’ brutal assault on the Jews during “Kristallnacht.” </p>
<p>Also known as “the Night of Broken Glass,” it’s one of the most closely scrutinized events in the history of Nazi Germany. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=Kristallnacht">Dozens of books</a> have been published about the hours between Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, when Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decided to unleash violence against Jews across Germany and the annexed territory of Austria with the aim of driving them out of the Third Reich. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-kristallnacht">Most accounts</a> tend to emphasize the attacks on synagogues and shops, along with the mass arrests of 30,000 men. A few note the destruction of Jewish schools and <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-kristallnacht">cemeteries</a>. </p>
<p>Attacks on Jewish homes, however, <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht">are barely mentioned</a>. </p>
<p>It’s an aspect of the story that has rarely been researched and written about – <a href="http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557538703">until now</a>.</p>
<h2>A pattern emerges in survivor accounts</h2>
<p>In 2008, when I arrived at the University of Southern California from Germany, I had been researching Nazi persecution of the German Jews for 20 years. I had published more than six books on the topic and thought I knew just about everything there was to know about Kristallnacht. </p>
<p>The university happened to be the new home of the Shoah Foundation and its <a href="https://sfi.usc.edu/vha">Visual History Archive</a>, which today includes over 55,000 survivor testimonies. When I started to watch interviews with German-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, I was surprised to hear many of them talk about the destruction of their homes during Kristallnacht. </p>
<p>Details from their recollections sounded eerily similar: When Nazi paramilitary troops broke the doors of their homes, it sounded as though a bomb had gone off; then the men cut into the featherbeds, hacked the furniture into pieces and smashed everything inside.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Hd8wk7DbuI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">In an interview recorded by USC’s Shoah Foundation that’s now in their Visual History Archive, Kaethe Wells explains how her family home was attacked by stormtroopers wielding axes during Kristallnacht.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet none of these stories appeared in traditional accounts of Kristallnacht. </p>
<p>I was perplexed by this disconnect. Some years later, I found a document from Schneidemühl, a small district in eastern Germany, that listed the destruction of a dozen synagogues, over 60 shops – and 231 homes. </p>
<p>These surprising numbers piqued my interest further. After digging into unpublished and published materials, I unearthed an abundance of evidence in administrative reports, diaries, letters and postwar testimonies. </p>
<p>A fuller picture of the brutal destruction of Jewish homes and apartments soon emerged. </p>
<p>For example, a Jewish merchant named Martin Fröhlich wrote to his daughter that when he arrived home the afternoon of that fateful November day, he noticed his door had been broken down. A tipped-over wardrobe blocked the entrance. Inside, everything had been hacked into pieces with axes: glass, china, clocks, the piano, furniture, chairs, lamps and paintings. Realizing that his home was now uninhabitable, he broke down and – as he confessed in the letter – started sobbing like a child.</p>
<h2>A systematic campaign of destruction</h2>
<p>The more I discovered, the more astonished I was by the scale and intensity of the attacks. </p>
<p>Using address lists provided by either local party officers or city officials, paramilitary SA and SS squads and Hitler Youth, armed with axes and pistols, attacked apartments with Jewish tenants in big cities like Berlin, as well as private Jewish homes in small villages. In Nuremberg, for example, attackers destroyed 236 Jewish flats. In Düsseldorf, over 400 were vandalized.</p>
<p>In the cities of Rostock and Mannheim, the attackers demolished virtually all Jewish apartments. </p>
<p>Documents point to Goebbels as the one who ordered the destruction of home furnishings. Due to the systematic nature of the attacks, the number of vandalized Jewish homes across <a href="https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199211869.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199211869-e-20">Greater Germany</a> must have been in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.</p>
<p>Then there are devastating details about the intensity of the destruction that emerge from letters and testimonies from postwar trials.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euskirchen">Euskirchen</a>, a house was burned to the ground.</p>
<p>In the village of Kamp, near the Rhineland town of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boppard">Boppard</a>, attackers broke into the house of the Kaufmann family, destroyed furniture and lamps, ripped out stove pipes, and broke doors and walls. When parts of the ceiling collapsed, the family escaped to a nearby monastery. </p>
