75 Years: Munich and Kristallnacht

Munich's Old City Hall (2013)

The Altes Rathaus (Old City Hall) in the heart of modern Munich leaves an impression on every visitor.  While its late-gothic spiked towers, which seem to pull the unblemished pearly façade into the Bavarian skies, announce Munich’s medieval past, the hybrid buses and smart-dressed businesspeople hurrying through its arches remind us that Munich is now a 21^st century cosmopolitan city.  However, a stone plaque next to its southern entrance details a role it played in a much darker period.  For it was from the structure’s ballroom behind the tall windows that on the evening of November 9^th 1938 that Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels initiated a pre-planned pogrom against the Jews of Germany.  The night would be known as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) or more appropriately ‘The November Pogrom,’ and it was accompanied by a mass imprisonment of Jewish men and a wave of anti-Semitic legislation.  The brutal effectiveness of the action and the relative domestic and international indifference that followed emboldened the Nazis, and firmly directed Germany on the path to genocide. 

Old City Hall Plaque (08 Nov 2013)

Old City Hall Plaque - English

Although the November pogrom occurred throughout Germany, this article focuses on the events and their aftermath in Munich, where Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, were assembled to celebrate the 15^th anniversary of the 1923 failed Putsch.     

Munich’s Jewish Community

Munich's Main Synagogue (center), Kunsterhaus (right), towers
of the Frauenkirche (background) (1880s??).  source:Public Domain

Same view 08 Nov 2013

Evidence of the earliest Jewish resident of Munich can be dated to at least 1229, a little over a half a century after the founding of the city.  Over the next two centuries, the Jewish community endured multiple pogroms, often coinciding with plagues that they were accused of initiating.  In 1442, the Wittelsbach Duke Albrecht banished the Jews from the city, and they wouldn’t be welcomed back until the days of the Enlightenment in the late 18^th century when the heavily indebted Bavarian rulers needed help financing the building projects that would make Munich one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.  

The city’s Jewish population thrived in the 19^th century.  When the first post-medieval synagogue opened in 1826, King Ludwig I attended its dedication.  The community reached its apex in 1910, with more than 11,000 people (Heusler, 16). It was also around the turn of the century that anti-Semitism, which had never gone away, started growing again.  Unlike medieval anti-Semitism, which was based on religion, the 20^th century ethnic-based brand was far more sinister.  Matters became worse after Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I.  Although many Jews had fought and died for the Kaiser’s empire, they were nevertheless accused of profiting from the war and betraying the fatherland.  In Munich, which had historically been wary of the outsiders, many citizens blamed Jews for a bloody period in 1919 when a revolutionary communist government briefly seized power.  Nevertheless, when compared to Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism in Germany was bearable.  They assumed the growth in anti-Semitism would wane once the country had recovered from the war.  However, in the 1930s the country sank into an economic depression and the Nazis rose to power, causing anti-Semitism to explode.      

  

Nazi ‘Jewish Policy’ Pre-1938

1933 boycott of Jewish Stores Bamberger und Hertz
Kauflinger-strasse Source: Stadtarchiv Muenchen

08 Nov 2013

Adolf Hitler had made it clear since his first writings on the ‘Jewish Question’ in 1919 that Germany had to rid itself of the Jews to become great again (Kershaw, 74).  He was convinced that Jews had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ during the First World War.  Moreover, he believed they were crippling Germany through the forces of Marxism and capitalism.  Hitler’s goal of making Germany Judenrein (literally: clean of Jews) remained a constant throughout his political career. However, when the
Nazis took power in 1933, achieving that goal proved harder than expected.

In general, Nazi policy aimed to make life so miserable for the Jews that they would emigrate voluntarily.  For instance, Nazis sponsored a boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, and enacted the Nuremburg Laws in 1935, which sought to remove Jews from German civic life.  Nevertheless, these measures did not have the desired results.  In fact, in Munich, between 1933 and 1937, the net Jewish population dropped only slightly from 9,005 to 8,713 (Heussler, 16). 

The reasons for the failure are many.  For one, many German Jews didn’t want to leave.  Over the past century Jews had integrated into Germany society.  They were patriots, and they believed the rise in anti-Semitism would ebb.  In the autobiography of Charlotte Knobloch, the current president of Munich’s Jewish Cultural Society, she explains that her father, Fritz Neuland, who had proudly fought for Germany during WWI, believed that Hitler and the Nazis would fall as fast as they had rose (Knobloch, 13).  Besides, leaving Germany involved paying a hefty price.  The authorities would seize anything left behind, and even if the owners could sell their property, they would receive only a fraction of its value.  Finally, emigration for many meant learning a new language and starting over from scratch.  Few Jews were ready to make that sacrifice, at least not before Kristallnacht.

However, even if more Jews had wanted to leave before 1938, most of the world was not ready to welcome them.  Many countries had imposed immigration quotas, including British-mandated Palestine.  The Evian Conference in 1938, in which 32 nations from Europe and the Americas attempted to find a solution to the growing number Jews wanting to leave Germany, famously ended in failure.  The international community’s willingness to help Germany’s Jews can be best summed up by Canadian Minister President Mackenzie King’s reply to the question of how many of Jews Canada could accept: “None is to many” (Heusler, 139).  Ironically, the only leader at the conference willing to accept a significant number of Jewish immigrants was the Dominican Republic’s racist dictator Rafael Trujillo, who hoped they would make his country ‘whiter’(Wells).

