The Rest Is History - 410. The Nazis in Power: The Night of Broken Glass

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

By November 1938 the scene in Germany was at its darkest yet, as the full scale of Hitler’s intentions for the Jewish population of the German Reich was becoming evermore apparent. As the threat of another world war increased, so the Nazi anti-semitism machine went up a gear. Synagogues were destroyed, Jewish businessmen, bureaucrats, lawyers and doctors disbarred, plans were made for a mass expulsion of Jews from Europe. But the worst was yet to come, as the assassination of a German official in Paris in late 1938 instigated the most savage wave of Jewish persecution in Germany so far… Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the build up to Krystallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - and the diabolical destruction, brutality and violence that ensued. By the end of 1938, Hitler’s two dearest ambitions, an apocalyptic victory over the Jewish people and the conquest of Europe itself, seemed terrifyingly within reach. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. The fiendish treatment of German Jews was always to be anticipated by those who took the trouble to read Mein Kampf, which is plastered with anti-Semitic abuse. To some extent, the persecution of Jews in Germany, and since the spring in Austria also, may have been employed to distract attention from the failure of Nazism to supply guns as well as butter, while their confiscated property is doubtless a convenient aid to depleted Nazi coffers. But antisemitism and persecution of Catholics are not a mere exhibition of crude

medievalism. Their purpose is to root out of the German people any allegiance, not only political, but even spiritual and intellectual. Other than that, to the Führer. That was the Yorkshire Post on the 14th of November 1938. Dominic, we left the story of the ratcheting up of Nazi persecution of the Jews in 1936, in the wake of the Berlin Olympics, when the Nazis had tidied up Berlin, had removed some of the more obviously anti-Semitic public notices, had allowed Jews to compete in the German Olympic team. But by 1938, that has darkened very, very seriously to the degree that it is becoming apparent to people, not just within Germany, but as we heard outside Germany, in Britain, in America, across the world.

What is the process by which we get from 1936 to 1938? Well, that's the story that we'll be telling in the first half of this episode, Tom. Just a quick word on that editorial. So that was written just a few days after the Reichskristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, as we call it in English, the great state-sponsored pogrom against the Jews in Germany. And actually, the interesting thing about that Yorkshire Post editorial is it gets a lot of things absolutely right, doesn't it?

It says that the scale of this attack could have been anticipated if you'd read Mein Kampf. It talks about how the Nazis like to ratchet up the anti-Semitism to distract from the fact that they are struggling to provide guns as well as butter. So that's a theme that you get from the histories by Adam Tooze or Richard Evans or something. It talks about the Nazi appetite for plunder of Jewish businesses, the confiscated property. It rightly says that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is not just what it calls crude medievalism, that it's different in character.

But it's totalitarian. I mean, it gets the character of totalitarianism very accurately. It gets one thing wrong, I would say, which is that it brackets it with the persecution of Catholics. Now, of course, there is tension between the Nazis and the Catholic Church. I mean, that would be a wonderful episode of the rest of history in itself. But perhaps what the Yorkshire Post doesn't quite get is the character of Nazi anti-Semitism

is so different from all the other Nazi prejudices. But I think also the idea that persecuting the Catholic Church is a feature of the Middle Ages isn't entirely accurate. No, I guess not. Well, I mean, listen,

we could spend the next hour nitpicking the Yorkshire Post, but that's not the aim of the episode. So, yes, how do we get from 1936, from the Olympics to Kristallnacht? Well, what happens is that after the apparent stasis of 1936 into 1937, the Nazi sort of anti-Semitism machine, as it were, the engine of anti-Semitism starts to crank up again towards the end of 1937. I mean, there are multiple reasons. One is obviously the impetus is always there. It's always been there kind of latently. But also, the Nazi high command at this point are very conscious that war is coming. They want war to come. They have a four-year plan

to prepare the Nazi economy for war. They are eyeing up Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, preparing to strike into the East to win the living space that they think they need. They think the conflict is inevitable. And it's very important for Hitler that what he sees as the enemy within is eliminated before he can take on the enemy without. But Dominic, when you say the enemy within, I mean, this is often used today. It kind of implies, I don't know, separatists within a nation state or something like that. But that's not quite what it means in this context, is it? Because it's more biological. It's an idea of an infection within the body. Yes, exactly. You're a boxer going to a world championship bout, but you have a virus that has made you weak, so you need to be cured of it.

