Anti Jewish violence was unleashed because of an assassination attempt on Ernst vom Rath, a secretary at the German Embassy in Paris, who was badly injured from two shots fired by a 17 year old Jew, Herschel Grünspan, on November 7th 1938. Close relatives of Herschel Grünspan had become victims of the deportation of Polish Jews from Germany to Poland carried out by German Authorities at the end of October. His parents and sister belonged to the thousands of unhappy people having to spend long weeks in poor conditions on the border of the two countries while neither parties wanted to accept them. An effort to draw attention to this and to avenge the fate of his parents initiated Herschel Grünspan to commit this act. Grünspan was immediately arrested by French bodies and later handed over to Germany where his fate became unknown.
An excuse was found
The unfortunate and ill thought out act of the Jewish boy was not the real reason for the outbreak of the pogrom – the Nazis used it only as an excuse for the application of anti –Semitic measures. Nazi propaganda presented the attempt of the assassination as a part of a Jewish plot against the German nation, as an attempt of Jews to create animosity between European states. In the days to follow the front pages of all German newspapers published grudge tirades against the Jews.
Meanwhile in Paris, vom Rath was struggling for his life and finally died in the afternoon of November 9th 1938. Coincidentally, the annual meeting of Hitler and retired Nazi fighters, a reminder of the unsuccessful plot in Munich in 1923, was set up in Munich on the evening of the same day. As soon as Hitler left around 10 p.m., Goebbels, no doubt under an agreement with Hitler, released the news about the death of vom Rath followed by a flamboyant speech against the Jews calling for revenge, which the present SA functionaries and other Nazi institutions interpreted as a command for the commencement of an anti-Semitic pogrom. Already that same night SA units started riots against the Jews and attacked Jewish buildings.
In the due course of the pogrom lasting from the late hours of November 9th throughout November 10th and in some places still on November 11th, the majority of synagogues and Jewish chapels considered the symbol of the presence and success of the Jewish minority in Germany were burned down. Jewish shops and enterprises were ransacked, their equipment destroyed. Around 7500 Jewish shops were reported destroyed. Almost 100 Jews were killed directly during the pogrom and roughly 30 thousand, mainly wealthy Jews, were deported to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. They were released only after being deprived of their asset in favour of the Reich and made and promised that they would leave the country.
Nazi Management cynically said that the pogrom was not organised and that the Jews themselves initiated the fair resentment of the people, and used it for additional measures against the Jews. The Jews were ordered to remove damage caused and put the appearance of the street into its original state. At the same time they were deprived of insurance to which the aggrieved party was entitled. In addition, on November 12th at a meeting where Hermann Göring was the chairman, a penalty amounting to one billion Deutsch Marks was imposed on the German Jews. In this way the Night of Broken Glass was also used for the acceleration of forced Aryanization of Jewish assets. The November pogrom of 1938 can be considered a symbolic as well as a practical milestone in the Nazi’s policy against the Jews: it marked the step over to total elimination of the Jews from society and potentially to their physical liquidation.
We never learned about pogroms in our country
The Czech public was not aware of the fact that the Night of Broken Glass was also going on in the Czech borderlands, where according to the Munich Agreement of September 30th 1938 a forced cession of Czech border areas to Germany was carried out. Its course was specific because it happened only several weeks after the seizure, the cities spangled with swastikas, and in the period of dramatic Aryazition of Jewish assets. The Night of Broken Glass had been carried out in the borderlands under waning passions, enthusiasm as well as fear of the Munich verdict. Many Sudetenland Germans hastily joined the Nazi Party or newly established SA small fighting units and were anxious for “revenge” against the Jews and Czechs. Already prior November 9th formerly significant Jewish villages in the borderlands had been disrupted: at least 12 thousand out of roughly 28 thousand Jewish inhabitants prior to the Munich Agreement escaped. The Jews and political Nazi dissenters had already been running from the borderlands earlier in substantial fear of violence from Nazi groups and this in particular in the period of the May mobilization and the escalating conflict in September. As a result by November synagogues were closed in many places; Jewish municipalities were not functioning any longer and often only those Jewish families which had non-Jewish relatives remained. Despite the obstacles placed on Jewish refugees by Czechoslovak authorities, the majority of the Sudetenland Jews succeeded in escaping to inland Bohemia prior to or shortly after the “Night of Broken Glass”. However, later on the majority of these were deported to ghettos and concentration camps.