1938

Of the 500,000 Jews living in Germany in 1933, 350,000 remained in 1938 (Doescher, 26).  At this point, Hitler was nearly ready to go to war, and in such a case he believed the Jews couldn’t be trusted (Doescher 54).  Therefore, the Nazis employed a series of new measures aimed at forcing Jews to emigrate.  For example, the Nazis skewed business regulations against them.  Consequently, in Munich between February and October, the number of Jewish-owned businesses shrank from 1690 to 666 (Kershaw, 450).  In August, Jewish men and women were forced to adopt the extra forename ‘Israel’ and ‘Sara,’ respectively.  Then in October, authorities stamped a ‘J’ into their passports. 

Memorial to former main synagogue - Herzog Max-strasse (2013)

In June, Hitler ordered the demolition of the main synagogue in Munich on Herzog-Max-strasse.  The official reason was that it hindered a city construction project.   However, Hitler actually hated having the Jewish house of worship so close to his favorite night club, which was located in the adjacent Kunstlerhaus.   

Meanwhile, the Nazis also increased state-sponsored violence against Jews.  In March, in recently-annexed Vienna Austria, local Nazis attacked Jews resulting in increased Jewish emigration over the next few months.  Back in Germany, Nazi bosses ‘took note’ (Kenshaw, 450). 

In May and June Nazi mobs vandalized and looted Jewish shops in Berlin.  Although Hitler supported violence against the Jews, in interest of international and domestic public opinion, he ordered the attacks to stop.   Often when Hitler made a move that risked generating outrage, he preferred to find a justification for the action.  A classic example is the Reichstag fire in 1933, which he used to justify employing the “Enabling Acts.”  On November 7^th 1938, he got his excuse to initiate a pogrom, when a Jew of Polish background shot a German diplomat in Paris. 

A Shooting in Paris

Herschel Grynszpan

Herschel Grynszpan was born and raised in Hannover Germany, where as a Jewish boy he endured bullying at school.  He dreamed of moving to Palestine, but his youth and the strict British immigration regulations wouldn’t allow it.  He eventually moved to Paris to live with aunt and uncle.  However, he never obtained the proper documentation, and when the 17-year-old’s Polish passport and German residency documents expired in 1938, he was left in political limbo. 

Meanwhile, when Germany annexed Austria in March, the Polish government feared an influx of Jewish immigrants.  To avoid this, they revoked the citizenship of any Polish Jew who had been out of the country for more than 5 years.  A few months later, the Poles went a step further by announcing that they would revoke the passports of all Polish Jews in Germany as of October 30^th.  The Germans responded by rounding up 12,000 of them on the 27^th and 28^th, loading them onto trains, and dropping them off at the Polish border.  Three of these deportees included Grynszpan’s parents and sister Bettina.  In early November, Bettina sent her brother a letter describing their forced deportation and their struggles in Poland.  The stateless young man with few future prospects was enraged.  On November 7^th he went to the German embassy in Paris and shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath.  As motive, he stated: “to protest Germany’s policies toward Jews … and to get revenge for his family’s predicament” (Doescher, 70).

The shooting appeared all over the Nazi press on the morning of the 8^th.  That evening, Nazi gangs all over Germany attacked Jewish shops, homes and synagogues.  However, the number of incidents was still relatively small.  Local leaders were waiting for a signal from a higher authority. 

The Engineering of a Pogrom

For Hitler and the party leadership, who were assembled in Munich to commemorate the 15^th anniversary of the 1923 failed Putsch, the shooting couldn’t have happened at a better time.  November 9^th was a holy day on the Nazi calendar, and emotions were running high.  According to a recently published book by Armin Fuhrer, Hitler sent his own personal doctor and a team of medics to tend to vom Rath in Paris.  Fuhrer believes that vom Rath’s injuries would not have been life threatening had he received the proper treatment.  Therefore, he argues that Hitler may have ordered his doctors to withhold treatment, thus allowing the German diplomat to die, and providing the Nazis with a martyr. 

Interestingly, neither Hitler nor any other high-ranking Nazi leader mentioned the shooting during the ceremonies on the 8^th.   Historian Ian Kenshaw believes that Hitler assumed vom Krath would die soon, and preferred waiting until he did before tapping into Nazi anger.  Indeed, whether due to lack of treatment or not, the young diplomat succumbed to his injuries the next afternoon.  The news quickly spread around Munich and the rest of Germany, leading to more anti-Jewish violence.  However, the worst was yet to come. 

 

Interior of the Tanzsaal in the Old City Hall
June 2013 (during a comic book fair)

That evening, Hitler joined the Alte Kaempfer (Old Fighters: Nazis who had taken part in the 1923 Putsch) in the gothic Tanzsaal (ball room) of the old city hall on Marienplatz for a banquet.  Witnesses claimed to see Hitler and his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels speaking quietly early on.  According to Goebbel’s diary, Hitler told him to “let the demonstrations continue [and] pull back the police.”  He contended that “[the] Jews should for once get to feel the anger of the people” (Kershaw, 456).  That evening Hitler left the function uncharacteristically early, and without speaking.  Instead, he returned to his residence on Prinzregentenplatz.   He approved of the pogrom, but wanted to distance himself from it.

