Dudleian Lecture: Kristallnacht 1938: Crescendo and Overture

[Music] good evening everyone welcome to the 2018-19 Dudley and lecture I'm David Hempton and as Dean of the Harvard Divinity School it's my pleasure and privilege to welcome you this evening and to introduce briefly the Dudley and lecture series to you first my thanks go to our office for academic affairs for organizing tonight's lecture especially Margie Jenkins a coordinator for the Academic Affairs Office and other helpers in that office but also to my colleague Kevin Madigan the wind professor of ecclesiastical history on our faculty who conceived and organized a lecture tonight and we are also grateful to the Center for European studies at Harvard for goosebump co-sponsoring this evenings event so please allow me to say just a few words about the oldest and most distinguished and Dowd lecture at Harvard the dalian lecture and thereby honor the donor who had this genius idea 268 years ago living memory of some of us so this lecture was endowed by Paul Dudley in 1750 with the sum of 133 pounds and so the compound interest is a wonderful thing Paul Dudley was born in 1675 and after graduating from Harvard College in 1690 he studied law at the temple in London he returned to Boston and became Attorney General and eventually Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and he died in 1751 the first lecture in this series was presented by Edward Holyoke an early American clergyman and the ninth president of Harvard and it was delivered in 1755 and it was entitled proof of natural religion recent speakers in this lecture series include sister Mary Hughes former president of the Leadership Conference of women religious Suzanne harjyot a Native American rights activist Kathleen Cummings of Notre Dame we're still remembered for her lecture on the 50th anniversary of vatican ii and dr. paul limb from vanderbilt university last year who spoke in commemoration of the 50th 500th anniversary of the reformation so we have another anniversary and a very disturbing one to remember this year November 9th tomorrow has been named by historians and journalists as a fateful day for German history because so many important historical events happened on this day just to mention a few the November revolution and creation of the Democratic vimar Republic in 1918 the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 however we are also mindful tonight of the night of broken glass or crystal nacht as it is in in German that took place in 1938 so we are remembering the 80th anniversary of this start of the Jewish pogroms by the storm troops of the Nazis on this infamous day in 1938 267 synagogues were destroyed and 91 Jewish citizens were killed in Germany and Austria more than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested the following day and sent to concentration camps hearing those numbers and even greater atrocities that followed is hard to talk about but much harder to ignore or forget our speaker tonight is Professor Peter Hayes from Northwestern University who is a very distinguished historian of these grim events dr. Hayes has devoted his scholarly work and research to help us understand and remember what happened during the time of the Holocaust and then knots of distant past and to ward off any new beginnings as they are looming all around us as recent events have tragically shown his latest book entitled why explaining the Holocaust should be a must read in every high school and college curriculum across the country his book ends with the proverb quote beware the beginnings the author tells us about mr. crup an important industrialist and influential leader in Germany in the early 1930s Krupp was forced by Hitler's troops which occupied his offices to dismiss all his jewish employees and any affiliates of other parties Krupp capitulated in the face of the threat of violence and political pressure another board member of the industrialist group at the time Reuter crops dating and I quote that his actions amounted to capitulation capitulation to bullying and that they deprived the organization of all basis for future non-compliance with Nazi demands and this person goes on to write if the German industrialist would not stand up for the legal rights of their own personnel for whom would they stand up and on what grounds and dr. Hayes concludes his book by stating that this correspondent was correct the more powerful the Nazis became the more irreversibly right he was so beware the begun beware the beginnings so thank you dr. Hayes for being with us tonight we're much looking forward to your talk before that my colleague and friend Professor Kevin Madigan will introduce our speaker Kevin's latest book project as with my old and dear friend Ian Kershaw distinguished medievalist who is also the biographer of Adolf Hitler represents a shift away from medieval Christianity which was the subject of Kevin's widely acclaimed book published in 2015 to a new career writing about European fascism in the 1930s and he's now working on a book about the Roman Catholic Church and religious minorities and Mussolini's Italy I want to note for our students attending tonight's lecture that professors haiyan Madigan also have made time for a separate meeting with students tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. over breakfast to talk in more detail about professor Hayes work and the questions that will arise from this evenings presentation so if you're a student please join our two distinguished professors tomorrow morning for a deeper conversation and presumably some free food it's now my great pleasure to invite and Professor Kevin Madigan to the podium to introduce tonight's speaker thank you Kevin good evening I'd like to begin by thanking Dean Hempton because as you might have guessed Peters not going to be addressing the topic of natural religion tonight he's not even going to be talking about unnatural religion that's my job so many thanks to David for so generously interpreting the terms of the dozen endowment so it is truly an honor and a genuine pleasure to be able to introduce today's speaker and to welcome him back to Boston not only is the son of Austin but he's an honored friend to many in the room and a teacher to us all a specialist in histories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and in particular in the conduct of the nation's largest corporations during the Third Reich Peter Hayes is professor emeritus of history in German and Northwestern University for his 36 year their 36 years there professor Hayes was a very popular and award-winning teacher and its last 16 years Peter was in addition the Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation professor at Northwestern though Peter took emeritus status in 2016 he's not shown any signs of slowing down not in the least rather he's been speaking around the globe and has published two books in the past two years including the book Dean Hempton mentioned which many of us have read since it's released last year and some of us will be making the Biograph bibliographical pillar of our survey courses a specialist as I say in big business during the Holocaust Peters now working on a co-authored book which will be entitled profits and persecution German big business in the Third Reich which will come out in English in German and he has other large projects under way as well I could say much more about his 15 or so books but let me just hint at the worldwide impact they've had by observing that they've been translated into Chinese French German Italian Japanese polish and Spanish on top of all this literary activity peter has long supported the work of the Jewish foundation for the righteous notably in preparing another book entitled how was it possible a holocaust reader and he's also served with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum where he currently chairs the academic committee as Dean Hempton has noted tomorrow will mark the 80th year since the German Kristallnacht program pogrom for that reason I'm particularly grateful that Peter has agreed to give this year's Dudley in lecture entitled crystal nacht 1938 crescendo and overture please join me in welcoming Peter Hayes to