'The Secret Police Banged At The Door...'

by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg - Thursday 6th 2008f November 2008

On the morning of 10 November, 1938 the phone went in my grandparents' home in Frankfurt-am-Main summoning my grandfather, Rabbi Dr Georg Salzberger, to appear at the Hauptsynagogue with the keys.

When he arrived, a huge crowd was standing in front of the burning building. No one made any attempt to put out the flames. But from amongst the mass of watching people he heard the words, 'This will be avenged.'

My mother, who was a teenager at the time, well remembers what followed. For three nights in succession the secret police banged at the door and forced my grandmother and her three daughters to perform 'useful work. This consisted of throwing the precious volumes of my grandfather's library out of the window.
Fearing for the fate of his family, my grandfather, who had gone into hiding in the home of a relative nearby, gave himself up. He was taken to the local gymnasium and, alongside hundreds of other Jewish men, forced to do humiliating exercises, before being deported to Dachau.

Only my grandmother's courage saved the family. At that time it was still possible to obtain one's freedom if one could prove that one had plans to emigrate. After two weeks, by which time he was already weak with pneumonia, my grandfather was released. Many were not so fortunate.

Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, was the so-called spontaneous response of the 'kochende Volksseele', the popular rage of the common people, at the killing by Herschel Grynszpan of the First Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan's parents were Polish Jews. On October 27 and 28 the German police and the SS dumped them, together with 16,000 others, at the border town of Zbaszyn. There they were left, by both the Germans and the Poles, to languish in hunger and misery. Enraged and helpless, Grynszpan bought a pistol, went to the embassy in Paris and shot the German diplomat.

There was little spontaneous about what followed. Hitler and Goebbels had the pretext they wanted. The latter's diary, missing until 1992, provides telling insights into the events of the subsequent days. '[Hitler] decides the police should be withdrawn. For once the Jews should get the feel of popular anger... I immediately give the necessary instructions to the police and to the Party.'
Later, 'The synagogue burns. We extinguish only insofar as is necessary for the neighbouring building From all over the Reich information is now flowing in: 50, then 70 synagogues are burning.'

Jewish businesses and communal buildings were smashed, synagogues were torched, Jews were attacked and humiliated, tens of thousands were arrested, many were murdered, many others took their own lives in despair. The Ministry of Justice determined that only those murderers were to be prosecuted who had acted for 'selfish reasons'.

Kristallnacht marked a ferocious progression in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. For my grandfather, who had been rabbi in Frankfurt since 1909, except for the years of the Great War when he was a chaplain at Verdun on the Western Front and won the Iron Cross, the events of that November put an end to his endeavours to help the remnant of his struggling community. Now, he had either to leave or perish with his family.

But emigration was not so simple. I recently found the letter informing my father's grandmother, Regina, widow of Rabbi Jakob Freimann, that 'owing to the limited number of certificates issued by the Mandate government' she would not be able to enter Palestine. Ironically, the letter is dated 9 November 1938. It presumably arrived in the midst of the pogrom.

But there may be more than chance to the connection. In July 1938, President Roosevelt had convened a conference in Evian to solve the problem of refugees from Germany.

No major country significantly increased the quota it was prepared to accept. Such indifference allowed Hitler to claim that other nations evidently also had their 'Jewish problem'. It was read as permission to proceed.

This is one of the most painful lessons as we remember Kristallnacht 70 years later. If we give evil licence it will murder; witness Nazi Europe, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur.

• Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg is Senior Rabbi, The Assembly Of Masorti Synagogues.