At 10:00 PM Goebbels proceeded to give a viciously anti-Semitic speech, blaming all Jews for the death of vom Krath.   He insisted that the recent anti-Jewish violence was justified.  He carefully added that the Nazi party had and would have nothing to do with the organization of the violence.  On the other hand, they would do nothing to stop the ‘will of the people.’  The propaganda minister was clearly trying to divert blame from the party by characterizing the violence as an outburst of citizen-rage.  However, he was also giving a subtle signal to local party leaders all over the country that he wanted the violence to intensify.  After his speech, he noted that, “all [party leaders tore] straight off to the telephone” (Kershaw, 457).  The pogrom could begin. 

In Munich, bands of SA (Sturmabteilung: ‘shock troops’), many of whom had spent the evening drinking, poured out of beer halls and into the city.  The director of the Gestapo (and a future architect of the Holocaust) Reinhard Heydrich, who was monitoring the situation from the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich, gave orders to the police not to intervene.  Instead, they should enact a prearranged arrest of thousands of Jewish men (see below).

The Munich fire department reported the first blaze at 11:59PM in a shop display on Augusten-strasse 113.  The SA, who had mostly changed into civilian clothes, would vandalize, loot, and/or destroy at least 42 Jewish businesses in Munich that night.  At 1:00AM, police were ordered to prevent the looting of Jewish shops by ‘securing’ valuable merchandise (Heusler, 51).  However, everyone knew this actually meant ‘confiscate’ the goods.  The Uhlfelder department store on Rosental 12 sustained especially heavy damage.  Even during the Nazi period it had been one the more popular department stores in Munich.  But on that evening, the SA smashed its windows, looted it goods, and destroyed its fixtures, including the only escalator in 1930’s Munich. 

 

Uhlfelder Department Store - Rosental 12 (10 Nov 1938)
Source: Stadtarchiv Muenchen

Rosental (08 Nov 2013) - The orgnal building was destroyed
 in WWII but one can still recognize the curveof the street.

Haus Bernheimer, Lehnbachplatz (10 Nov 1938)
Source: Stadtarchiv Muenchen

Haus Bernheimer (October 2013)

The Nazis didn’t stop with the Jewish community’s economic livelihood, but also attacked their cultural ones.  Shortly after 1:00AM, the SA doused the Ohel Jakob Synogogue on Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse with gasoline and set it ablaze (Heusler, 65).  Goebbels, who had just attended an SS swearing-in ceremony on Odeonplatz, saw the sky glowing red, and immediately returned to district headquarters to order the fire department not to act unless the adjacent buildings were endangered (Kenshaw, 458).  Eventually the synagogue’s Rabbi, Ernst Ehrentreu, rushed to the blaze hoping to save the Torah scrolls.  He arrived too late, and the SA greeted him by trying to throw him into the flames.  Only the intervention of an SA officer who still possessed a grain of humanity prevented his colleagues from murdering the rabbi (Heusler, 65).  Instead, they arrested Ehrentreu and sent him to Dachau. 

Synagogue Ohel Jakob - Max-Rudolf-Strasse (10 Nov 1938)

Plaque on Max-Rudolf-Strasse
October 2013

In addition, the SA set fire to the synagogue on Reichenbach-strasse 27 and the prayer room of the East-European Jews on Ickstatt-strasse 11.  The fire department extinguished the latter blaze quickly, but only because non-Jews lived in the apartment above it (Heusler 75). 

Former Jewish Nursing Home - Mathildenstrasse 9
Now part of the University Clinic (October 2013) 

The Nazis also targeted the headquarters of Munich’s Israeli Cultural Society on Lindwurmstrasse 125, and the Jewish nursing homes on Kaulbachstrasse 65 and Mathildenstrasse 8-9.  In the case of the latter two, the SA forcibly evicted the residents.  An 83-year-old woman, who had no family, dared ask one of the SA men where she should go.  He replied, “There is plenty of room in Lake Starnberg for all of you” (Heusler, 75).

Finally, the Nazis targeted private residences.   For example they set fire to the upper floor of Karl Bach’s home on Boehmerwaldplatz 2.  However, a group of Bavarian Hitler Jugend (HJ: Hitler Youth) leaders employed another method of anti-Jewish terror at private residences.  This method employed the threat of violence, but instead of damaging property, their goal was extortion.

Interior of Ohel Jakob Synagogue (10 Nov 1938)

Nazi Extortion

At around midnight on November 9^th/10^th, a knock woke the 28-year-old Paul Bernheimer, whose family were famous art dealers.  He opened the door at Kurfursten-strasse 30 to a group of men in uniform, led by an HJ officer named Waldmann.  The following exchange of words ensued:

• Waldmann: A German diplomat died in Paris today.  A Jew named Herschel Grynszpan murdered him.  You are a Jew as well.  We’ll give you the chance to express your disgust of the crime and your loyalty to the German Reich with an atonement payment.
• Bernheimer: What do I have to do with that?
• Waldmann: Do you think we are a bunch of gangsters? Don’t you see that we are wearing uniforms?  … You should be happy that we are polite men.  You could have been visited by others. (source: Emde)

Here, Waldmann is clearly trying to promote the illusion that they were not associated with the mobs roaming the city. Nevertheless, Waldmann’s veiled threats eventually persuaded Bernheimer to sign over 5,000 Reichmarks to the Nazis.  This was just the first example of the use of extortion that night. 