Harvard good evening everybody thank you very much for the invitation and thank you for coming as you will hear in my voice I think as time passes though I have spent 40 years in the Babylonian captivity of Chicago I am originally a Bostonian and I did spend the first six years of my life in Allston Brighton and then middle school and high school and Framingham so I don't get back here enough it's a pleasure to be here I looked up the history of this lecture and the rubrics that it was originally designed to support and I was a little surprised as to how you found me I do not usually deal in natural or revealed religion the third rubric was the Romish religion I was raised in it so that's something and then the fourth rubric was Presbyterian ministry in theology and there you were brilliant because my grandmother my maternal grandmother's father was a minister of the Kirk who was ordained in Sterling in Scotland and came out to New Brunswick and then my grandmother moved down to Boston in the 1920s so at least biographically I fit most students of the Holocaust regard the pogrom unleashed in Germany on the night of November 9th and 10th of 1938 as a watershed moment it's not that this was the first time or even the first time in 1938 that Nazis had killed German Jews or driven them to suicide burned their synagogues and marched thousands of Jewish men off to concentration camps Austrian Jews already had experienced all of this in march 1938 during the Angelus the Reich had rounded up five thousand German Jews and put them behind barbed wire during the summer of that year and the synagogues of Munich and nürnberg were set ablaze then what appeared different about the so called crystal knock to people at the time was the scale and intensity of the destruction and violence all these things happened all across the country to many more people at many more sites and with much greater ferocity than previously and what has stood out to historians since is something that the regime labored to conceal at the time the organized state directed nature of the onslaught in place of the arbitrary episodic uneven and often locally instigated persecution and chicanery that beset German Jews during the preceding five years I think I've said something off in place of the arbitrary episodic uneven and often locally instigated persecution and chicanery that beset German Jews during the preceding five years and nine months of Nazi rule a new phase of official and systematic degradation humiliation and dispossession seemed to have arrived this understanding of what happened that November is simultaneously accurate and misleading accurate about the scale and barbarity of the onslaught of the Oslo of the assault misleading about the degree and forms of change in Nazi policy toward Jews that night as to the scale every dimension of the onslaught the looting and destruction of residences shops and synagogues the number of people made homeless terrified injured and murdered and the spectacle of somewhere between twenty six thousand and thirty thousand Jewish men humiliatingly marched through the streets of the major cities on their way to deportation two camps vastly surpassed even the vicious rampage in Vienna several months earlier let alone the occasional assaults on Jews carried out by stormtroopers on Berlin score first and in earlier years small wonder that within months the number of applications for exit visas on file at foreign embassies and consulates in Berlin overtook the number of Jews left in their eyes one way of gauging the profound emotional impact of what happened that night is to read the more than 250 eyewitness accounts that three Harvard faculty members solicited in 1939-40 via a competition for quote the best unpublished personal life histories of persons who have experienced the effects of National Socialism in Germany unquote you can find the originals most of them in German in the Houghton library also there is a manuscript including 34 translated excerpts describing the horrors of crystal nacht that a sociology professor here named Edward Hart's horn intended to publish under the title Nazi madness November 1938 the book never appeared however because Hartshorne entered US government service a few months before Pearl Harbor and never returned to academia he was killed in Marburg Germany in 1946 under mysterious circumstances two-thirds of the excerpts Hartshorne chose finally got into print in 2011 albeit only in German in a moving volume entitled Nemeth avec indeces land a fragment of the sentence written by dr. hurtin at Hoff were calling her a resolved quote never again to return to this country if we can just escape alive unquote yet despite the terrifying shock of the November pogrom it did not denote a change in nots isms objective regarding Jews the regime's leaders defined this repeatedly and identically both before Hitler came to power and in the first years thereafter Jews had to be removed in German and felt from the German sphere they were stigmatized as Germany's incorrigible eternal enemies sworn subversives and fifth columnist s' whose traitorous actions had brought about the nation's defeat in World War one and would cause the same outcome in another conflict the sole change over time was in the regime's choice of means to achieve their removal these evolved from inducing emigration to forcing expulsion to carrying out extermination cristinaw thus marked the crescendo in a passage from the first to the second phase that had begun a year earlier and an overture to the third to understand the transitional nature of what happened in Germany that night we have to begin with a question that good historians raise with regard to any event why now and not earlier or later the answer lies in the shifting relationship between the Third Reich's expansionist foreign policy and its exclusionist racial one from 1933 to 1937 the Nazi regimes pursuit of these goals ran along parallel mutually reinforcing lines as the new rulers of Germany felt their way forward testing what they could get away with in reasserting their nation's power abroad and persecuting Jews at home after all Hitler started from an outwardly weak position when he came to power in January 1933 his nation had no Armed Forces to speak of and his party enjoyed majority support in neither the electorate nor the cabinet in both foreign and racial policy he therefore proceeded similarly at first combining periodic but well spaced attacks on the status quo with reassurances about the limited and just five nature of his intentions he sought neither war nor murder he told foreigners and Germans only equality and self-determination for his country and reasonable reductions in Jews supposedly excessive influence over the people they lived among the sphe if teen months separated Hitler's withdrawal from the European disarmament conference and the League of Nations in 1933 from his renunciation of the military restrictions of the Versailles Treaty in 1935 and another 15 months separated that move from his reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936 in so-called racial policy two years or more stood between the beginning of the expulsion of Jews from the German civil service and cultural life in 1933 and the laws of 1935 that excluded Jews from the German military deprived them of German citizenship and forbade sexual relations between Jews and non-jews and almost no conspicuous restrictions followed in 1936 37 all the while outbreaks of overt violence against Jews were kept to a minimum and mostly out of sight or earshot of foreign reporters Hitler supplemented this staccato stop-and-go pattern in the public pursuit of his goals in the mid 1930s with a second more clandestine approach to conceal the pace of German rearmament his regime created a dummy bond issuing corporation called Methot that in effect doubled the military expenditures reported in the national budget to inflict more harm on Jews than his sporadic national enactments could he allowed local party bosses and stormtrooper units to harass and threaten individual Jews or their children to ensure their social isolation and to undermine their livelihoods in short the Third Reich pursued its intentions behind a