That's the sort of medical metaphor that the Nazis employed. That's exactly it. They need to purge this from the system. That's how Hitler is thinking. Now, even at this stage, 1937, the Nazis are thinking in extraordinarily ambitious terms. So in November 1937, Goebbels has a long conversation with Hitler and afterwards he writes in his diary these words, the Jews must get out of Germany, indeed out of Europe altogether. That will take some time yet, but it will and must happen. The leader is firmly resolved upon it.

I mean, kind of interesting use of words though there, get out of Europe. but it will and must happen. The leader is firmly resolved upon it. I mean, kind of interesting use of words though there, get out of Europe, not be eliminated from Europe. So is this reflective of the SS program to force Jews to emigrate to Palestine and so on? Yes. Because as you said last time, the great engine for doing this is the SS, is Himmler. The SS are dreaming of this great territorial empire in which they will be the new racial elite. Yeah. They increasingly regard kind of Nazi racial policy as their own private domain. Because the SS are intellectually elite, aren't they? As well as racially elite,

as they themselves would see it. Yeah. They're more likely to be university educated, for example, than other Nazi groups. So they are intellectuals, a lot of them. I mean, they're not just mindless thugs. These are people who are providing intellectual rationalisations for what they are going to be doing. you said a couple of episodes ago himla for example is going and doing all these archaeological digs and searching for artifacts and dabbling in occult theories and stuff and he is a good example of somebody who regards this as not just a question of policy it's a question of existential life and death it's apocalyptic struggle is coming he tells s SS leaders, November 1938, we are facing an ideological struggle with Jewry, Freemasonry, Marxism, and the churches of the world. And he says, you know,

the Jew has to be driven out. Because the Jews are responsible for all those things. Yes, exactly. I mean, Freemasonry, Marxism, and the churches, they are all Jewish. Exactly. And they think when war comes, those two questions are inextricably coupled. The Jews in Germany and war in Europe. That we cannot win the war in Europe unless we have dealt with the issue of the Jews in Germany. So spring 1938, you have the Anschluss, which we did in a previous episode, the incorporation of Austria with its large Jewish minority, particularly in Vienna, into the Reich. And the number of Jews who have now been absorbed into the Reich make up for the number of Jews who've emigrated from Germany.

Exactly. So as far as if you're an anti-Semite, you're back to square one, effectively. You've got now the same number of Jewish fellow citizens, though you don't think of them that way, as you started with. And so it's at this point that you have a new sort of phase in the anti-Jewish terror. So it's at this point in the spring of 1938 that almost all remaining Jewish doctors and lawyers lose their licenses. It's at this point that the Nazis unleash violence against synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. So the Great Synagogue in Munich is demolished in June 1938. The Great Synagogue in Nuremberg is demolished at the same time that summer in August.

Which has an incredible symbolic resonance because, of course, Nuremberg is the centre of the rallies. It's been enshrined by the Nazis as the embodiment of everything that a racially pure Germany should be. So to have the synagogue standing there, and it's a huge structure with a great dome, very kind of contrary to the medieval architecture of the old city. To Nazis, it's a standing affront. But at the same time, for anyone who is alert to the history, not just of recent antisemitism, but of antisemitism reaching back to the Middle Ages, the destruction of that synagogue is a terrible symbolic moment because there'd been two previous synagogues. Both had been destroyed in antisemitic pogroms, the first one in 1349. So in the context of the Black Death Death so that sense of plague again and anti-Semitism being kind of

interfused but it's also tragic because that synagogue had served as a symbol of the integration of German Jews into the fatherland because the foundation stone leaders of the various Christian denominations in Nuremberg had come to that ceremony and the Kaiser had come and had been shown around it by the chief rabbi there. Symbolically, from the Nazi point of view, it's a triumphant moment. From anyone who had valued the Jewish contribution to Germany, it's a terrible moment. Yeah. It's interesting that you say the terrible symbolism, because I think there's a real sense that this is the moment when if you had any remaining illusions about what Nazis intend and about the depths of their hatred this is the moment at which those are blown away so it's that summer 1938 that it is made compulsory

for German Jews if they don't have Jewish names they have to adopt the forename Israel or Sarah to show that they're Jewish and they have a J stamped in their passports. It's also at that moment that the Nazis launch their final drive to basically push Jews out of German economic life, to take over, to steal Jewish businesses. And actually the terrible thing about this, we've talked a bit about how areas of society are complicit. So the way that they would do this is they will hit you with tax bills. They will hit you with fines. They will intimidate you. They will basically put every possible bit of pressure on you to give up your business. To sell up and get out.