It is no secret that a number of high ranking Nazis disagreed with the destruction of property.  Indeed, they hoped to eventually steal the property and thus didn’t want it damaged.  This group included the regional Nazi party leader (Gauleiter) Adolf Wagner.  After Goebbel’s speech at the Old City Hall, Wagner took a 33-year-old regional HJ leader named Emil Klein aside.  He told Klein that he wanted “action against the Jews…that didn’t involve the smashing of windows.” (Heusler, 95).  Klein took note and instructed his fellow HJ leaders to meet him at the Excelsior hotel near the train station to coordinate their action. 

By the time they met at the Excelsior, the above-mentioned Waldmann had already extorted ‘atonement money’ from Bernheimer.  Upon hearing of his success, Klein lauded his improvisation, but chided him for not extorting more. “If you are demanding atonement payments,” Klein said, “then that amount for a Jew like Bernheimer is a joke.  He can pay ten times that.”(focus)  Consequently, Waldmann and other HJ leaders returned to the streets, where they extorted 50,000 Reichmarks from Paul Bernheimer’s cousin, Carl, and another 73,000 from other prominent Jews (Heusler, 107). 

Meanwhile, Klein had bigger targets in mind, specifically houses that the HJ could seize.  Since the action was ad-hoc, he and his companions had to use the phone book at the Excelsior Hotel to find targets.  When the women who answered the door at the first home fainted, they impatiently moved on to the closest Jewish neighbor.   Here, they encountered Anselm and Laura Kahn.   Klein ‘warned’ them “that their lives were in danger because the public was on the streets to attack Jewish businesses” (Heusler, 104).  He advised them “to leave their house quickly, and emigrate from Germany as soon as possible” (ibid).  Here, Klein, like Waldmann, was touting the ridiculous party line.  The Kahn’s, whose business had already been ‘aryanized’ and whose children had emigrated, left their house on Noerdliche Auffahrts-allee 22 within two hours.  They were forced to ‘donate’ their property to the HJ.  In return, Nazi authorities expedited their emigration documents.     

The Kahns' passport photos (1939)
Source: Stadtarchiv Muenchen

Despite their loss of dignity and property, the Khans were lucky.  They survived.  The next two cases involve two Munich Jews who were visited by Nazis on that night and subsequently lost their lives.

The Case of Jochim Both

Joachim and Marjem Both moved to Munich in 1908 from a village near the Polish city of Rzeszow (then part of Austrian-Hungarian Empire).  No one knows why they came to Munich, but at the time many Jews were relocating west due to escalating anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe (Heusler, 112).  In Munich, Joachim and his brother-in-law founded a successful furniture store on Lindwurmstrasse 185, which they were still running on November 9^th 1938.

Lindwurm-strasse 185 (Left, on the corner)

Lindwurm Strasse 185 (October 2013)

 

That evening, a group of SA men was drinking in the bar inside the Mens Sports Club (Maenner Turn Verein – MTV) on Haeberlstrasse 11.  Late in the evening, the SA leader told his men to return home to change into civilian clothes because they would be “smashing the windows” of a number of Jewish shops (Heusler, 114).  Later, as two of the men were returning to the sports club, they stopped at Lindwurmstrasse 185 to throw stones at the display windows.  Eventually, they left (in a police report, they claimed to have been attacked by patrons of a local bar) and returned with 10 colleagues, who proceeded to ransack the store and the Both’s apartment, which was located on the second floor. 

Unfortunately for the Boths, they returned from an evening at the theater at the same time the SA were inside.  According to Marjem Both’s testimony, when they reached the entrance to their shop, the SA attacked them and prevented them from entering.  The men then grabbed Joachim and dragged him upstairs.  When Marjem could finally get inside the building, the SA were coming down the stairs.  One punched her in the face as he passed.  She got up and rushed upstairs, where she found her husband’s body in their son’s room.  He had been shot point blank in the head. 

Nobody will ever know what actually happened at Lindwurmstrasse 185 that evening.  According to the SA, Both (referred to as ‘the Jew’ in their police statements) had escaped their grasp and jumped onto the window sill as if he were going to jump.  Two SA men pulled him down and the one named Schenk put a pistol to his head.  According to Schenk, Both then ‘made a sudden movement,’ causing him to pull the trigger (Heusler, 116).  Unsurprisingly, despite the fact Both was unarmed and surrounded by SA, the Nazi court felt Schenk had acted appropriately, and no disciplinary action was taken. 

Maenner Turn Verein - The SA were drinking here before
they murdered Jochim Both. source: Stadtarchiv Muenchen

Maenner Turn Verein
(October 2013)

The Case of Emil Kraemer

It is clear the SA murdered Joachim Both, and to this day, his death is the only one in Munich that can be proven to have been a direct result of the pogrom.  However, there were also a number of suspicious suicides on November 9^th/10^th, including that of Emil Kraemer, a notary and partial owner of a Munich bank.  Friends described Kraemer as man that was “full of life” and “showed absolutely no suicidal tendencies” (focus or stern).  Nevertheless, the official police report of his death stated that he jumped to his death from the third floor of his house on November 10^th at 7:30 AM.  The report also records that his wife poisoned herself as a result of the “suicide of her husband” (Emde).  However her death is reported to have occurred at 7:00AM, a half hour before the death of Joachim.  Either there was mistake in the documentation, or something was deliberately falsified.

