Shabbat Kristallnacht in the Library of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester
This post continues a post on my primary blog, On Libraries: The Library of Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester.
I copied out the following excerpt from one of most authoritative histories of the Holocaust, The War Against The Jews, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, shortly after midnight of November 9 — November 10, 2007, a Shabbat Kristallnacht:
From The War Against the Jews, Kristallnacht, pp 100-104.
But an unexpected opportunity for dealing with the Jews opened up with the assassination on November 7, 1938, of Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary in the German embassy in Paris, by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish student, Hershl Grynszpan. … Grynszpan’s parents had been among the first rounded up, and the son had become unsettled by their fate.
Hitler himself never uttered a word publicly on vom Rath’s assassination or on the events of the Kristallnacht (night of glass). Yet those events could not have occurred without his approval. The incitement against the Jews began on November 8 with the first news report that vom Rath had been seriously wounded (he died two days later).
Now, the party members and SA men took Goebbels’ hints as he intended them to be taken: Jewish blood was to flow for the death of vom Rath…That night fires were ignited all over Germany, and the shattered pl
[I stopped here to go to bed, resuming at 6:50AM Saturday morning)]
ate glass that was to give the pogrom its name littered the streets of German towns and cities. (It was later estimated that the amount of plate glass destroyed equaled half the annual production of the plate-glass industry of Belgium, from which it had been imported. Over seven thousand Jewish businesses were destroyed. Nearly one hundred Jews were killed, and thousands more subjected to wanton violence and sadistic torments.
About thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen.
If the death of vom Rath had triggered Gorbbels’ pogrom, the pogrom itself provided the National Socialist Government with the opportunity , short of actual war, to proceed with the total expropriation of the Jews and the complete removal of their freedom.
Everything relating to the Jewish question, it seemed, had been disposed of, except the Jews themselves. On January 24, 1939, Goring gave Heydrich the power to take all measures for a stepped-up forced emigration of the German Jews, along the lines that Eichmann had pioneered in Vienna after the Anschluss.
[I had not known before reading this passage that Eichmann was directly involved in the planning for the War Against the Jews in Austria.]
P. 80. The SD Main Office in Munich wsa enlarged to three departments. Within the department known as SD-Inland (domestic affairs), a separate desk for Jewish affairs (coded II-112) was set up with the SS-Untersturmfuhrer Leopold von Mildenstein in charge. Mildenstein hired Adolf Eichmann at the end of 1934 as his export on Zionism, that niche in the bureaucracy coded II-1123.
xiii
The Subject: Definitions and Contours
The annihilation of six million Jews, carried out by the German state under Adolf Hitler during World War II, has resisted understanding. The question persists: how could it have happened? That question embraces several questions, each charged with passion and moral judgment. They are:
1. How was it possible for a modern state to carry out the systematic murder of a whole pople for no reason other than that they were Jews?
2. How was it possible for a whole people to allow itself to be destroyed?
3. How was it possible for the world to stand by without halting this destruction?
Part I of this book, “The Final Solution,” attempt to answer the first question.
I write this on a Saturday afternoon. The Jewish Sabbath lasts from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, and one is not supposed to work on a Sabbath.
However, this is an exception, since the preservation of life takes priority over any religious ritual requirement. Though I am writing on a Sabbath, I am not working, but I am laboring, in a labor of love.
Though Rabbi Chaim Stern of Blessed Memory is no longer with us, as is also the case with most of the few Jews who emerged from the Nazi death camps, we need to preserve their memory, and the memory of the times in which they lived, lest history repeat itself.
This goal of this project is to help preserve those memories.