To get out, exactly. And the people who collaborate in this, the people who gain from it, are all the big names of the German economy. So anyone who follows football will know that Bayern Munich's stadium is called the Allianz Arena, the stadium in Munich. Allianz is one of the companies that benefits from this, that takes over Jewish businesses. But Allianz are not alone. I'm not singling them out out of some prejudice or whatever. Krupp, Tyson, Flick, IG Farben, the Deutsche Bank, the Dresdner Bank. These are the big names

of German economic life. And they all gain from taking over their Jewish rivals, taking over Jewish property, premises, you know, hoovering up bits of their markets, all of that kind of thing. And presumably leading Nazis as well are benefiting. Of course. So we've talked about how Goering loves a bit of plunder.

A fur coat. Yeah, exactly. Nazis are prospering, but you don't have to be a Nazi to do it. But you remember the episode that we did on Unity Mitford, where Hitler gives her a flat and she goes around Munich and she has a choice of three flats. And she ends up in one of them and says, oh, I'll have this and goes around saying, oh, I'll get rid of these curtains. We'll have new chairs here. While the former owners of the flat are sobbing in the hall, surrounded by the few fragments that they've been allowed. I mean, it's a terrible process. But you could see that, Tom, as a metaphor for what happens generally in the German economy. So the people who benefit from basically the expulsion of the Jews from the mainstream of German life, they're not just Goering and other corrupt Nazi functionaries. They are doctors and lawyers, people who think, brilliant,

my Jewish competitors are out of the way. I can take their customers, all good for me. You know, university professors and academics start tailoring their research to the demands of the Nazi regime. So, for example, if you're an academic, you might turn your hand to studies showing how you can measure a Jewish skull or a history showing how the Jews have always betrayed Germany or whatever it might be. Think of Carl Schmitt. The jurist, yeah. Who, even well before this, had been proposing that any book by any Jewish scholar should be put into its own category. There should be a kind of Jewish section in every library, you know, quarantined. So it's not as though this is being forced on German academics. I mean, they are enthusiastic collaborators in it.

And I think by 1938, by the summer of 1938, so many different branches of kind of civil society, judges, lawyers, policemen, just people who run things or indeed, you know, shopkeepers who've seen their rivals eliminated. All of these people

are complicit now. They're in on it. Yeah. Once you are in on it, there's no going back as it were because you don't want to admit that you were wrong or that the process

was wrong to begin with. So that ratcheting up has really had an effect on lots of different areas of society. And it's been directed from the Fuhrer. He has set the tone, but then people on the ground have kind of responded to it. So it's not just, this is a top-down totalitarian system. That's not how the Nazi dictatorship works. No, because, I mean, this is the whole point of Hitler comparing himself to Pericles, who is famous as the great democratic leader of Athens. But Pericles is the embodiment of the will to power as the Nazis see it. And Hitler is the same, that what is happening is cast as an expression of a primordial racial impulse. And that Hitler

is merely the standard bearer for this and that the German people are being awakened to this racial heritage and this explains what is now happening. It's a measure of the Nazi achievement that they have encouraged this. Yes. Now that violence is always still there

and it's actually got worse in the summer of 1938. So there are attacks on Jewish homes. There are attacks on the remaining doctor surgeries or law firms or shops or whatever. And that really reaches a peak in about June or July 1938. So there's a real, what Richard Evans describes as a pogrom-like atmosphere. There's a sense that something is brewing. Of course, the question is, you know, all this business that they've been saying, this rhetorical stuff about removing Jews from Germany or indeed from Europe, how are they going to do that? You know, will intimidating people into fleeing the Reich be enough?

And at this point, they are contemplating lots of different schemes. So one of them, very famously, is about reaching some sort of deal with a foreign country, a foreign land, which will take the entire Jewish population of Germany. So not Rwanda, but Madagascar. Madagascar, exactly. So Goebbels makes a note, the Führer wants to push them all out, negotiate with Poland or Romania, Madagascar would be most suitable. So this is an idea that runs right through the 1930s. It's incredibly sort of implausible, sort of fanciful idea, but that's one notion. Palestine, which we mentioned last time, is another idea.