In any case, the story of Emil Kraemer starts earlier that evening.  After HJ leader Emil Klein had successfully confiscated the Kahns’ house, he and his men visited Kraemer, who proved a lot less cooperative.  Klein eventually got frustrated and returned to the Hotel Excelsior, where he instructed three of his men to pick up Kraemer in a car, drive him a few miles from his home, and then force him to walk home barefoot (Heusler, 106).  Unfortunately, there are no credible witnesses to what happened next.  According to the HJ men, they took Kraemer to his bank, where he wrote them a check for 4,000 Reichmarks.  Then they brought him to his home unharmed.  However, the official report also includes the testimony of a brother of one of the participants, who claims that he heard him boast about beating Kraemer to death.  This inconvenient piece of evidence was probably ignored by the police, as they promptly classified Kraemer’s death as a suicide. 

Dachau

Hitler and Goebbels finally decided to end the violence on the morning of November 10^th as the chorus of criticism grew louder from members of party leadership who preferred action against the Jews that didn’t involve burning buildings and broken glass littering German streets.  However, the pogrom comprised just one phase of a larger anti-Jewish plan.  The next phase, which took place over the next few days, involved the detention of at least 30,000 Jewish men in concentration camps throughout Germany.  In Munich, the SS would arrest at least 1,000 and imprison them at the notorious Dachau camp, located 10 miles north-east of the city. 

Although all prisoners at Dachau – from Catholics to communists – suffered inhumane treatment, SS officers were especially cruel to the Jews (Heusler, 128).  Osker Goebel reported that upon their arrival following Kristallnacht, the Jews had to stand in the snow all night before they were allowed into barracks.  At that point they had to hand over their clothes and belongings.  They were “packed together like sardines” on thin straw mattresses, and to insulate themselves from the cold, they stuffed newspaper under their prison uniforms (Heusler, 129).  That month, 24 Jews died at Dachau (ibid). 

Even prominent Jews were targeted.  Nobel-prize winning chemist Richard Willstaetter, and members of the Bernheimer family, who had paid atonement money to the HJ that night and had sold furniture to Hermann Georing, received no special treatment.  In fact, the leaders of the Jewish community were often singled out for special punishment.  For instance, even before he arrived at Dachau, the SS dragged Rabbi Leo Baerenwald into the forest and beat him with their rifles (ibid).    

The lucky ones who had enough money and connections could get out of Dachau after a couple of weeks.  However, release depended on a promise to emigrate from Germany.  In many cases, family members had to produce documentation from foreign embassies (Heusler, 134). 

One notable case was the above-mentioned Berheimer family.  Otto Bernheimer, who had run the family business since 1918, rushed back to Munich from vacation in Baden-Baden on the evening of the 9^th when he heard what was happening.  He had barely avoided the SS at his hotel.  However, they caught up with him on the 10^th in Munich.  He was fortunate to be an honorary consul at the Mexican consulate, which was located in the building he owned on Lehnbachplatz 5.  The consulate threatened to arrest 12 German nationals in Mexico if Berheimer was not set free.  The Nazis gave in, but continued to pressure Berheimer to emigrate.  Eventually they forced him to buy a hacienda in Venezuela, and at his own cost, bring Hermann Goering’s uncle (who was Jewish and no longer tolerated by his family) to South America with him.

Another case involved Edward Engelberg, who is now a professor emitrius at Brandeis University in Waltham Massachusetts.  He was just a 9-year-old boy as he saw smoke pouring out of his school adjacent to the Ohel-Jakob synagogue on Max-Rudolf-strasse on the morning of November 10^th1938.  He ran home, but only to see the Gestapo arrest his father.  In the following weeks, Edward’s mother desperately tried to obtain an exit visa for the family, which was required to get her husband out of Dachau.  She finally succeeded by bribing an official at the Swiss embassy with a painting.

Dachau: 34-hour forced muster (January 1939)
Source: Gedenkstaette Dachau Archiv

Dachau 2011

Those prisoners whose families were not fortunate enough to obtain visas remained in Dachau for months.  Many died before they got out.  When one prisoner escaped in January of 1939, the guards forced the Jews to stand outside in freezing temperatures for 34 hours, resulting in 60 deaths (Heussler, 135).  In the case of Felix Feuchtwanger, who was a local Jewish leader, the guards tore and then shaved off his beard.  They also beat him so badly that his wife didn’t immediately recognize him when he finally came home (Heussler, 134).  He died a few days later. 

The Only Escape

In winter of 1939, the Nazis released the remaining Jews who had been detained on Kristallnacht.  However, their prospects were bleak.  They were too old or didn’t have enough money or connections to emigrate.  And even if they did, the chances of the world opening its doors to Germany’s Jews were getting slimmer every day.  For many Jews who were not able to leave Germany, suicide offered the only escape.  In 1933 Jews accounted for 1.2% of Munich’s population.  During the first four years of the Nazi dictatorship, their share of total suicides was high at 2.5 %.  However, in 1938 and 1939, despite the Jewish percentage of the population falling below 1%, its share of suicides surged to 10.7%, and 7%, respectively.  Of those Jewish suicides, over 50% of them were committed by people over the age of 60, who had no hope escaping by other means (Heusler,146). 

 

The Next Measures

About a week after the pogrom and detentions, the Nazis enacted a number of legal measures that would cap off the concentrated attack on Germany’s Jews.  These included:  

·        State seizure of any Jewish-owned financial securities.

