The Day of Fate
Kristallnacht, on its 80th anniversary, still offers a
potent lesson: We all face the choice between right and wrong, responsibility
and recklessness, conscience and complicity.
By David Frum
NOVEMBER 9, 2018
At an evening news conference on November 9, 1989, a
spokesman for the East German Communist government made a history-altering
mistake.
The spokesman had been authorized to say that travel
restrictions on East German citizens would be lifted the next day, November 10.
Instead, he said that the restrictions were lifted effective immediately.
Within minutes, hundreds of thousands of East Berliners
rushed to the checkpoints of the Berlin Wall. Since the erection of the wall in
1961, border guards had killed more than 750 people seeking to escape East
Germany. That night, the border guards had heard the same news as everyone
else. Their license to kill had been withdrawn. They stood aside. The
long-imprisoned citizens of East Berlin rushed out into West Berlin that night,
in what became the greatest and best street party in the history of the world.
Soon, Berliners east and west began to attack the hated
wall, smash it, rip it apart, in what would become the overture to the
reunification of the long-divided nation into a single democratic republic.
One of the first orders of business of that reunified
Germany was to establish a new national day. What more obvious candidate was
there than the ninth of November, the day the wall came tumbling down?
But, no. Germans call November 9 the “day of fate.” Over
nearly two centuries, November 9 has been the day when the profoundest choices,
for good or ill, are thrust before German leaders and people. On this day, the
most hopeful possibilities and the darkest realities have presented
themselves—reminding Germans and not only Germans that of all history’s forces,
human agency can be the most powerful and most mysterious. On November 9, again
and again, paths have diverged between better and worse futures—not only for
Germans, but for the world. November 9, 1989, could not be a day of celebration
in reunited Germany, because the date also conjured one of the most evil events
in German history: Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938.
Until November 1938, the Nazi program for Germany’s Jews
was one of humiliation, segregation, and exploitation. Recent scholarship has
drawn uncomfortable parallels between the Nazi
subordination of the Jews before 1938 and the Jim Crow system of the American
South at the same time. In the half decade leading up to 1938, German Jews were
expelled from the civil service and from teaching posts. They were forbidden to
marry Gentiles and risked murderous punishment for nonmarital sexual relations.
They lost their licenses to practice medicine and law. They were barred from
using park benches and swimming pools. They were excluded from Germany’s
universities, then its high schools. They were expelled from orchestras and
other cultural institutions. At every turn, they were economically defrauded
and robbed: subjected to economic boycotts, punitively taxed, denied health
insurance and other social benefits, and forced to sell assets at knockdown
prices to regime cronies.
Yet through the end of 1937, it remained possible to hope
that the Nazi persecution might still respect some last limits of humanity.
While many individual Jews suffered assaults and some were murdered in the
early years of the regime, systematic killing of Jews solely because of their
religion still hovered over the horizon. Surely in an advanced and cultured
nation, some decency must still constrain uttermost barbarity?
Eighty years ago this week, the last of those illusions was
smashed like broken glass.
The year had been one of escalating adventurism by Adolf
Hitler’s regime. In March, German forces rolled into and annexed Austria.
Jeering stormtroopers forced elderly Viennese Jews to scrub cobblestones on
their hands and knees. Almost overnight, a community of 180,000 was subjected
to the dehumanizing ordinances that had been piled on the Jews of Germany over
the past half decade.
Over the summer, Hitler pushed Europe to the brink of war
by demanding the carve-up of Czechoslovakia. His seeming triumph at Munich in
September actually left Hitler frustrated and angry. He had been forced to
confront how unready Germany was for a possibly long war, and how relieved his
subjects were when war was averted. Deprived of an external enemy for the time
being, Hitler turned on his enemy within: the Jews of the new Greater German
Reich.
The next month, Hitler got his pretext.
A young Polish Jewish exile, whose family had first been
impoverished then rendered stateless by Nazi policies, struck back by
assassinating a German diplomat in Paris on the night of November 7, 1938.
The Nazi leadership seized on the killing as proof of a
global Jewish plot against Germany. Brownshirts were ordered to attack Jewish
lives and property—and police were ordered to stand aside. Almost every
important synagogue in Germany was set ablaze, Jewish homes and apartments were
invaded and plundered, and the few remaining Jewish-owned shops were smashed
and looted. At least 100 Jews died in the pogrom, according to the unreliable
official figures, almost certainly many more. Thousands were sent to concentration
camps. After it was all over, insurance companies were forbidden to compensate
Jews for the damage done to them. The state expropriated to itself the proceeds
instead, and then imposed further massive fines upon the Jewish community.