So there's a guy called Leopold von Mildenstein, who's an SS man. He goes to Palestine and he has meetings with Zionists. He's the guy who was Eichmann's boss. Yeah. Kind of leading that whole drive. Exactly. Yes, he was. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

But actually, a lot of Nazis don't quite like that idea because they think if we establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, well, we're just storing up trouble for ourselves later on. Potential threat. I mean, one day that will be the base for an enemy empire that will want to fight us. So obviously that's not a good idea. Now there's another idea, which is we just basically find some kind of barren wasteland. You know, who knows? Maybe when we've conquered the Soviet Union, we put them all in Siberia or whatever. Because that's the theme of Michael Chabon's great novel,

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, isn't it? Where they all end up in Canada. It's kind of alternative history where Jews haven't gone to Palestine. They've gone to the frozen wastes of the American North. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that idea about the frozen waste is really important because it reminds us this is always latently genocidal. The idea is not, let's find them a place to live where they can just crack on and we can forget about them. It is, let us find a place to live where they can just crack on and, you know, we can forget about them. It is, let us find a place to put them where they will die. And that is why one thing that we haven't mentioned, but which of course, certainly people in Britain will know, is that it's very difficult. I mean, the reason that the Nazis are having all these arguments is because Jews cannot emigrate easily to countries like Britain, to France, to America, because there are limits put up there. But also,

presumably, they don't want to let them go to prosperous and successful economies, because there the threat will be even more paramount. Yes, exactly. I mean, don't forget, they're saying again and again, they must be removed from Europe. Goebbels says that. So in other words, if they all go to live in the Netherlands or in France or in London, that is sub-ideal from the Nazi point of view because the terrible apocalyptic threat is still there. People have these great arguments about where the Holocaust originated, when was the order given for the final solution or this sort of thing. To my mind, there is clearly a genocidal impulse, if only rhetorically, there all through the 1930s, and it has become more and more pronounced. I mean, we introduced the previous episode with Hitler talking about rotting corpses of Jews hanging from the gallows in Munich. So, I mean, it's been there from the beginning, right? Yeah, absolutely it has. So let me just end this half of the episode with an

example of how this might affect one particular Jewish family. We'll pick a family called the Grinspans. So they are Jews originally from Poland. They'd come to Germany in 1911 and settled in Hanover and opened a tailor shop, Zindel and Rivka Grinspan. They are Yiddish speaking, what are called Ostjuden, so Jews from the East. And they have a son born in 1921 called Herschel. He's a bright boy, but very sensitive. He feels his Jewishness very keen keenly he's bullied at school because he's jewish he wants to emigrate to palestine so he does want to join the zionists but he's told he's too young so he's sent off to live with an uncle and aunt in paris so from the nazi perspective they're pleased he's gone but

this is a sub-ideal solution. In Paris, he lives with other Polish Orthodox Jews. He doesn't really mix much. He doesn't learn French. He speaks Yiddish. And he reads at the end of 1938 that in Poland, the authorities there responding to anti-Semitic pressure want to strip Polish Jews living abroad of their Polish citizenship. And in response, so this is interesting, it's the Nazis responding to another Central European state. In response, the Gestapo have decided to arrest all Polish Jews in Germany and to deport them. And his parents are among those people who have been arrested and stripped of their property and put onto a train bound for Poland.

So Herschel, Grinschmann, he hears this and he is understandably absolutely horrified. And he decides he's going to do something about it. And on the 7th of November 1938, he wakes up at his home in Paris. He goes out. He goes to a shop and buys a revolver. And on the 7th of November, 1938, he wakes up at his home in Paris. He goes out, he goes to a shop and buys a revolver. And then he walks to Rue de Lille, where the German embassy is based. And he goes in, and as he goes in, he actually walks past the ambassador. He doesn't realize he's walked past the ambassador.

