Hitler

unleashed on Jewish property in Munich as soon as Goebbels had finished speaking. One of his closest underlings, Julius Schaub, had been in the thick of things with Goebbels, behaving like the Stoßtrupp fighter of old. During the days that followed, Hitler took care to remain equivocal. He did not praise Goebbels, or what had happened. But nor did he openly, even to his close circle, let alone in public, condemn him outright or categorically dissociate himself from the unpopular Propaganda Minister. Goebbels had the feeling that his own policy against the Jews met with Hitler’s full approval.
    None of this has the ring of actions being taken against Hitler’s will, or in opposition to his intentions. Rather, it seems to point, as Speer presumed, to Hitler’s embarrassment when it became clear to him that the action he had approved was meeting with little but condemnation even in the highest circles of the regime. If Goebbels himself could feign anger at the burning of synagogues whose destruction he had himself directly incited, and even ordered, Hitler was certainly capable of such cynicism. What anger Hitler harboured was purely at an ‘action’ that threatened to engulf him in the unpopularity he had failed to predict. Disbelieving that the Führer could have been responsible, his subordinate leaders were all happy to be deceived. They preferred the easier target of Goebbels, who had played the more visible role. From that night on, it was as if Hitler wanted to draw a veil over the whole business. At his speech in Munich to press representatives on the following evening, 10 November, he made not the slightest mention of the onslaught against the Jews. Even in his ‘inner circle’, he never referred to
‘Reichskristallnacht’
during the rest of his days. But although he had publicly distanced himself from what had taken place, Hitler had in fact favoured the most extreme steps at every juncture.
    The signs are that ‘Crystal Night’ had a profound impact upon Hitler. For at least two decades, probably longer, he had harboured feelings which fused fear and loathing into a pathological view of Jews as theincarnation of evil threatening German survival. Alongside the pragmatic reasons why Hitler agreed with Goebbels that the time was opportune to unleash the fury of the Nazi Movement against Jews ran the deeply embedded ideological urge to destroy what he saw as Germany’s most implacable enemy, responsible in his mind for the war and its most tragic and damaging consequence for the Reich, the November Revolution. This demonization of the Jew and fear of the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ was part of a world-view that saw the random and despairing act of Herschel Grynszpan as part of a plot to destroy the mighty German Reich. Hitler had by that time spent months at the epicentre of an international crisis that had brought Europe to the very brink of a new war. In the context of continuing crisis in foreign policy, with the prospect of international conflict never far away, ‘Crystal Night’ seems to have reinvoked – certainly to have re-emphasized – the presumed links, present in his warped outlook since 1918–19 and fully expounded in
Mein Kampf
, between the power of the Jews and war.
    He had commented in the last chapter of
Mein Kampf
that ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front’ would not have been necessary if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’. Such rhetoric, appalling though the sentiments were, was not an indication that Hitler already had the ‘Final Solution’ in mind. But the implicit genocidal link between war and the killing of Jews was there. Göring’s remarks at the end of the meeting on 12 November had been an ominous pointer in the same direction: ‘If the German Reich comes into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future, it can be taken for granted that we in Germany will think in the first instance of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews.’
    With war approaching again, the question of the threat of the Jews in a future conflict was evidently present in Hitler’s mind. The idea of using the Jews as hostages, part of Hitler’s mentality, but also advanced in the SS’s organ
Das Schwarze Korps
in October and November 1938, is testimony to the linkage between war and idea of a ‘world conspiracy’. ‘The Jews living in Germany and Italy are the hostages which fate has placed in