<p>In the small town of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fauheim">Großauheim</a>, located in the state of Hesse, troops used sledgehammers to destroy everything in two Jewish homes, including lamps, radios, clocks and furniture. Even after the war, shards of glass and china were found impressed in the wooden floor.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Zs_L1gFGUQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">In an interview recorded by USC’s Shoah Foundation that’s now in their Visual History Archive, Ruth Winick recalls how men in green uniforms burst into her family’s home, destroying just about everything inside.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Everything ravaged and shattered’</h2>
<p>The documents I found and interviews I listened to revealed how sexual abuse, beatings and murder were commonplace. Much of it happened during the home intrusions. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linz">Linz</a>, two SA men sexually assaulted a Jewish woman. In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremen">Bremen</a>, the SA shot and killed Selma Zwienicki in her own bedroom. In Cologne, as Moritz Spiro tried to stop two men from destroying his furniture, one of the intruders beat him and fractured his skull. Spiro died days later in the Jewish hospital.</p>
<p>In a letter dated Nov. 20, 1938, a Viennese woman described her family’s injuries to a relative: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You can’t imagine, how it looked like at home. Papa with a head injury, bandaged, I with severe attacks in bed, everything ravaged and shattered… When the doctor arrived to patch up Papa, Herta and Rosa, who all bled horribly from their heads, we could not even provide him with a towel.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The brutality of the attacks didn’t go unnoticed. On Nov. 15, the U.S. consul general in Stuttgart, Samuel Honaker, <a href="http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English_33.pdf">wrote to his ambassador in Berlin</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Of all the places in this section of Germany, the Jews in Rastatt, which is situated near Baden-Baden, have apparently been subjected to the most ruthless treatment. Many Jews in this section were cruelly attacked and beaten and the furnishings of their homes almost totally destroyed.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>These findings make clear: The demolition of Jewish homes was an overlooked aspect of the November 1938 pogrom. </p>
<p>Why did it stay in the shadows for so long?</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, most newspaper articles and photographs of the violent event exclusively focused on the destroyed synagogues and stores – selective coverage that probably influenced our understanding.</p>
<p>Yet, it was the destruction of the home – the last refuge for the German Jewish families who found themselves facing heightened public discrimination <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nuremberg-laws">in the years leading up to the pogrom</a> – that likely extracted the greatest toll on the Jewish population. The brutal attacks rendered thousands homeless and hundreds beaten, sexually assaulted or murdered.</p>
<p>The brutal assaults also likely played a big role in the spate of <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-heartbreaking-suicide-notes-jews-left-after-kristallnacht-1.6635959">Jewish suicides</a> that took place in the days and weeks after Kristallnacht, along with the decision that tens of thousands of Jews made to flee Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>While this story speaks to decades of scholarly neglect, it is, at the same time, a testament to the power of survivor accounts, which continue to change the way we understand the Holocaust.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/123301/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wolf Gruner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Most histories highlight the shattered storefronts and synagogues set aflame. But it was the systematic ransacking of Jewish homes that extracted the greatest toll.Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1036332018-11-08T10:50:51Z2018-11-08T10:50:51ZKristallnacht 80 years on: some reading to help make sense of the most notorious state-sponsored pogrom<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244310/original/file-20181107-74783-1b8ixhf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">German citizens in Magdeburg the morning after Kristallnacht.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">German Federal Archive</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the evening of November 9 1938 a Nazi pogrom raged across German and Austrian cities. Nazis branded the atrocity with a poetic term: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/09/us/the-road-to-extermination-kristallnacht-lessons-pondered-by-historians.html">Kristallnacht</a> or “Crystal Night”. In that branding, fiction took hold. In English it translates as “The Night of Broken Glass” but that also tames the horror. Yes, broken glass from Jewish shopfront windows littered the streets, but also hundreds of synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned to the ground while Jews were beaten, imprisoned and killed. </p>