smokescreen in conjunction with wishful thinking on the part of some Germans and many British and French onlookers who dreaded the prospect of war the result was widespread popular readiness to believe that Hitler's aspirations with regard to the international order and the presence of Jews in Germany could be kept within manageable bounds this delusion underpinned not only the policy of appeasing Hitler's demands for territorial concessions but also Britain's delay in rearming to face the danger of German aggression as well as the general reluctance of foreign States either to protest against Nazis violations of Jews human rights or to provide refuge to the victims of these violations by late 1937 the Nazi regimes duplicity had enabled noteworthy successes the Reich had created at least the appearance of an intimidating war machine begun a vast expansion of synthetic raw materials production to make Germany blockade proof driven roughly one third of the German Jewish population out of the country and stripped German Jewry of almost one-half of its wealth but Hitler concluded that he had merely set the stage for achieving his goals actually doing so now meant that he had to engage in a race against time for one thing he understood that the military edge he had quired over Britain and France through breakneck spending on armaments was artificial and likely to prove fleeting once those nations brought the superior resources of their empires to bear at a conference in Berlin on November 5th 1937 he therefore told his senior generals and ministers that Germany would have to fight its war for living space no later than 1943 245 after which the Reich's window of opportunity would close and he prophesied that conflict might have to come even sooner if opportunities arose to annex Austria and Czechoslovakia which he considered quite possible he did not refer at that meeting to a second respect in which he felt a sense of urgency but his subsequent actions attest to it if war was imminent and if as Hitler's ideology dictated that war could not be won so long as Jews lived within German lines the pace at which Jews were leaving the Reich had to accelerate at the current rates of mortality and immigration no Jews would remain in Germany by the mid 1950s but that was way beyond Hitler's time horizon for conflict these were the considerations that led to the massive escalation of pressure on Jews in Germany from November 1937 to the crescendo of Kristallnacht in November 1938 the Nazi regime now subjected Jews to a veritable cascade of cruelty in order to persuade more of them to leave and to shock and awe other nations into opening their doors Jewish businesses were defined as those in which one senior manager was a Jew or 25% or more of the stock was owned by Jews swiftly deprived of government contracts raw materials and foreign currency with which to pay for necessary imports such firms had little choice but to sell out at extortionist prices Jewish communities lost their right to own property and had their synagogue and school sites confiscated Jews had to complete an itemized census of their personal property to add identifiably Jewish middle names and to have their passports stamped with a red J 30,000 Jews lost their jobs when the Reich forbade them to work as travelling salesmen thousands of Jewish doctors and lawyers saw their practices limited to serving other Jews the national government authorized municipality to ban Jews from public streets on certain days of the week it expelled Jews who held Soviet citizenship from the country early in 1938 and many of those who held polish passports in October thus setting off the chain of events that led to the Kristallnacht pogrom but until that outburst of atrocity the increasing pressure on German Jews led to only a modest increase in the number who managed to get out of the country the avión conference on refugees in July 1938 revealed all but universal unwillingness on the part of the rest of the world to take in more Jews nations that had been receptive in the early 1930s notably France the Low Countries and Czechoslovakia had turned noticeably less so in the United States immigration quotas continued to go unfilled as the public and the relevant divisions of the State Department balked at the admission of more so-called refugees while Britain continued to insist that it could serve only as a transit state accepting only Jews destined for another ultimate destination the dominions notably Canada South Africa and Australia declined to accept more than a handful of such people Hershel Grinch bonds murder in Paris of the German diplomat ants from rot in order to draw attention to the plight of his parents who were among the Polish Jews the Nazis had tried to push into Poland thus gave Hitler a pretext to ratchet up the pressure he welcomed it all the more because 1938 had presented him with the possibilities he had foreseen the previous years in the form of the Angelus with Austria and the acquisition of the Czech Borderlands at the Munich conference these victories now brought Hitler face to face with the inherent but previously masked prediction between his desires for territorial expansion and racial purification obtaining the former worked against achieving the latter since the newly acquired territories together contain two hundred thousand Jews almost as many as had emigrated from the third reich since 1933 this circumstance gave added input impetus not only to the regime's decision to unleash unleash the violence of early november 1938 but also to the emergence in Nazi leadership circles of a new way of talking and thinking about policy toward Jews given the prospect of not being able to get rid of Jews faster than the growing Reich added them a prospect made vivid by the fact that the living space Hitler envisioned lay in Poland and parts of the Soviet Union inhabited by millions of Jews officials began to give voice to the previously unthinkable the first documented use of a new vocabulary concerning the Reich's future treatment of the Jews comes from a report of a Swiss diplomat in Paris of a conversation on November 14th 1938 less than a week after Kristallnacht in which the number two man in the German Foreign Ministry ansed from vice echo declared quote the remaining Jews in Germany should immediately be deported somewhere if no country will take them in they surely are going sooner or later toward their complete annihilation in German you have a fairly and finish tone entgegen finished all 10 days later - wat Sakura the publication of the Nazi SS which now also controlled the German police and he edited as follows quote the German people are not in the least inclined to tolerate in their country hundreds of thousands of impoverished to choose in such a situation we would be faced with the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld by fire and sword the result would be the actual and final end of jewelry in Germany its complete annihilation finally in January 1939 Hitler made the new vocabulary his on the 21st of the month he told the Czech Foreign Minister that the Jews of Germany would be annihilated unless other nations admitted them nine days later in a speech to the Reichstag commemorating the sixth anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor Hitler predicted quote the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe unquote in the event of a new world war as yet all these remarks foretold annihilation finished all only as something that would happen under certain conditions but for the first time the thought was out in the open so much so in fact that the US Consul General in Germany raymond Geist prematurely but presently told the State Department on December 6th weeks before Hitler uttered even the threat that quote the Germans have embarked on a program of annihilation of the Jews unquote headlines in American newspapers used the same word in the short run Kristallnacht was a qualified success from the Nazi regimes point of view briefly but perceptibly the rampage pried open the doors of admission to the United Kingdom and to the United States shocking public and official opinion enough to allow about a hundred thousand Jews to gain access to both