Scanty sources
It is bewildering to see how difficult it is in many cases to reproduce the course of the Night of Broken Glass in the borderlands. Today there are places where it is known that within the period between the Munich Agreement and 1945 a synagogue was destroyed, a cemetery damaged or made obsolete. In many cases though official documents are rather scanty and the contemporary press at the time controlled by propaganda rules contained mainly anti-Semitic articles and labelled the Parisian assassination as being an expression of a worldwide Jewish plot. We mainly lack statements by eye witnesses: for example Jewish observers, currently being interviewed by the Jewish Museum in Prague for a documentary can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Even if we add the published ones, reports of the pogrom in the borderlands are more than erratic. In the minds of the Sudetenland Germans the memory of the violence against the Jews after the Munich Agreement plays only a small role and similarly, the Czech Germans only have very vague memories of the burning of synagogues and deportations.
Who were the offenders
Due elapsed time and lack of source material it is not easy to judge who the offenders were. In the Sudetenland tradition it is often handed down that for several weeks after the Munich Agreement the Nazis had not yet been strongly established in the borderlands and that the locals refrained to participate in the ordered anti-Semitic pogrom. It is obvious that similarly as in the “Old Reich” the main executors were the local SA units, the Hitlerjugend, and to a certain extend also auxiliary police and SS or Gestapo members. The members of the original organisations of Henlein’s Sudetenland Party were affiliated into those parties. These, whether it concerned the members of paramilitary “Sudetendeutscher Freikorps” or youth organisations, were behind the majority of the violence against political opponents of Nazism, Czechs and Jews, prior to and after the Munich Agreement.
On the other hand, the burning of synagogues and other violence was certainly not due to the spontaneous acts of an embittered folk as deemed by Nazis propaganda. While the execution of the event remained in the hands of a small group of Nazis, the majority of Sudetenland Germans were more likely to be standing by as synagogues were burned and arrests made. Reports from more than one place confirm that the burning of synagogues attracted the attention of local inhabitants. It is difficult to find out whether these were outraged, apathetic, or approved of the violence. More usual were condemnations of unnecessary damage to assets. Efforts to help the persecuted Jews were more of an exception rather than the rule.
When Sudetenland Germans tried to save synagogues, as documented in more than one instance, they did not do this as an expression of their antipathy for Nazism and Anti- Semitism, but more because of the fear of danger of fire to adjacent buildings, or they carried out the event formally in such a way as to avoid damage to the building. For example the municipal councillors in Krnov slyly defied the order by burning only the ceremonial chapel in the cemetery instead of burning the synagogue itself and declaring the Synagogue a city market building.
According to existing research, roughly 35 synagogues in total had been burnt down or damaged in the borderlands and an unknown number of men were deported to Dachau or Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Those who survived had to sign an agreement on prompt emigration from the Germany. Other Jews were imprisoned in improvised camps established in more than a dozen places in the Sudetenland. Violence and expulsion reduced Jewish communities in the borderlands to a fragment of their original size.
According to official statistics 171 401 refugees, in total of which 141 037 were of Czech nationality, 10 496 German and 18 673 Jews escaped from the borderlands attached to Nazi Germany to Czech interior lands.
Official Authorities did not want the expelled Jews in their land
The attitude of the Czech Authorities towards Jewish refugees was not shown in a good light, especially after the Night of Broken Glass. The Ministry of Interior immediately ordered all subordinate authorities not to allow any Jews, who did not have a right of domicile, in the territory of the then Czechoslovakia.