<p>Eight decades later, novelists are still trying to make sense of the pogrom – which was was designed to give the Nazi Party’s antisemitic agenda the legitimacy of public support.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244334/original/file-20181107-74760-id7ege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Herschel Grynszpan just after his arrest on November 7 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bundesarchiv Bild</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kristallnacht marked a new epoch. Earlier pogroms, such as in Russia, were popular riots – now, for the first time, an industrial nation turned the forces of the state against an ethnic group within its own borders. To get away with this, a state needs to control the narrative. In this instance, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was the key player. When a young Polish Jew named <a href="http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/grynszpan.html">Herschel Grynszpan</a> entered the German Embassy in Paris and shot a German official, Goebbels saw the possibilities. He used news of the event to trigger Kristallnacht.</p>
<h2>Fear and disbelief</h2>
<p>The state that attacks its citizens also turns on its writers and free-thinkers – people who can construct a counter-narrative. The future Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti and his wife, the writer Veza, were such people. “We shall remember this November”, a Jewish character reflects in Veza Canetti’s novel <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/veza-canetti-the-tortoises/a-44559543">The Tortoises</a>, “when we are all being punished because a child went wrong and was led astray”. </p>
<p>In the wake of Kristallnacht, the Canettis fled Vienna for Paris and by January 1939 had settled in exile in London, where, in a feverish three months, Veza wrote her novel (unpublished until this century). It provides a window on how intellectuals fought to understand the unimaginable as it unfolded. “The temples are burning!” says one character. “Can you believe that’s possible?” asks another. So why don’t they go and see for themselves? “People haven’t the heart. They feel like criminals. They believe the temple will strike them down if they watch and don’t do anything about it.” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-59643-119-5">Emil and Karl</a>, the first published novel to feature the pogrom, came out in New York in February 1940. <a href="http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0172.xml">Yankev Glatshteyn</a>, a Polish Jew and immigrant to the US, wrote it in Yiddish to alert American Jewish youngsters to the perils facing their European kindred. It features two friends, one a Jewish boy and the other the son of socialists. Forced to scrub streets clean with their hands after Kristallnacht, both boys learn they must flee their country if they are to stay alive.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244350/original/file-20181107-74757-14c77ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Novelist Christa Wolf was 27 when she witnessed Kristallnacht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/arts/christa-wolf-dies-at-82-wrote-of-the-germanys.html">Christa Wolf</a>, who forged life as a writer in what became East Germany, fed her memories of the night into Nelly, a character in her 1976 novel A Model Childhood. Nelly knew nothing of Jews, but in that pogrom she witnessed a burning synagogue. “It wouldn’t have taken much for Nelly to have succumbed to an improper emotion: compassion,” Wolf reflected. “But healthy German common sense built a barrier against it: fear.” These asides of bitter irony note the chilling reality of the time: those who showed sympathy for the plight of the Jews risked sharing their plight.</p>
<h2>Still burning</h2>
<p>So to the 21st century. With events such as Kristallnacht locked away in history, what use are we novelists? Novels unlock history. Governments maintain their hold on narratives that justify abuses of power – but novelists can invert that narrative order to reveal neglected viewpoints.</p>
<p>In 2009, Laurent Binet novelised the life and death of Reinhard Heydrich (a man known as “Hitler’s Brain” – the German acronym which gives the book its title: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/16/hhhh-laurent-binet-review">HHhH</a>. Under orders from Goebbels, Heydrich set the November pogrom in motion. Binet maintains clinical control of the story, anchoring it to archived fact. Heydrich is shown measuring Kristallnacht’s efficiency, including the cost of all the broken glass.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244332/original/file-20181107-74760-31g7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The interior of Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, Berlin, which was burned on Kristallnacht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Center for Jewish History, New York</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Michele Zackheim’s <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/03/28/facts-first-an-interview-with-michelle-zackheim/">Last Train to Paris </a> (2013) an American Jewish female journalist is dispatched into Nazi-controlled Berlin. Highlighted here is not the broken glass, but the fires. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[With] no wind, clouds of smoke were perched on top of each burning building. In between the buildings, perversely, as if Mother Nature were laughing at our idiocy, we could see the stars.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those fires also burn a synagogue in a remote Austrian town in <a href="https://www.jilliancantor.com/">The Lost Letter</a>, the 2017 novel by Jillian Cantor – a novelist who focuses on 20th-century history. Cantor’s novel follows Zackheim’s in looking back over decades, seeking emotional engagement with distant tragedy.</p>