And he goes to the desk and he says, I need to see somebody senior. I've got secret intelligence. I've got really important documents. I need to see somebody. And the clerk says, well, you can go and talk to this guy. And he basically picks the single most junior person at the embassy, who's a guy in his late twenties called Ernst von Rath. And Herschel Grinspan goes into von Rath's office and sort of sits down or whatever. And Rath says, well, what's this intelligence? And at that point, Grinchman pulls out his revolver and he shoots Rath five times in the chest. And in his pocket, Grinchman is carrying a note. He says, I'm doing this to avenge my parents' tragedy and that of 12,000

Jews who are being kicked out of Germany. I want to make sure that the whole world hears my protest. Please forgive me." It's a note to his parents. And that, Tom, is the moment that launches the most savage and shocking of all the Nazi attacks on the Jews thus far, the Night of Broken Glass. Okay, thank you, Dominic. We will talk about the consequences of that, what happens in the second half. See you then. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Dominic, in the first half, we ended with the shooting of Ernst von Rath, a junior official in the German embassy in Paris by a Polish Jew outraged by the wanted the whole world to hear his protest. And of course, the whole world does hear his protest, but particularly one place where his protest is heard is in Germany. Yeah. So von Braat, the guy who he shot, the young diplomat, he died two days later on the afternoon of the 9th of November. And as ill luck would have it, it's the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. But the echo here is of the Reichstag fire, isn't it? Which likewise was a wholly unexpected action by an enemy of the Nazis that played into their hands. Yeah, exactly. I think the parallels are uncanny, really. And the fact that it happens, it happens on the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. So all the Nazi old

fighters, as they're called, are meeting in Munich. They're gathered together and they hear the news of this assassination in Paris. And as with the Reichstag fire, exactly that, one of Hitler's enemies has handed him a chance to seize an opportunity. And this is what happens. So on the 8th of November, the day after the shooting, the German press is full of, the anti-Semitic abuse has been turned up to 11. And there are demonstrations breaking out. There are violent pogroms. The tension is really at sort of the highest possible level. Now, the news of von Raat's death comes through publicly on the evening of the next day, the 9th.

And Hitler's probably heard about it in the afternoon because he'd sent his own doctor to von Raat's bedside. All the Nazi top brass are meeting at the old town hall in Munich. They have a big dinner and at that dinner there is a very public scene where a messenger comes in to tell

Hitler and Goebbels that von Rath has died, that he's succumbed to his injuries. So the theatre of it. Yeah, they probably knew it already. They almost certainly

knew it already. But they almost staged this theatrical reenactment of hearing the news so everybody can see it. it. And then they kind of huddle together in a very excited histrionic manner, again, publicly for everybody to see. Looking very serious. And then Hitler sort of rushes off to his Munich apartment. So what are they talking about? Well, almost certainly what happens in that conversation is Hitler says to Goebbels, this is the chance to move definitively against the Jews of Germany. What we will do is we will launch physical attacks on Jewish families. We will round up as many Jewish men as possible. I mean, they're talking about tens of thousands of people and throw them into prison. And this is our chance to intimidate as many Jews as we can to get out of Germany. This is the chance

to purge Germany of its Jewish population. And the way they're going to spin it is they will present it to the world as a spontaneous, improvised, you know, expression of German anger. Exactly. But it's actually going to be directed from the top. So Goebbels is the person who really is in charge of directing it. He gives a speech an hour later at 10 o'clock in which he addresses the assembled crowd. He says to them, it's a terrible thing that von Raad is dead. Already people across the Reich are expressing their anger and attacking Jews.

Quite right too. You know, everybody should take inspiration from this. Let's all do it. Now, the orders are going out late that night across Germany, and they are very explicit. It must be focused. It must appear to be spontaneous. It shouldn't be hooliganism and sort of massive looting and chaos and stuff although in reality it does turn out to be very chaotic and we mustn't touch foreign jews or foreigners because you know that

will inflame opinion overseas and crucially it must be carried out in civilian dress in other words it must not look like this is being done by the ss or the brown shirts yeah it must look like this is the german people so himmler that night sends a message to the ss and he says if you're going to do it if you're going to join in you must dress in civilian clothes you must not dress in uss uniforms hydrick his deputy now of course as you said earlier the ss are running the police the ss are basically in charge of the Gestapo and so on. So they tell them, you must not intervene. You must not protect Jewish families. You must not stop the destruction of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries.