·        State seizure of any Jewish-owned jewelry or art. 

·        Jews were forbidden to own an automobile.

·        The driver licenses of Jews were revoked.  

·        New taxes were levied against Jews.

·        Jewish children could no longer attend ‘German’ schools. 

·        Jews could no longer run a retail business.

·        Jew could no longer practice medicine (including as dentists or veterinarians)

(Doescher, 127)

Jews were also required to pay for all the damages incurred on Kristallnacht, and the state would seize any insurance claims.  Munich was actually at the forefront of the legal action by enacting local versions of many of the regulations a few days before the national ones. 

Finally, shortly after Kristallnacht, the Nazis began a concerted effort to consolidate Jewish residences.  They forcibly evicted many Jews out of their own homes and crammed them into houses with groups of other Jewish families.  The state seized the vacated homes, while the shared domiciles became known as Judenhaeuser (Jewish Houses).  In Munich, which has historically had a housing shortage, the city authorities took especial advantage of this policy.  Clearly this action was a step toward the future creation of ghettos, from where Jews would be transported to death camps in the 1940s.

Former Judenhaus Thiersch-strasse 7 (October 2013)

Reactions and Consequences

Adolf Wagner speaking at Circus Krone (11 Nov 1938)
Source: Stadtarchiv Muenchen

Hitler had always been wary of the possible domestic and international backlash to a pogrom.  That is probably why he had curbed previous acts of violence against the Jews.  On November 10^th, Nazi leadership was so concerned about possible fallout, they organized propaganda speeches all over Germany for the next evening to gauge public opinion and to sooth any discontent.  In Munich, Gauleiter Wager spoke at Circus Krone and he was simulcast at numerous beer halls around the city.  He argued that the “acts of retaliation” had been completely legitimate (Heusler, 153).  In reality, the propaganda speeches were probably not necessary. While it is impossible to gauge what the average citizen thought about the events of November 8-10^th, in general they reacted with indifference.  Even the Catholic and Protestant churches, which were no friends of the Nazis, were silent.  Munich’s citizens had been distancing themselves from their Jewish neighbors since 1933, but on November 9^th 1938, they completely turned their backs on them.   

Even the children had been tainted with the hate.  For example, Marguerite Strasser recalled that the other students tormented her worse than normal on November 10^th, and they hid her clothes during gym class ( Heberer, 26).  Meanwhile, her friend was beaten and had her clothes torn (ibid).  However, neither had to endure the abuse for long; the principal expelled the Jewish students later that day.

That is not to say that all of Munich’s residents agreed with what the Nazis were doing.  There were many isolated cases of kindness in the following days.  Some were simple.  For example, as the above-mentioned Margariete Strasser was leaving school, her math teacher showed solidarity by reminded her to do her homework(ibid).  Even more impressive was the Strasser’s non-Jewish housemaid, who upon hearing of the Gestapo’s intention to confiscate her employer’s house, went to the secret police’s headquarters and fought until the family was allowed to stay. 

There were also many cases of ‘aryans’ risking arrest by hiding Jews, such as the manager of the Schauspielhaus, Herr Daffinger, who hid Dentist Raphael Levi in his own home.  In other cases, many non-Jews bought groceries for their neighbors in ‘aryan’ shops in order to help them circumvent the Jewish shopping ban (Heusler, 151). 

Unfortunately, these cases were more exceptions than the rule, and the Nazis could not have been more pleased.  The public’s apathy signaled to the Nazis that their goal of ‘aryanizing’ the country would be met with little resistance.  Consequently, they were emboldened to employ more brutal anti-Jewish tactics.  Indeed, the SS took increasingly more charge of implementing this policy from then on. 

In retrospect, Kristallnacht represented the biggest step toward the Holocaust since the Nazis took power.   Three years later, as the war was slowly turning against Germany, the SS forced 1,000 of Munich’s Jews, including children and the elderly, onto train cars.  The train left Munich on November 20^th 1941, and rolled through the cold East-European winter to Riga.  There, no one was allowed to get out; the ghetto in the Lithuanian city was too crowded.  The train then redirected to Fort IX in Kaunus, where an SS firing squad executed every member of the transport.  Over the next two years, nearly all of Munich’s remaining Jews were deported to camps in Eastern Europe (mostly Theriesenstadt).  The deportations took place in broad daylight.  Although the citizens of Munich had no idea where they were going, nobody bothered or dared to ask.  

Stolpersteine - Lindwurm-strasse 205 

Jewish Reaction to Kristallnacht

On the morning of Noverber 10^th, 1938, Munich’s Jews could not have possibly foreseen the horrors of the Holocaust.  Nevertheless, they knew they knew that they no longer had a future in Germany.  A few days earlier, many Jews still had considered themselves German and still held out hope that their homeland would return to sanity.  However, like the windows of their shops, that hope was shattered by the violence of Kristallnacht.  Nearly everyone sought to emigrate.  In Munich, between 1937 and 1939, Munich’s Jewish population fell from 8713 to 4535 (Heussler, 16).  Those who stayed were too old, too poor, or not lucky enough to get a visa. 