places before the gates narrowed again during the following summer but this was as nothing when set against the conquest of Poland shortly thereafter in pursuit of a jew-free Greater Germany the Reich clearly was chasing its own tail officially the near-term policy in 1940 remained inducing emigration while the relocation of most German Jews to so-called Jew houses and the formation of ghettos in Poland accelerated the rate of attrition among them and prepared the way for the next phase of forcible expulsion - a succession of imagined destinations at first Madagascar later the outer reaches of a conquered Soviet Union beyond the Urals and above the Arctic Circle but as each of these so-called reservations proved impracticable all of the conditions posited by Vitek a dashpot Sequoia and Hitler in 1938 39 came to pass the numerous remaining Jews could not be deported they had become impoverished and war had occurred and so during the latter half of 1941 the fulfillment of the prophecies of 1938 took place but in two steps first the Nazi regime opted to bring death to the Jews in the path of its invasion of the Soviet Union and thus to avoid the problems of managing ghettos that had arisen in Poland the murders would be carried out by special shooting units drawn from the SS and assorted police formations concealed from the wider world under cover of war and justified - German soldiers as preventing sabotage and for stalling partisans in short as acts of self-defense second just as these killing operations in the east began to encompass women and children as well as men Hermann Goering directed of ein hawd Hyde wish to find quote an overall solution to the Jewish Question in the German sphere unquote he and his subordinates hydration his subordinates quickly realized that they had the capacity to bring the Jews already in germ grass to death by much less conspicuous and labor-intensive means than those practice practiced in the conquered parts of the Soviet Union by deporting Europe's remaining Jews to remote sites applying the gassing methods developed during the so called euthanasia action of 1940-41 against handicapped people in Germany exploiting the cheapness and lethality of a fumigant already in use at many camps and military sites the infamous Zyklon and burning the bodies the SS could achieve its dream of a Jew free Reich in relatively short order consequently the effects of Zyklon were tested on Soviet prisoners of war at Auschwitz in September 1941 construction of a gassing installation at Bell chech began by November and a broken-down manor house began functioning as a killing installation at Hell know on December 8th the stage was literally set for the carnage that followed between march 1942 and February 1943 when fully half the victims of the Holocaust perished in only 11 months Kristallnacht not only gave some German policymakers a glimpse of the possible future but it also revealed the availability of a key means to the foretold end for though the perpetrators of the pogrom in November 1938 consisted primarily of Nazi Party stalwarts mostly ese men acting under orders assaults on Jews and their possessions frequently were cheered on and intensified around the country by male teenagers imbued with the bloodlust in which the regime had schooled the German population during the preceding years their willingness to mock and attack their neighbors foreshadowed their readiness 3 to 5 years later now in the uniforms of the police the Army and the yes to inflict torture and death upon Jews in the occupied East Kristallnacht served in other words as a practice round in dehumanization and as a signal to Nazi leaders of how far they had come in creating a murderous society all in all then Kristallnacht gave voice to the thought of wholesale slaughter though not yet the reality and it rehearsed German youth in viciousness in the history of the Holocaust the pogrom thus heralded the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end thank you all very much for your attention so thank you so much Peter and a brief response from our own good afternoon thank you Peter thank you Kevin before was before responding to Professor Hayes thoughtful and stimulating lecture I would like to thank Dean Hempton and Professor Madigan and their colleagues at the Divinity School for giving us the opportunity to co-sponsor this afternoon's event Kevin organised this event from start to finish and offered us the opportunity to co-sponsor without the heavy lifting and we appreciate it very much thirty years ago in 1988 as a doctoral student at Harvard I co organized an academic conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the November pogrom I was struck then as I am now by the unique way that academic gatherings can serve the dual functions of education and commemoration the following year I was privileged to attend the first lessons and legacies conference on the Holocaust convened by Professor haze and the Holocaust education foundation at Northwestern this was the beginning of a series of conferences edited volumes and scholarly institutes in North America and Europe that did more than advance academic understanding of Nazi crimes in the genocide of the Jews in Europe these efforts in which Professor Hayes has played a leading role over many years helped to bridge gaps that once fractured the field of Holocaust Studies gaps between academics and survivors between Germans and Jews between those focused on the victims and those studying the perpetrators and between historians literary critics religious scholars and psychologists this work in addition to his definitive research on German industry in the Third Reich has helped make Peter a Dean of the field and it's an honor to have him here today and to have the opportunity to hear an overview of crystal knocked that draws deeply on his vast knowledge of the scholarship on Nazi Germany in the Holocaust professor haze characterizes the events of the November pogrom nacht as both crescendo and Prelude and in referring to similar acts of public violence humiliation vandalism and theft that occurred in the months before November 1938 he shows that Kristallnacht was indeed a crescendo different in scope but not different in kind from a longer phase of anti-jewish persecution within the German Reich this raises several questions my first has to do with the changing role of anti-semitism in Germany during the Third Reich as Professor Hayes notes in why his recently published and Magisterial overview of the Holocaust the problem with Daniel Goldhagen z' argument regarding German anti-semitism was the characterization of ant Jewish prejudiced as an unchanging force in German history though in fact the inculcation and activation and empowerment of anti-jewish views and policies underwent a transformation from 1933 to 1939 to put this in plainer terms when it comes to the legitimation of racist views leadership frankly matters how should we view the change that occurred in the years and months leading up to November 1938 what did that mean for the Nazi lead and for the lower party members or for young Germans who came of age under Hitler to her and Peter referred at the end of his talk or for the rest of the population who may have viewed themselves as bystanders but whom we might see as more or less complicit another question raised by professor professor hayes has to do with the changing nature of Nazi goals and actions as he reminds us anti-jewish policy was focused on social segregation expropriation and mass emigration through at least 1938 if we view Kristallnacht as an escalation of these policies which it surely was does this instrumentalist analysis lead us to understate the ritualistic psychological aesthetic or even dare I say spiritual functions served by the violence and the public spectacle how might we understand the violence against the Jews as simultaneously instrumental and as an end in itself thinking about the different motivations for persecution of Jews raises for me the poly kradic nature of the Nazi regime in which multiple entities competed for authority over the anti-jewish agenda Here I am thinking particularly of the essay the SS the Gestapo the SD and other entities if