<h2>All the toys in the world</h2>
<p>Günter Grass was ten on Kristallnacht, the same age as Oskar in his novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/oct/07/the-tin-drum-gunter-grass">The Tin Drum</a> (1952). The Jewish toyshop that supplied Oskar’s drum was burned down that night and the shop owner killed himself – “he took along with him all the toys in the world”. A character akin to Grass appears in John Boyne’s 2018 novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/05/ladder-to-sky-john-boyne-review">A Ladder to the Sky</a>. In his teens <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/nobel-prize-author-guenter-grass-i-was-a-member-of-the-ss-a-431353.html">Grass joined the Waffen-SS</a> – a fact he kept secret until old age. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244347/original/file-20181107-74787-ap5dtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A column of Jews being deported ‘for their own safety’, in November 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Federal Archives</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Boyne’s book, the central character, a writer, took actions after Kristallnacht that destroyed a Jewish family. Like Grass he contained the story for decades. Of course, the true storyteller must share and not conceal stories. Wolf showed us how fear was a barrier against compassion. Boyne makes us face the consequences of overcoming such fear.</p>
<p>Once people would have said Kristallnacht was unimaginable in a modern context. But they were wrong – <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/the-roma-peoples-hungarian-hell/">do Roma feel safe</a> from the actions of the Hungarian State today? How safe are the Rohingya in Myanmar, Mexicans in the US, the Windrush generation in the UK? </p>
<p>Through fiction we can enter history, encounter suffering and exercise compassion. We close our book, awakened. Fiction sharpens memory for when history repeats itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103633/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Goodman's new novel J SS Bach, which tackles the themes of the Holocaust and Music and stems from the historical events of 1938, comes out from Wrecking Ball Press in March 2019. </span></em></p>Eight decades on, the thought of the state encouraging people to attack groups of citizens is hard to believe. Here are some books that might help.Martin Goodman, Professor of Creative Writing, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/871442017-11-08T18:48:30Z2017-11-08T18:48:30ZHow Hitler used a lie about November 9 as the foundation for the Third Reich<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193819/original/file-20171108-14177-a1lv3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Making of a demagogue. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As Adolf Hitler worked on his secret first autobiography in the summer of 1923, he faced a problem. He had decided that in Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/07/europe/hitler-biography-koerber/index.html">to be published</a> as a biography attributed to the young right-wing writer Adolf-Victor von Koerber, he would present himself as a boy from Austria whose formative experiences had led him to political revelations about the hidden architecture of the world.</p>
<p>His pitch would be that these revelations would allow him to become Germany’s saviour at the very moment of the country’s most dire need. Yet to tell a credible story about himself, he needed to connect the story of his own life to that of the nation – as understood by the right wing extremists he was trying to lead. Theirs was a story of a heroic nation, undefeated in war, which had been stabbed in the back by traitors on the home front on November 9, 1918, the day of the <a href="http://alphahistory.com/weimarrepublic/german-revolution/">German revolution</a>.</p>
<p>The challenge for Hitler was that his own real-life experiences on that day did not fit this narrative. After having (unfairly) been cold-shouldered and branded a “rear-area pig” by his wartime peers, he had spent the day in a military hospital recuperating from a mustard gas attack. He was still harbouring fluctuating political ideas and had not expressed anything anti-Semitic by that point. </p>
<p>Worse still, in the weeks and months to come, he would readily serve the successive left-wing revolutionary regimes that Bavaria was about to experience. At the moment when he was radicalised in the summer of 1919, he had been more anti-capitalist and incensed by globalism than anti-Bolshevik. Until that time, he had not realised that Germany had really been defeated in the war – though many Germans thought it had been some sort of draw until the Versailles treaty was drawn up, he could not possibly admit being one of them. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193824/original/file-20171108-14209-4454x2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Workers protesting in Berlin, November 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>I am the resurrection</h2>