In 1871, when Otto von Bismarck united Germany, Jews received full citizenship and equal rights.  They responded by fully integrating into German society.  They kept their religion, but accepted Germany as their fatherland.  In Munich and Bavaria, that meant visiting beer gardens and wearing lederhosen.  A German-Jew was not an oxymoron.  Kristallnacht ended that.  It tore the German out of every Jew that lived there.  From then on, it would be impossible to be both.  After the war, thousands of survivors of the Holocaust came to Germany as displaced persons.  Most eventually immigrated to the new state of Israel, North America, or any other country that wasn’t Germany.  However, some, like Fritz Neuland and his daughter remained (see below).  For these people, reconciling Nazi Germany and the new democratic Germany was a nearly impossible task.  They may have lived in Germany, had a German passport, but few actually felt German.  Even Jews that were born in Germany after the Holocaust struggled with these problems, and as a result many emigrated.  Even in Munich today, 75 years after the November Pogrom, when the Jewish Cultural Society has approximately the same number of members as in 1938, this issue of identity still haunts them.     

Epilogue      

The paragraphs below briefly tell the post-Kristallnacht stories of a few of the people mentioned in this article.  For a couple of the people, I am happy to report, their stories are not over yet, even 75 years later.  

The Engelbergs: Jakob Engelberg was released from Dachau after three weeks on a promise that he would leave the country within 24 hours.  He and his son Edward and daughter Melly took a train to the Switzerland the next day while his wife, Paula, stayed behind to tie up some loose ends before joining them later.  From Switzerland they moved on to New York City where they settled down.  Jakob died in 1942.  An autopsy discovered that the blows he had received in Dachau contributed to his death.  Melly Engelberg started working to help support the family while going to night school.  In 1946, she married Herbert Resnicow, and later in life became an English teacher at Northport High School on Long Island.  She passed away in May, 2013.  Her brother Edward, who can still recall the smoke pouring out of the Ohel Jakob synagogue, would go on to be a professor of Literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.  In November 2011, he wrote a blog post at the Jewish Currents website, in which he tells the story of his experience on Kristallnacht and how his mother used a painting to bribe Swiss officials.  A comment from a woman in Langgoens Germany led to a correspondence and friendship between the two and the realization that their families had both been in Chemnitz Germany and friendly with the painter Theodor Stein in the 19^th century.  The story is fascinating, and I won’t tell it here, but you can read about it in his two blog posts from 2011 and 2012: 

Our Mona Lisa and Kristallnacht

More on our Mona Lisa and Kristallnacht

New Main Synagogue 'Ohel Jakob' (St. Jakob's Platz)
Completed 2006

Fritz Neuland and Charlotte Knobloch:  Fritz Neuland received warning on November 9^th that the SS was looking for him, and managed to escape with his daughter through Munich’s streets and among the Nazi mobs to a friend’s house in Gauting, a suburb of Munich.  Although Fritz Neuland had tied to ride out the Nazi years, the events of November 9^th, 1938 finally convinced him that he and his family had to leave Germany.  He managed to secure visas for the United States for himself and his daughter, but not for his mother (the elderly were not wanted).  As neither he nor Charlotte could leave her, they decided to stay in Munich.  During the war a family friend in northern Bavaria hid Charlotte, while her Fritz survived as as forced laborer. His mother was  murdered at Theriesenstadt in 1944.  Although nearly all surviving Jews wanted to leave Germany after the war, Fritz made the difficult choice to stay.  As a lawyer trained in German law, it would be difficult to continue his career in a new country.  In addition, his services helping Jews recovering seized property were in high demand.  Charlotte, however, had other plans.  After the war she married Samuel Knobloch 1946.  They planned to emigrate to St. Louis.  However, a child postponed their plans, and eventually they got settled in Munich.  Charlotte would go on to be one of the most prominent Jews in Germany.  She was President of Central Council of Jews in Germany from 2006-2010, a Vice President of the World Jewish Congress from 2005 to 2013, Vice President of the European Jewish Congress of from 2003 to 2010, and has been the President of the Israeli Cultural Society of Munich since 1985.  Her crowning achievement was the opening of a new main synagogue on St. Jakob's Platz in the center of Munich.  Today, even at the age of 81, she is still active making the Jewish community an active part of Bavarian and German society.    

(source: Knobloch) 

The Boths: After the death of Jochim Both, his men’s fashion store was closed.  His wife and son were forced to clear out their apartment and move out immediately.  Jochim Both’s children (he also had a daughter who lived with her husband in Munich) eventually immigrated to England.  However, Marjem Both remained in Munich, and counted among the 1,000 who were deported to Lithuania and executed in Kaunus in November 1941.  After the war, the case of Jochim Both was reopened.  The man named Schenk, who had shot Both, as well as a number of his colleague had been killed in the war.  The remaining claimed to not have been present, or to not be able to remember being there due to heavy drinking that evening. No one was ever punished for Jochim Both’s death. (source: Heusler)   

Rabbi Ernst Ehrentreu: Ehrenteu, who was nearly thrown into the flames of his synagogue, immigrated to Britain in 1939.  During the war, due to his German roots, he was detained under suspicion of being an ‘enemy foreigner,’ first on the Isle of Man and then later in Australia.  After the war he returned to Britain where he co-founded ‘Bridge Lane Beth Hamedrash’ and worked as a rabbi.  He died in 1981. (source: Brocke)      