crystal nacht was a crescendo was it the crescendo of the thuggish anti-semitism of the Brownshirts of the SA and local party bosses and Gauleiter who perpetrated intimidation violence and vandalism against Jews from April 33 through 1938 and if Kristallnacht was a prelude was this because it was the moment when the SS now in control of the police assumed increasing authority over anti-jewish policy in a way that was more rigorous more systematic and increasingly genocide 'el or is this dichotomy too simple one of the most instructive aspects of professor Hayes talk is the way he helps us understand how an anti-jewish policy characterized by social ostracism street violence expropriation and forced emigration increasingly increasingly came to be seen as insufficient and how an even more radical policy of mass murder came into focus conceptually in late 1938 and 1939 in this sense cristal nacht was both the climax and the last gasp of one phase of anti-jewish policy and it also expressed a virulent and murderous rage that would soon be translated into a new and even more radical form of persecution and mass murder thereafter hatred of Jews would increasingly be instantiated as fully genocide 'el finally I'd like to ask what did Cristal nock mean for the Jews who experienced it in why professor haze says a great deal about the impossible situations in which victims found themselves the choiceless choices that they faced without any possibility of decisively influencing their fate at the hands of others Peter today in your lecture you mentioned a collection of victim testimonies in the Harvard archives and I'd be grateful if you could say a bit more today and you have already about the experience of the Jews themselves in Germany at Kristallnacht thank you thank you very much Alex we're gonna invite Peter back up to the podium now to respond to Alex and then at that point we'll open it up to all of you for questions just a reminder that there will be a microphone circulating around and if you would just wait for the microphone to arrive to you that'd be great because we are filming this ok Peter thank you Alex these are all very challenging and important issues let me unlike Alice in Wonderland let me start at the end and work back this question of the the experience of the Jews who went through this one of the things one has to bear in mind is what Nazi persecution did to the Jewish population in Germany after 1933 it literally was different by 1939 than it was by 1933 by 1939 in the aftermath Achra style' knocked half the jews remaining in germany were over 50 years old 60% of them were women almost everybody who was an adolescent in 1933 85% of them got out but very few people who were over the age of 50 got out the population that was left that was being subjected to this was a population that was even less defense able to defend itself than was the case earlier many of the people and by the time the persecution in tents intensified after nineteen after Kristallnacht most of the population was old female and infirm and so this is the first thing to realize about the situation that is who these people were that they had been those who had skills that could get them a visa to another country had long since left the committee was in created the the community was increasingly grouped in the so-called shoe houses where people lived three or four to a room where they were restricted where they could go shopping they were restricted what hours of the day they could go shopping usually after four o'clock in the afternoon at which point all the shop shelves would be empty and so forth so this is this is what was left and it is important to realize that what the Nazi policy had done from 33 to 39 was to reduce this community to this situation that takes us to the first question how'd they do that not to the community itself how do they create these kinds of pressures on the community that produced that result and I think the thing one has to remember is power magnifies the ideas of those who hold it once the Nazis came in what and this is why I've taken the somewhat controversial position that in the history of anti-semitism in Germany it is far more important what happened after 1933 than what happened before anti-semitism did not bring out off Hitler to power it was not the principal motivation of why people voted for him but once he acquired power he was able to turn this society into a society that believed or at least acted as if it believed his crazy notions that these people were the source of all Germany's misfortunes that they had systematically held the country back and therefore because they had victimized the Germans the Germans were entitled to revenge that's the simple syllogism that the Nazis sold and they sold it by constantly in a kind of echo chamber in which there were no competing voice they were formed magazines were not available in Nazi Germany after 1933 there was no equivalent of CNN you could barely get the BBC this was a single voice relentlessly telling Germans you've been robbed we know who did it and we know how to fix it and you are entitled to whatever ruthlessness you wish to exercise in doing that now this brings us the excellent question about the emotional psychological visceral quality of the events and on November 9th and 10th because if you read these accounts you you feel like Franklin Roosevelt who was the one who said shortly after he said it was it was impossible for him to believe that this kind of behavior could occur in a civilized country because you you read accounts of husbands and wives their front doors being broken down there being driven out of the house while their furniture is thrown out the windows while everything is smashed with no purpose other than destruction and this goes on over and over across the country what is that all about it's about this syllogism of victimization and revenge it's about a sense that we have been humiliated in the past and now we exalt ourselves by taking this revenge it's it's something out of the Middle Ages in a kind of exorcism quality and that is certainly very apparent in the in the individual accounts of what actually occurred on that night so yes there is this there is a danger that in talking about the way in which the levers of power are activated at the top one loses sight of what these people who are acting out the situation that night think they're doing and that is visceral and emotional and vengeful the the other question about you know is this the transition point in Nazi persecution from thuggery to something more systemic yes and no clearly the policy becomes more systemic and becomes more single focused but the thuggery never stops when you read the accounts of the emptying of ghettos in the East you again feel like Franklin Roosevelt you cannot believe that people in a civilized country do these things and that is so that continues that never stops that is part of it and the the danger here I think is in looking back on this is in seeing it wasn't easy for the Nazis to turn this society into a murderous Society but with total control of power it wasn't that difficult either and thus you have a population willing to do things in 1940-41 and virtually everybody who was asked to do these things is willing to do it the number of people in German shooting units who say I can't my stomach won't take it I'm too weak to do that is maybe up ten percent at the top and no one has the courage to say this is wrong they will simply say they will opt out by saying I'm too weak almost everybody is willing to do this and they're willing to do it out of a kind of sense of solidarity with each other and with the ideology that says these people are our mortal enemies and because they're our mortal enemies we're entitled to do anything to them take questions please okay I'm sorry thank you very fine I I'm thinking as you're talking about victor klemper uh you know of course his work helped me as a white southerner in this country growing up in the 40s and 50s and seeing this white supremacy have been flow in a certain way but always be there the way he talks about the underlying anti-semitism and anti-do was very resonant with me about the way white supremacy worked at