This tension exploded in early November. On the morning of 7 November, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, entered the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, the third legation secretary, in an act of revenge for the recent deportation of his parents. As vom Rath lingered between life and death, Goebbels orchestrated wild attacks in the German press that, much to his satisfaction, resulted on the evening of 8 November in outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence organized by local party leaders. By chance, vom Rath died on the ninth, the same day that the Nazi old guard had gathered in Munich for the annual memorial of the failed 1923 putsch. From Goebbels’s perspective, the time for action had come. That evening, following an animated conversation with the Führer, after which Hitler left the gathering unusually early, Goebbels gave a blistering anti-Jewish speech, during which he announced vom Rath’s death, noted with approval the “retaliatory” actions of the day before, and made it clear that the party should organize further anti-Jewish “demonstrations.” He then enunciated detailed instructions for what should be done as well as pressuring and prodding occasionally reluctant officials into action. The result of his efforts has come to be known as Reichskristallnacht (Night of broken glass), a shocking outburst of physical violence, destruction of property, burning of synagogues, and mass arrests of Jewish men that left the world, and many Germans, stunned.23
Kristallnacht, and the conclusions Hitler drew from it, marked a significant turning point in Nazi policy and thinking. Although emotionally satisfying for Goebbels and other party radicals, the pogrom was a political disaster both domestically and abroad. Harsh international condemnation of Nazi actions might have been expected, but the clear lack of domestic approval for this outburst of public violence raised new obstacles to solving the Jewish question. The reaction to Kristallnacht, and its meaning, clearly troubled Hitler. Not only did he see the international response, especially that of the United States, as yet more evidence of the hostility of world Jewry toward Germany, but the disappointing reaction of the German public also seemed to reinforce once again his fear of the power of the Jews to subvert even popular governments. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had explicitly linked German defeat in war with the destructive influence of the Jews; with the prospect of a new war ever present, the threat of the Jews took center stage in his thoughts. A remark made on 12 November, at the conclusion of a high-level conference to deal with the fallout from Kristallnacht, perhaps provided an indication of Hitler’s thinking as well. “If the German Reich comes into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future,” Goering threatened, “it can be taken for granted that we in Germany will think… of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews.”24
Over the next two months, in a variety of forums, Hitler and other top Nazis expressed more or less the same sentiment. The use of German Jews as hostages in the event of a conflict was openly discussed in the German press, while Goebbels unleashed a blistering anti-Jewish and anti-American propaganda campaign that depicted New York as the center of world Jewry and President Roosevelt as the stooge of the Jewish conspiracy. The threat was clear: if a new conflict erupted in Europe, one that could only result as a consequence of Jewish manipulation, German Jews would be held responsible for the harm that world Jewry inflicted on Germany. The SS organ, Das schwarze Korps, thundered in late November 1938: “We would therefore [in the event of war] be faced with the hard necessity of eradicating the Jewish underworld…. The result would be the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation.” Certainly, this should not be construed as evidence for an already existing plan for the Holocaust, but it does indicate the clear emergence of a murderous mentality. Hitler himself revealed such an attitude in a remarkably menacing comment to the Czech foreign minister in late January 1939: “The Jews here [in Germany] will be annihilated. The Jews had not brought about the 9 November 1918 for nothing. This day will be avenged.”25 Not for the first nor for the last time, Hitler vowed to gain retribution for the German defeat in World War I; indeed, the theme “never again another November 1918” ran as a leitmotif through his actions until the end of his life.
Anger, frustration, resentment, willingness to lash out violently at those perceived to be threatening Germany with destruction—these emotions formed the backdrop to Hitler’s speech of 30 January 1939. Ostensibly given to mark the sixth anniversary of the Nazi ascension to power, it served primarily as a recitation of the alleged evils done to Germany by the Jewish conspiracy and a reply to the overt economic and military challenges that Hitler saw emanating from Britain and America. Denied access to vital economic resources, at a disadvantage in the global trading system, and held in debt bondage by the Jewish plutocrats, Hitler raised once again the familiar theme of Lebensraum as the only solution to Germany’s existential dilemma. The Western democracies, however, blocked Germany’s expansion to the east, meddling in an area “in which the English, or any other Western nation have no business at all.” The Germans, Hitler asserted, “in the future will not accept the attempt of Western states to meddle at will in certain issues which are solely our business in order to prevent through their interference natural and rational solutions.” He explicitly linked this obstructionism with the Jewish question, mocking ostensible Western concern but refusal to accept Jewish refugees, and then outlined a possible territorial solution: “I think that the sooner this problem is solved the better. For Europe cannot find rest until the Jewish Question is cleared up. It may well be possible that… an agreement on this problem may be reached in Europe…. The world has sufficient space for settlements.”26
Hitler then turned to his obsession with Lebensraum. Significantly, he linked Western obstruction in solving this issue, the Jewish conspiracy, and his new fixation on Jews as hostages. If he were to be thwarted in achieving Lebensraum, he now outlined a radical alternative, one that eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy:
And one more thing I would like to state on this day memorable perhaps not only for us Germans. I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at. During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state… and then, among other things, achieve a solution of the Jewish problem. I suppose that the laughter of Jewry in Germany is now choking in their throats.