In some cases, Jewish refugees were turned back by Czech police regardless of whether they had been banished or had escaped. Because German authorities did not allow them back, groups of Jews were forced to move backwards and forwards between the Czech and German border guards. For example on November 12th a five member family of Josef Meztger originally from Eberfeld by Cologne above the Rhine was transported to the demarcation line close to Terezín. Metzger showed his certification of Czech citizenship and a right of abode in the diminished state territory for the whole family. Despite this, the family was send back. The reason was that his thirteen year old daughter did not have a proper passport. After several hours the Metzgers were sent back by the German side and only upon the direction of the Ministry of Interior were they admitted into the Czech territory. The same day German authorities armed with bayonets turned out 14 Jews from Karlovy Vary on the road in the direction of the Czech territory where they were found by Czech border guards who let them board a bus to Pilsen. However, the refugees were immediately turned back to where they came from by a directive from the Provincial Authority.
The initial attitude of the Czechoslovak Authorities was not dissimilar to their reactions to the wave of Jewish refugees after the anschluss of Austria in March 1938 where Jewish refugees fleeing in fields and forest of Southern Moravia were driven back by Czechoslovak border guards while members of the Czech minority in Vienna were admitted without any difficulties.
The reaction to the wave of Jewish and German refugees from the borderlands shows that after the Munich Agreement a very narrow definition of who was a refugee and who was not dominated in Czechoslovakia. True Czechs were mainly considered refugees. On the other hand, it has to be said that the Czechoslovak attitude towards Jewish refugees was inconsistent and that the majority of them eventually made it to the interior lands either legally or illegally.
The Night of Broken Glass in Varnsdorf
An extract from the memoirs of Margita Maršálková, born in Varnsdorf where her father worked for two Italian Insurance Companies. Her mother was a professional dressmaker; but she only sewed at home, officially she was a housewife. Her father was of Jewish origin, her mother was not, but prior to her wedding she changed for the Jewish religion:
I will never forget the events of the Night of Broken Glass in Varnsdorf. A young girl for whom my mother was sewing a dress for dancing lessons was visiting us that evening. My sister and I were sent to bed. Our bedroom was facing the street and we were woken up by loud shouting in front of the house: Jews out! Jews to the gallows! We were both horror stricken, started crying and ran for our mother. The girl was still sitting there and we were shouting that we will not be there. Mother embraced us and started crying too. Our grandmother was also there and she calmed us down and I remember very vividly how the young girl, a German, went out and shouted towards the crowd: You should be ashamed of yourselves, scaring the lady and her children to death like this! What on earth are they responsible for? Shortly they moved elsewhere, but we learned that the same shouting was executed at each house where somebody was arrested.
That day a strange atmosphere reigned. Two policemen came to pick up my father, one a local in Czech uniform and the other in a German Reich uniform. Father was not at home, only mother and grandmother and me and my sister. My sister and I were playing with our toys. The German-Reich policeman said rather flustered: Children are playing here. But the local one who even used to be a classmate of our father had been far more unapproachable. Then they left and waited for our father in front of the house. They came together with father upstairs; father was joking and asked whether he can still have a cup of coffee. They said that there was no time for it and mother started crying. Father calmed her down saying: What are you crying for, I have not done anything to anybody, I am not afraid; this must be a mistake which will be cleared up soon. This was the first shock which was forever engraved in my child’s psyche. Many times I have thought that it had been pushed out of my mind after all those years but I am finding out that it is still very much alive and that it hurts more than ever.
They took father to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. We did not know about this for a long time. Mother was told by the wives of other Jewish men who were also detained, that they spent the first night in Varnsdorf prison called Schutzhaft, preventive custody. Then they were taken away and nobody knew where and it was a long time that elapsed before the first card, written in capital letters, was delivered. It was from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the prescribed thirty words he wrote that he is fine and that he hopes that we, the children, are being good, it was a very neutral card.
He returned home on Christmas day, in a desolate state. His hands and feet were frost bitten raw. We called a doctor who came and provided treatment for him, mother wished to know some details and Daddy only said: do not ask me anything. I had to swear that I will tell nothing about it nowhere and to no one. And really he did not tell us anything. I do not know whether he said something to our mother when they were alone, but when we, the children were present he did not say a word. As soon his hands and feet healed up and he was capable of normal life where he could walk and pick up things with his hands he left for Prague and stayed there until he was transported to Terezín.
You may find more on the following address: www.holocaust.cz/cz2/resources/pres/kristalovanoc70/kristalovanoc70 (available only in Czech)