least in the white south of my I don't know really how it works in the rest of the country and the sense that it wasn't every day getting a lecture about those Jews killing Jesus or those Jews who did these things it was underlying in a lot of formal and informal ways in this sort of just who said it when when it was polite or impolite how deep it wasn't what I loved especially about the language of the Third Reich but also around his his memoirs is how much he just documented that as a growing part of an acceptable discourse he was so much about discourse but also about practice suddenly it just wasn't odd to say and then do and then act on those things and it seems to me that what you're saying is that and what I don't understand and I don't think limpar understand and I hope you can help is what are the what are the checks on it I mean does it have to run its course was there is there a way to just make it irrelevant that's what I think I thought for a long period of time but how do we check it because it's there you know it's there yes but there's almost no way to check it in in the circumstances of Nazi Germany you gotta remember this is a society that this is a political party that comes to power in in extremely violent circumstances the first six months of 1933 are drenched in violence and there are stormtroopers marching down every street and if you are Sebastian Hafner tells this story I think that if you are a civilian standing on the sidewalk and the swastika flag goes by and you don't elevate your arm the brown shorts will beat you up and the cops won't protect you this will every everyone in Germany in the summer of 1933 who wanted to get a teaching certificate had to go to Nazi boot camp over the summer anyone who wanted to take the law boards the equivalent German equivalent of law boards had to go to Nazi boot camp over the summer where they were drilled in a sort of militarized sense of what it means to be a German now in those circumstances there's very little way to stop this because this is the sole voice speaking to people it controls not only the discourse but also the levers of social advancement and so people conform now in our society it's a little different what we have is the legitimation of certain views that once were under rocks they're there but they're not people don't vocalize them because that's that's you know we all know that's a little boorish and wrong and so and now we have political figures who are basically saying come out it's okay you can do this it's perfectly legitimate to say these things under the guise of saying we're against political correctness political correctness being common politeness in many cases right and so so that is the danger and when you get a situation for we're sort of in the halfway part we're in the liberation of these impulses but they aren't totally in grip in backed by the power of the state and by violence in Nazi Germany they were and so what you what you what you get is a steady increase in conformity and again it doesn't have to be mental conformity doesn't have to be mental conforming it's simply a willingness to behave according to what the regime wants you to do and then you can tell yourself I'm a better person than that I have reservations but if you don't act on them they are useless to the victims these reservations when I go back here and work our way this way thank you it's it's pretty horrifying stuff and I find it somewhat difficult to talk about it but I appreciate your talk I wonder first of all these the expansionist impulse is probably not the right word but this expansionism that you that you linked this sort of you linked to the change in the approach to the so-called Jewish problem and then I was going to ask about this but now I want to take it back a little earlier then if it became impossible in 1933 as a result of the violence and the other things you've described what briefly is your understanding of what led to that situation the mistakes that were made politically that the incapacity to organize effectively to resist the rise to power I know it's a huge thing but as they're sort of your brief understanding of how it was that the forces that might have resisted ended up not being able to more successfully this is extremely complicated question but if you look at the mathematics of the decline of the bio Republic what is striking is if the Communists and the Socialists had been in a single political party voting together they would have out pulled the Nazis and so what but they didn't work together and there was no conceivable coalition that could add up to more votes and this tempted sufficient to create a majority in the parliament and this tempted people to imagine if they could work with Hitler and so you have the bourgeois political parties and some of the elites in the countries yes we know he's vulgar we know he's uneducated we know he's impetuous so on and so forth but we'll control him and so we'll put him in power he will provide us with a mass basis we can at least restore order in this country and then we can achieve whatever goals we have that overlapped with his mostly those were not racial goals but they were the revision of the Treaty of Versailles the repression of the unions so on and so forth and so this this delusion that one could use Hitler to their ends is ultimately what produces the government that that Hitler takes over and then it gives them a six-month lesson and how delusional they are let me start back there you're asking me about my Romish views the the behavior of the churches was disappointing in the face of the crisis you had the Protestants basically split in many respects because the nationalism of Protestantism in Germany leads to an attempt to work with the Nazis there's in fact a right Bischoff who's appointed mullah and the willingness to stand up for the gospel is reduced by this patriotic fervor and nationalist impulse with the Catholic Church the problems are a little different they have to do with a memory of having been marginalized as disloyal under your Imperial Germany and bending over backwards to prove that they are loyal that's the first thing the second thing and this is a this is a little excursion into my youthful days of catechism training the thing you have to remember about the Catholic Church is it is in my opinion it is highly blackmail Abul by political power and the reason goes like this in Catholics theology there is no salvation without the sacraments you cannot go to heaven without baptism and Communion and confession and last rites you know there were seven of them I've forgotten some right but this is you cannot do it and this used to lead to the interesting question that I would raise in catechism class what about Protestants can they go to heaven and they would say well they sort of have sacraments you know it's not real communion when they hand you that piece of bread but they sort of have sacraments what about Jews there would be an awkward silence on the part of the nun inquiry at that moment so this is the doctrine you cannot go to heaven without the sacraments and you cannot get the sacraments yourself you can't just go to the supermarket and pick them up in fact you have to get them from the hand of a priest that is the what makes them efficacious that means there's no salvation without priests now any dictatorship that threatens to close the churches and take the priests away is a dictatorship that threatens to deprive the Catholic Church of its very reason for being because its reason for being is to save souls is to get you into the real life for which you are rehearsing right now that is I know I simplified it a little bit right but that's basically the theology of the Catholic Church now that means that the Pope drew a distinction between the Communists who closed the churches and turn them into stables and the Nazis who arrest some priests but not all of them who say that certain teachings are unacceptable but you can basically keep the churches open this is for a pope who is serious about the theological mission of the church an absolutely fundamental distinction now the Catholic prelate s' in Germany divided very deeply over what to do and there are individual