At the end of 1937, some 350,000 Jews had remained in
Germany, down from a 1932 population of 437,000. In the 10 months after
Kristallnacht, more than 115,000 fled the unified German-Austrian Reich—in most
cases, leaving behind virtually all their possessions to be stolen by the
state.
Kristallnacht opened a new chapter in the Nazi
extermination project. To that point, the regime had used murder as a means to
terrorize Jews into emigrating. After the November pogrom, it was suddenly
thinkable that murder might mutate into an end in itself—into outright
genocide, a word that had not yet been coined.
So it was not possible to establish November 9 as the new
German national day after the country’s reunification. That honor was set for
October 3, the date of the legal union of the two Germanys in 1990.
Yet November 9 retains its place in memory as Germany’s
“day of fate,” the date—like Tisha B’Av on the Hebrew calendar—on which history
again and again seems to turn.
On November 9, 1848, the German democrat Robert Blum was
shot to death by a Habsburg firing squad in Vienna. Blum’s execution would be
interpreted after his death as the final extinguishing of the liberal hopes of
1848 that Germany could overthrow its kings and princes and be united as a
liberal republic. Germany would be united, all right, but as an authoritarian
and militaristic regime under an emperor.
On November 9, 1918, the last of those emperors abdicated
as his armies dissolved in defeat. Another German democrat, Philipp
Scheidemann, would rush to the window of the Reichstag that same day to
proclaim another attempt at a liberal republic, the one we remember as Weimar.
Five years later, a fascist agitator named Adolf Hitler
attempted to topple that republic. After rousing his followers with an
impassioned speech in a Munich beer hall on the night of November 8, he marched
3,000 Brownshirts into the center of the city the next morning. Hitler expected
the city authorities to surrender to him. Instead, shots erupted, and more than
a dozen Nazis were killed. One more lucky bullet could have altered world
history. Instead, Hitler ran away with a dislocated shoulder.
The anniversary of the putsch would become a day of
commemoration for the Nazi Party. On the evening of November 8, Hitler would
annually return to the Munich beer hall and rant and rave through hours of
cheers and applause. The event became such a routine that it enabled one of the
most nearly successful of the assassination attempts on Hitler. A lone
working-class German, Georg Elser, built a bomb and secreted it within a pillar
of the beer hall near Hitler’s usual speaking place in advance of the commemoration
on November 8, 1939.
Everything under Elser’s control worked flawlessly: The
massive bomb detonated at 9:20 p.m., bringing down much of the ceiling of the
beer hall. Had Hitler still stood in his expected place, he would have been
killed, along with much of the senior Nazi leadership: Joseph Goebbels,
Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Alfred Rosenberg, and many others. But bad
luck befell Elser and the world. Foggy weather between Munich and Berlin
prompted Hitler to bring the start time of his speech forward from the usual 9
p.m. to 8 p.m., and then to cut its length to only an hour. Hitler and his
entourage departed the hall at 9:07, and it promptly emptied out after him.
Only about 120 people still lingered at the time of the explosion. Half of them
were injured; eight were killed. Elser was captured by the Gestapo as he tried
to cross into Switzerland. He was tortured, sent to Dachau, and
executed—apparently on Hitler’s personal order—in April 1945. He left behind an
epitaph: “I hoped to prevent greater bloodshed by my death.” A 17-meter steel
silhouette of his face now rises above Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, a couple
hundred meters from where Hitler’s chancery once stood.
What is now the past was once the future. What is now shame
was once choice. Germany’s day of fate, November 9, belongs not only to the
killers and looters of the Brownshirts but also to men like Elser, Scheidemann,
and Blum, who offered Germans a different way from the way they took.
What is now the future will someday be the past. What is
now choice may someday be shame. Rarely in history do people confront choices
as extreme as those that Germans confronted in the 1930s and ’40s. The genius
of democratic politics in normal times is that the choices are not extreme at
all. Americans and their counterparts across the developed world usually find
themselves arguing within narrow bounds about the inevitable trade-offs of
collective life. Coalition-building and dealmaking define democratic politics
when it is working properly.
It does not always work properly.
Even in our own time, we are confronted with political
moments that are not defined by dealmaking as usual, that thrust upon us the
stark alternatives of right or wrong, responsibility or recklessness,
conscience or complicity. Many feel that this is one of those moments. And may
we, in our own days of fate, discover within ourselves the courage and
integrity to ensure that our descendants remember our anniversaries with pride,
not pain.