Rabbi Leo Baerwald: Baerwald, who was beaten in the woods before being taken to Dachau was able to immigrate to the New York City in spring of 1940.  He was aided by Hermann Schuelein, who had been the manager of the Loewenbraeu brewery in Munich until the Nazis came to power, and in New York co-created the cult beer brand ‘Rheingold.’  Schuelein and another Munich émigré Samson Schmidt, had begun to set up a community for Jewish immigrants from southern Germany.  Washington Heights had so many German Jews at the time, it gained the nick name, ‘the Fourth Reich.’  Baerenwald helped found a new congregation there for émigrés from southern Germany called Beth Hillel, and he became their rabbi at the synagogue on 571 West 182^nd Street.   In the early years, the main language used by the congregation was German, but that slowly changed to English over the years.  Baerwald died in 1980, and his congregation slowly declined as the next generation moved out of Washington Heights.  The synagogue closed in 2000.   Source: Places of Exile: Munich and Washington Heights http://www.juedisches-museum-muenchen.de/fileadmin/downloads/presse/Washington_Heights/Washington_web.pdf

Margaurite Strasser:  She succeeded to immigrate to France before the war, and  in 1951 she returned to Munich to work as a translator.  Over the years, she has contributed to various books on Munich in the Nazi period, and has been active in teaching younger generations about the era.  I am not sure if she is still alive.  The last mention of her I could find was at a Holocaust memorial event in Munich in 2004.

Bernheimer Family:  The Bernheimer family immigrated to Venezuela in 1939 and lived there during the war years.  Otto Bernheimer returned to Munich in August 1945 to rebuild his art business.  He was the only member of his family who wanted to return, and one of the few Jews eager to re-integrate himself into German society.  It took three years for him to regain his property.  A villa that he had owned on Lake Starnberg had been used as a school during the war.  He immediately donated it back to the state for the sake of the children.  Meanwhile, Otto’s son, Karl Berheimer, who wanted nothing to do with Germany, remained in Venezuela.  He married the daughter of a Venezuelan plantation owner and they had a child named Konrad in 1950.  Karl died in an automobile accident in 1954, and afterwards the family moved to Munich.  Otto died in 1960, and Konrad took over the business in 1977.  Today he still runs the Bernheimer ‘Old Masters’ gallery on Brienner-strasse 7.  His daughter Blanca is director of the Bernheimer Fine Art Photography gallery.  In September of 2013, Konrad published a book chronicling the history of his family and its business titled Narwalzahn und Alte Meister.     (Source: http://www.bernheimer.com/sites/default/files/press/Reden_Wir_Ueber_Muenchen_Bernheimer.pdf)

The house Karl Urlfelder re-built

Karl Uhlfelder:  After Karl Uhlfelder’s department store was destroyed during the pogrom, he immigrated to the USA via Switzerland and India.  Unfortunately, the Nazis seized his assets in Germany; and therefore was not able to buy the freedom of his sister and her family, who were among the victims of the transport to Kanus in 1941.   Uhlfelder returned to Munich in 1949 in hopes of re-opening his department store, but was devastated to find that the building had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombing.  Instead he sold the property to the city.  Today, the city museum’s exhibit on the Nazi era in Munich is located where his department store once stood.  Uhlfelder nevertheless stayed in Munich.  Despite everything that had happened, he still considered Munich his home.  He rebuilt his house on Rosental 9, where he lived until his death in 1959. (source:  Juedisches Leben in Muenchen: Lesebuch zur Geschichte des Muenchner Alltag)

Carl Bach:  After his home was set on fire on Kristallnacht, Carl Bach immigrated to the USA After the war, he returned to Munich, where he became co-owner of Konen.  He eventually returned to the United States, but his family still owns a share of the department store their forefather founded 142 years ago. 

Emil Klein:  Even before Emil Klein extorted the Kahns on Kristallnacht, he had had a long history with the Nazi party.  He joined the party early, as a 15-year-old in 1920 and took part in Hitler’s Putsch attempt in 1923.  After Kristallnacht, the Nazis investigated the action of the HJ on that night.  They suspected that he or his colleagues may have kept some the extorted money for themselves.  However, the court couldn’t find any evidence of fraud, and they exonerated him.  After the war, he was tried for his role in Kristallnacht and was sentenced to three years in a labor camp.  For years, he was last of the original Nazis (those who joined before 1923).  He finally died in Munich in 2010 at the age of 104.    

Sources

Heusler, Andreas and Tobias Weger 'Kristallnacht' Gewalt gegen die Muenchner Juden im November 1938 Munich: Buchendorfer Verlag, 1998.

Doescher, Hans Juergen Reichskristallnact Die Novemberpogrom 1938 Propylaen Taschenbuch, 2000.

Wells, Allen Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa Duke University Press, 2009.

Heberer, Patricia Children During the Holocaust Altamira Press, 2011.

Knoblch, Charlotte and Rafael Seligmann In Deutschland Angekommen: Erinnerungen Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 2012.   

Brocke, Michael ed. Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner, Volume 2 K.G. Saur, 2009.

Kershaw, Ian Hitler: 1889-1945 Penguin Books, 2009.

Baumann, Angelika Juedisches Leben in Muenchen: Lesebuch zur Geschichte des Muenchner Alltag Muenchen Verlag, 1995.  

Emde, Heiner Reichspogromnacht: Auftakt zum Holocaust Online Focus 08 November 2008 http://www.focus.de/wissen/mensch/geschichte/tid-12488/reichspogromnacht-auftakt-zum-holocaust_aid_346880.html

Juedisches Museum Muenchen Places of Exile: Munich and Washington Heights 2009.