Catholic Bishops who do say that the Pope should speak out more forcefully that they should speak out more forcefully they did not speak out after Kristallnacht they did not denounce this as the atrocity that it was they remain silent there were Cardinals of the Catholic Church in Germany who thought they should but they were overruled by a majority of the Cardinals and that's the way the debate was played out I always say with regard to the Catholic Church the behavior gets better the lower down the hierarchy you look you know there are there were people who were quite heroic at the parish level there were even the the famous case of the the Provost of the st. hedwig Zinn in Berlin the Catholic cathedral in Berlin Lichtenberg who went to a concentrate who stood up on the pulpit and denounced gurbles for having written a pamphlet that attacked the Jews and he was arrested and he ultimately died in a camp there there are these heroic examples as there are in the Protestant church but the majority of the behavior was adaptive and in that sense accepting my late wife Pauline gave a Dudley in lecture about 20 years ago I guess and she was reminded then that one of the rubrics of this lecture was to expose the errors of the Catholic Church and she being Catholic sort of wended her way around this she was a historian of the colonial American period and you know I've I I'd like to ask it a more scholarly question I've always admire I because I always agree with what you say in various things it's very equilibrate it it's very it's it's it's not excessive it's it's think it thinks through this and I'm grateful for that quality of your your scholarship what I wonder is we have studied this so long now you've written a what do you think what is left for scholars to do with the Holocaust and with especially the German story that's behind the collar Holocaust what is left for scholars to do you know if I if I knew that I'd be part of the next generation which I can't be you know so the next generation will come up with things that I can't possibly imagine because I'm steeped in the questions that my generation cared about we certainly can answer that question geographically we know that we know the parts of the Holocaust that we most need to learn new things about and they are often as in the case of Hungary associated with highly inaccessible languages for people who were not born in them or in the case of Ukraine where there's a lot of source material buried and lost and never cataloged and people are going to be spending 30 years finding it but but we know geographically that Eastern Europe it's it's the places where the Holocaust happened this is the other thing that people tend to overlook which is that three-quarters of the victims of the Holocaust came from only three countries Poland Lithuania and the USSR ninety percent of the victims of the Holocaust died in those places it's not France it's not Amsterdam it's not Anne Frank it's this and so there's gonna be the need to balance that out to find out more about that and so forth there's always going to be a central impenetrability about this which keeps us coming back to it which is how difficult it is to believe that this society turned into the place that did it it's you know this this is what makes the Holocaust different from every other genocide I know it's the kind of society that did it it's not the Ottoman Empire it's not Mao's China it's not the Khmer Rouge it's the this is an educated civilised cultivated all those things and yet it descends into this that's always going to be the question that we keep coming back to and then there will be other questions that we keep coming back to who will defend whom timeless question not which the Holocaust throws up over and over again and every generation will have a new answer to it based on new kinds of you know specialist sort of research that we do and the things we discovered doing that so and the probably the punchline of this answer is it's gonna sound odd I'm optimistic about the subject of the Holocaust I don't think it's going to go away I don't think people are going to become indifferent to it over time precisely because it raises these eternal challenges yes thank you first of all I want to thank you and you did a wonderful presentation as far as history is concerned but I have to let you know that I was there doing Chris Anna in Germany the city where I was born is now Poland its bless out and I experienced since I attended a Jewish day school there after 1935 students from public schools joined our to school it was that early that the animosity was against the Jewish people and the children had to come to our school this is one of the things that I wanted to let you know in addition all the years that we were there and my parents had come from Poland to Germany and I was also part of those days when we were supposed to go to Poland but it would take too long to tell you all that and what I experienced was that children you add Jewish children from the time that Hitler came to power were beaten up by German kids I'm the third child and I the young brother I didn't look Jewish so they didn't beat me up but I had to protect my younger brother I also want to mention that I experienced from my parents business that it declined and that the German population while they were perhaps not anti-jewish they were afraid to come to a Jewish store and buy there in the beginning that everybody joined the Nazi Party but as time went on more and more did and I think the promises that Hitler made to these Germans that he would help them financially is also very very important that turned them against the Jews and I also want to let you know that the jewish community in every city not only in mine in Berlin and Frankfurt wherever they banded together and they did an extremely important job trying to help you see that you'll leave Germany or to prepare as children to learn a trade that when the time comes that we could get out in general the idea was that males have to leave first so you were right in saying there were many Jewish women and children left because if they could possibly send the husbands fathers out of the country they did that you didn't mention the Communists enough because they were also persecuted they were the the target of the Nazis and I also might want to share with you I'm sure that you know about that newspaper disturb Alma which was a paper that was it's only claim to existence was that they had caricatures and horrible stories against the Jews the Knobloch unit and yet as as a child I stood there because I was fascinated and I stood there and I read it and I said that's not we we are not the way it's written there so if you well I don't want to speak more because I could go on forever and ever because it's part of my life but I want to thank you and I'm glad by Jordan Lord and professor Barry who invited me to come here thank you very much thank you [Applause] thank you very much for that enlightening talk I don't think there's a single European or Eastern European or either even Middle Eastern to this day including myself who was not affected by what the Nazis did in 1938 my family was affected but I don't want to go into a personal thing my question is I'm afraid as scholars maybe you're letting the the average German easily off the hook the people who did this were not just thugs I mean the people who did this were at high level in terms of society they were owned you know they had a lot of money they had good positions so to say that you know leadership matters to say that it was because of Hitler that this happened to say that people were afraid because the the SS or the Nazis were scaring them off I believe that's a little bit letting the Germans off the hook easily so maybe in the future what really the scholarship has to be directed towards a what has the church done about this what have the industrial the people had the money how were they involved in this whole thing and basically just as German society how was the society in general involved in this the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said the German pagan god Wharton was awakened because what happened was beyond just beyond understanding so