And you must make preparations to arrest as many people as possible. The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Muller, he sends out an instruction. He says, tell the jails in Germany to prepare for the reception of 30,000 Jews, and especially let's choose properted Jews, i.e. people with money, because then we can take their money. We want their money. We want their possessions. We want everything. powers across the Reich, this gigantic pogrom, a nationwide pogrom in cities and towns and villages. I'll just give you a couple of examples. I mean, there's so many terrible examples. These are both from Richard Evans' book on the Third Reich in Power. He points to a town in Franconia,

always very anti-Semitic Franconia, called Treutlingen. The local stormtrooper commander gets an instruction just after midnight, gets a phone call, round up all your guys. He rounds them all up. They rampage through this little town. They smash all the shops. They burn down the synagogue. Local people start to gather, not to stop them, but to encourage them, to cheer them on, to help them smash windows of shops and start looting the shops. They burst into the homes of local people. There's a guy called Moritz Meyer, who later writes an account of what happens. He wakes up and he realises that a stormtrooper's in his house downstairs. His family are asleep and they're smashing all his furniture and all

his crockery and whatnot. They force his family down into the cellar. Then they force the family to smash all their own wine bottles in the cellar and all this kind of thing. And then at the end, Meyer himself, they try to get out to the railway station. He ends up being arrested. And this sort of scene is repeated in towns all across Germany. The other example I was going to pick from Richard Evans' book, it's just a tiny thing, but it's really heartbreaking. In a place called Esslingen in Baden-Württemberg, which is near Stuttgart, there was a Jewish orphanage and people break into the orphanage

with axes and sledgehammers. They destroy everything, the kids' books or their religious stuff, anything they can find, toys. Yeah, they burn them all. And then they say to the children,

if you do not leave, we will burn you too. So you have these poor kids straggling along the roads in the dark, walking for hours in tears, and they have to basically walk all the way to Stuttgart, which I think is about three hours away, before they can find anyone to shelter them or anything like that. I mean, that's just one scene among thousands upon thousands. As all the reports of this flood in, Goebbels and Hitler are delighted. I mean, Goebbels writes in his diary, the people's anger is raging. Nothing can

be done against it. And I don't want to do anything either. Should be given free reign. As I drive back to my hotel, the windows shatter. Bravo, bravo. The synagogues are burning in all the big cities. You know, the delight, the glee. You talked before about the kind of, the way that the Nazis rationalise and they intellectualise what they're doing. But there is a kind of savagery. Yeah, of course, a relish. You know, that sadistic joy and destruction

which we shouldn't lose sight of. But, Dominic, this whole thing has been set up as being a spontaneous expression of public will. So what is the kind of official position of the Nazi hierarchy and what's happening? They absolutely back it. They say it's a completely reasonable expression of the utterly justifiable anger of the German people who have been victimized and brutalized by a worldwide jury for too long. However, they don't want the disorder to get completely out of control. So the following lunchtime, Goebbels goes to the Osteria in Munich, which of course is Hitler's

favorite restaurant. It's the restaurant, Tom, I'll mention it before you do, that Unity Mitford used to hang out at in a hope of catching Hitler's eye. There, Hitler issues an order, end of the action, stop. And of course, the terrible thing is that, I mean, that's one of many terrible things, is it doesn't stop, that it actually continues, that now so many people have a taste for the sadism and the cruelty. So again, the examples of the next couple of days, Jews are forced to sing religious songs in the street, they're drenched in water, they're kicked and they're made to dance outside the synagogue in essen jewish men are rounded up and their beards are set on fire in a place called meppen they're made to lie down outside the storm

trooper headquarters the sa headquarters and then the brown shirts literally walk over the top of them the really shocking thing actually is and we've mentioned this so many times in this series, I still find it, you know, it's sort of haunting and terrifying how much children and young people are involved in these events. So in Frankfurt, for example, kids are taken out of school to spit at the Jews who have been rounded up. But it's not surprising, is it? I mean, if they've been indoctrinated in this, that's what they're going to do. No, I guess it's not surprising, Tom. No, it's not surprising, is it? I mean, if they've been indoctrinated in this, that's what they're going to do. No, I guess it's not surprising, Tom. No, it's not surprising at all. The morality they've been taught is a Nazi morality.