<p>Hitler thus decided in the summer of 1923, as he was trying to create a space for himself in national politics, that he would simply recast his past. And what better way to connect his own life to that of the nation than to pick November 9 as the moment of his political epiphany?</p>
<p>The aspiring dictator now used biblical language to describe how he had essentially been dead from the mustard gas attack before the revolution had brought him back to life. In the moment of this resurrection, he wrote, he had decided to become the leader who would bring deliverance to the German people. Hiding behind the name of Koerber, a war hero who could lend him broader legitimacy because he was not part of the Nazi party, Hitler was not shy in comparing his fate that November 9 directly with that of Jesus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This man, destined to eternal night, who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul; one of the most wretched from among this crowd of broken heroes: this man’s eyes shall be opened! Calm shall be restored to his convulsed features. In the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendor, new life!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A year later, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, his much longer second autobiography, he used this fictional recasting of his experiences on November 9, 1918 as the focal point of the story. He described how he had responded to the news that revolution had broken out and that the war was over and had been lost. </p>
<p>On hearing the news, Hitler claims that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…it was impossible for me to stay any longer. While everything began to go black again before my eyes, stumbling, I groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my cot and buried my burning head in the covers and pillows.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He describes how in the nights and days after learning about this Socialist revolution, while experiencing “all the pain of my eyes”, he decided upon his future: “I, however, resolved now to become a politician”. The previous 267 pages of Mein Kampf had been but a build-up: this one sentence is the most famous in the book.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193822/original/file-20171108-14182-1y8xype.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ad infinitum.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hitler now also incorporated another November 9 into the story, the failed <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007884">right-wing coup</a> from 1923 that had landed him in prison. The fact that this occurred on the 9th of the month was in fact a coincidence. Hitler had initially not even be the central figure of the putsch. Only through a clever staging of himself in his trial had it been turned from “the Ludendorff putsch”, named after the World War I general involved, into “the Hitler putsch”. In Mein Kampf, Hitler now sold the coup as an attempted counter-revolution to the left-wing revolution of five years earlier.</p>
<h2>How November 9 grew</h2>
<p>By 1927, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s then chief ideologue, codified Hitler’s story of the two November 9s into a narrative that would form the backbone of Nazi propaganda for the next two decades, labelling the date Germany’s “fateful day” (Schicksalstag). In 1938, Goebbels deliberately organised <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005201">Kristallnacht</a> on the same date to showcase the Nazis’ belief that Jews had stabbed Germans in the back by surrendering in World War I on November 9, 1918 and creating a German parliamentary democracy.</p>
<p>Even today, Hitler and Rosenberg’s “fateful day” narrative is disconcertingly alive and well in Germany. It now incorporates yet another November 9 – that of 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell. </p>
<p>To be sure, the Nazi story of November 9 as the day of Hitler’s resurrection and thwarted German heroism has been turned into one of tragedy and sorrow. Yet Germans continue to refer to that day of the year as their “Schicksalstag”, unaware that they are employing Rosenberg’s language.</p>
<p>Worse still, many Germans still treat Hitler’s November 9, 1918 as an embellishment of an essentially true story about how he had had become radicalised. This leads them to look for the wrong warning signs for the emergence of new Hitlers at a time of renewed populism and demagoguery – not recognising the ways in which extreme forms of anti-globalism, triggered by the confluence of economic and political crises, can radicalise those who were once essentially moderate.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87144/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Weber received funding from the British Academy and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation to help him write Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi.</span></em></p>The Nazi fuhrer’s story about his ‘resurrection’ in 1918 is an important lesson for today.Thomas Weber, Chair in History & International Affairs, University of AberdeenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.