we can't just say it was the thug so we can't just say to us if there's a lot of what we're talking about if we're talking about the night itself Kristallnacht yes we can say it was just the thugs if you are talking about the transformation of German society in the 30s there is a lot of scholarship on all the things you just listed now where there is a very strong difference in the literature and I and is the old fashioned view that somehow in the course of the 1930s the German National character reasserted itself which is your reference to young and and vote on and so forth the sort of vog nary in view of German history I just don't agree with it I just think that if you look at all the written sources if you look at the material that we have it is quite clear that some Germans fit that model but not all of them do there was also 1918 in German history all roads do not lead to the same place it takes a lot of political power to form a society into the instrument of this will remember just just a moment remember what there are moments where certain numbers are blindingly revealing when Adolf Hitler came to power on January 30th 1933 probably 55% of the Germans had never ever voted for him 55% now the two then say in the face of such a thing that blanketly these people were all in agreement and ready to do it from day one is just not a credible assertion you have to look how a voting block that did not endorse him became a society in 1933 for instance I I'll give you an illustration from my work on corporations I've written two books you said industrialists everton two books about large-scale German corporations IG Farben a big chemicals company Degussa a smaller chemicals company when Adolf Hitler came to power on January 30th 1933 not a single member of the Board of Directors of either of those companies was a National Socialist the two companies each of them had made one small monetary donation in the course of 1930 through to the Nazis neither company had ever advertised in a Nazi newspaper which is another way of subsidizing the Nazis flash-forward to 1943 these companies are partners in the sale of zyklon-b they are both employing tens of thousands of slave laborers they are involved in every crime of the Nazi state the important explanatory problem is how do you get from A to B how do you get from it to a situation in which none of them are for Hitler and greeting him with enthusiasm and ten years later they are all acting as if they had been that's an important explanatory power and the idea of German national character or the way they raised their children which is also comes up in this context that they were all just primed to do this from the get-go seems to me to fail completely in the face of that difference 1933 and 1943 something right behind you I was just wondering if you could characterize the this progression from through these phases of emigration to to expulsion to extermination and was that something that was like planned from the beginning or was that something that the that the government got the emigration thing wasn't going fast if I mean it sounded to me it does at the start of your talking he was saying that I believe that a third of the Jewish population had already left by so it sounds like it was actually having big-time offense and so in granting with territorial expansion they were adding more Jews so they were kind of like running in place kind of thing from their point of view but I'm just wondering what was their idea about the immigration phase of this from the beginning did they think it would be sufficient or was it a highly or was a part of a plan that they had from the beginning to go through phase 1 phase 2 phase it's no it's it's quite striking how little they had thought this through when you look at the party planning documents from 1928 1929 1930 1931 they basically think that if they just make life difficult for Jews in Germany that they will go away and they think of new ways to make life difficult they lay out some of them but principally what they're worried about in the in the initial phase is they have they've convinced themselves of this fantasy that Jews have too much influence over Germans Jews make Germans do things that Germans wouldn't want to do if they were thinking straight so you try to reduce that influence and the first thing is you kick them out of the government positions and you kick them out of cultural life one of the first things they do in 1933 is they say Jews can't be newspaper editors Jews can't be theater directors Jews can't even be orchestra conductors the all the ways in which they have an effect on Germans that will be that will be cut down that will be stopped and then this isn't enough and so they begin thinking of new things and what happens is a kind of mission creep or a you know where they're getting some of what they want but it's not quite enough and then of course there was that element of time that I introduce to you their sense of time speeds up they have to get rid of the Jews before the war comes and so they've gotten a third of them out by 1937 now they think of the next thing but then of course they're expanding to get evermore Jews this is the faithful mathematics of Nazi expansionism that they they believe the Jews are a mortal threat but they keep taking territory where there are more Jews and then it's very you ask yourself why does this vocabulary suddenly crop up in 1938 and it had not existed before their messaging was very consistent and Faneuil and fair no removal and then all of a sudden people start talking differently why does that happen because literally it dawns on them that they're facing this mathematical dilemma and they haven't thought it through one more thank you so much for this most enlightening talk my question sort of follows on one of the earlier questions can you talk a bit about first so I don't disagree with you about the proximate cause and in the role of leadership but if you take a historical view and you go to see the Crusades the the Inquisition the Dreyfus Affair the programs I'm now going to the late 1800s Early 1900s in Poland in Russia is there not a common element there and is it not the church say that they're not a common element there and is it not the church the beginning of my book the first chapter of my book is why the Jews and it is about anti-semitism which is fundamentally rooted in a religious conflict so it's there is modern anti-semitism may not take religious forms in many respects but it starts with a religious rivalry the Jews are the people who said no Christianity came into the world with a promise of the good news the gospel the new covenant the whole bit everything is revised and starting anew and the Jews said thank you very much we have it and that is that's where it all starts now however it's not a linear story there's the Crusades there's the Inquisition there's that there's also emancipation there's also the trend of the 19th century in which more opportunities are open to Jews and so forth there's Amsterdam there's the Netherlands in in the early modern period it's not a consistent story in which always the persecute oriole impulse has the upper hand because there are countervailing strains of Christianity and countervailing no notions in Western history so what we look at this and we try to figure out why do these eruptions occur at what are the conditions that are favorable - eruptions of this sort at one time or another what are conditions that are dis unfavorable to it and we get this kind of two steps forward one step back one step forward two steps back historical narration the real question is not is hostility to Jews embedded in Western culture you bet it is and that there's no argument there and it's rooted in religion but there keeps finding new guises to take and so forth but the question is why is it sometimes not very powerful and why is it sometimes quite powerful and quite destructive and we have to be able as historians we have to be able to explain that okay [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

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Id: Ru4Zf8YmqMQ

Length: 85min 51sec (5151 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 19 2018