Hitler

Führer. He decides: let the demonstrations continue. Pull back the police. The Jews should for once get to feel the anger of the people. That’s right. I immediately give corresponding directives to police and party. Then I speak for a short time in that vein to the party leadership. Storms of applause. All tear straight off to the telephone. Now the people will act.’
    Goebbels certainly did his best to make sure ‘the people’ acted. He put out detailed instructions of what had and had not to be done. He fired up the mood where there was hesitancy. Immediately after he had spoken, the Stoßtrupp Hitler, an ‘assault squad’ whose traditions reached back to the heady days of pre-putsch beerhouse brawls and bore the Führer’s name, was launched to wreak havoc on the streets of Munich. Almost immediately they demolished the old synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Straße, left standing after the main synagogue had been destroyed in the summer. AdolfWagner, Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria (who as Bavarian Minister of Interior was supposedly responsible for order in the province), himself no moderate in ‘the Jewish Question’, got cold feet. But Goebbels pushed him into line. The ‘capital city of the Movement’ of all places was not going to be spared what was happening already all over Germany. Goebbels then gave direct telephone instructions to Berlin to demolish the synagogue in Fasanenstraße, off the Kurfürstendamm.
    The top leadership of the police and SS, also gathered in Munich but not present when Goebbels had given his speech, learnt of the ‘action’ only once it had started. Heydrich, at the time in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, was informed by the Munich Gestapo Office around 11.20 p.m., after the first orders had already gone out to the party and SA. He immediately sought Himmler’s directives on how the police should respond. The Reichsführer-SS was contacted in Hitler’s Munich apartment. He asked what orders Hitler had for him. Hitler replied – mostlikely at Himmler’s prompting – that he wanted the SS to keep out of the ‘action’. Disorder and uncontrolled violence and destruction were not the SS’s style. Himmler and Heydrich preferred the ‘rational’, systematic approach to the ‘Jewish Question’. Soon after midnight orders went out that any SS men participating in the ‘demonstrations’ were to do so only in civilian clothing. At 1.20 a.m. Heydrich telexed all police chiefs instructing the police not to obstruct the destruction of the synagogues and to arrest as many male Jews, especially wealthy ones, as available prison accommodation could take. The figure of 20–30,000 Jews had already been mentioned in a Gestapo directive sent out before midnight.
    Meanwhile, across the Reich, party activists – especially SA men – were suddenly summoned by their local leaders and told to burn down synagogues or were turned loose on other Jewish property. Many of those involved had been celebrating at their own commemoration of the Beerhall Putsch, and some were the worse for wear from drink. The ‘action’ was usually improvised on the spot.
    At midnight, at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich where the attempted putsch in 1923 had met its end, Goebbels had witnessed the swearing-in of the SS to Hitler. The Propaganda Minister was ready to return to his hotel when he saw the sky red from the fire of the burning synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Straße. Back he went to Gau headquarters. Instructions were given out that the fire-brigade should extinguish only what was necessary to protect nearby buildings. Otherwise they were to let the synagogue burn down. ‘The Stoßtrupp is doing dreadful damage,’ he commented. Reports came in to him of seventy-five synagogues on fire throughout the Reich, fifteen of them in Berlin. He had evidently by this time heard of the Gestapo directive. ‘The Führer has ordered,’ he noted, ‘that 20–30,000 Jews are immediately to be arrested.’ In fact, it had been a Gestapo order with no reference in it to a directive of the Führer. Clearly, however, though he had instigated the pogrom, Goebbels took it that the key decisions came from Hitler. Goebbels went with Julius Schaub, Hitler’s general factotum, into the Artists’ Club to wait for further news. Schaub was in fine form. ‘His old Stoßtrupp past has been revived,’ commented Goebbels. He went back to his hotel. He could hear the noise of shattering glass from smashed shop windows.