Yeah. Where what they're doing is the right thing. It's a good thing. It's moral. It's for the good of the race. But it's nonetheless horrifying though, right? Of course. Of course. I mean, in the Tsar land, there are stories about Jewish people trying to escape and mobs of small children running after them, kicking them, throwing stones at them, hitting them with sticks, you know, making them fall to the ground and then hitting them and all this sort of thing. I mean, it's kind of diabolical. So enormous amounts of damage, you know, hundreds of millions of marks worth of damage when they finally clear up all the broken glass.

And that's where the name Kristallnacht comes from. The Reichskristallnacht, yeah. The Knights of Broken Glass. Yeah. How many people died? Some estimates as low as a couple of hundred, some into the early thousands, kind of one, two, three thousand. As in Vienna, we talked about this in the Anschluss episode, some people kill themselves.

About 30,000 people ended up being arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. Are there rapes? Do you know? I don't know, Tom. Because that would be illegal, presumably. It would be against the law. Yeah, that's an interesting question. Is there any hint of sexual violence? I haven't seen any in the history books that I've read. So probably not.

Perhaps not. Perhaps the taboo is so great. Yeah. But no, I don't think so. But in general, I think there's a sense that this is an absolute watershed. It is clear now beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that there is nothing that the Nazis are not prepared to do to the Jews. And whatever they do do, nobody will try to stop them. Well, except Dominic, there is still a shadow of a doubt, isn't there? Because, I mean, no one at this stage, even now, is thinking that there might be industrialised extermination of Jews. That's fair, but it's plausible that they will organise pogrom after pogrom.

I mean, it's very clear they are committed to this idea about driving the Jews out of Germany. I said there were many terrible things. Another terrible thing, on the 10th of November, just a day or so later, the Nazis meet to decide who's going to pay for all this. And they decide, well, the Jews will pay for it. They'll pay for it themselves. So on the 12th, Goering announces the economic measures

that will be promulgated against the Jews. He says they will pay a fine for the damage that was inflicted upon them of one billion Reichsmarks. Every Jewish family will have to hand over a quarter of their assets in order to pay for the damage. There is a law on the exclusion of Jews from German economic life. So you can't basically hold any meaningful occupation anymore if you're Jewish in Germany. All remaining Jewish businesses, there aren't many left,

but they will be area-nised. You know, they will be taken over by non-Jews. They will basically be completely segregated now. This is terrible in Victor Klemperer's diaries, isn't it? He finds himself excluded

from everything. It's terrible. Everything. Can't go to the cinema, can't go to the theatre, can't go to a concert, can't go to a swimming pool. A town now has the right to ban you from certain streets from certain parts of the town you cannot drive you cannot go to a park you cannot go to a sports facility you cannot go to any swimming pool hydric suggests at this point that they should wear

badges yellow badges but that is not fully introduced actually until the second world war. But in a sense, it's irrelevant because at this point the Jews have been driven into virtual ghetto, I suppose. But also a bureaucratic ghetto. Yes. Because their names are on public record. Yeah, of course. I mean, they've got the J stamps in their passport. They've been renamed, Tom. So some people do get out, 80,000 people or so. They go to USA. Some go to Britain.

Some go to Holland until the Dutch close their borders. Some go to Brazil or Argentina or Shanghai, actually, a disproportionately high number given its size, go to the free port of Shanghai, which has some of the laxest or most welcoming, shall we say, rules anywhere in the world about the admission of Jews. Britain doesn't. Britain really puts up the barrier. But having said that, is this when the Kindertransport happens? Yeah, 10,000 or so Jewish children come to Britain. But yes, no European state says, you can all come here. Actually, most European neighbors are more anxious to try and keep out flows of refugees.

So about 80,000 people have left, but from the Nazi point of view, that is not enough. They have played their card, this huge pogrom, and there are still tens and tens of thousands of Jewish people left in Germany. So the question now is what will they do? And a couple of months later, the beginning of 1939, there is set up under Reinhard Heydrich a central office for Jewish immigration. This is the office that has been given the responsibility of, in inverted commas, removing the remaining Jewish population of Germany from the Reich and implicitly from Europe. And as Ian Kershaw says, this is a decisive step on the way that was to end in the gas chambers of the extermination camps, because it is this commission, it is this post that Heydrich invokes when he opens the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

He says, I was given this job at the beginning of 1939 to get rid of the remaining Jews, and this is now what we're about to do. So this is the bureaucratization and the industrialization of genocide. Exactly right. Exactly. And I think Kristallnacht, for the reputation of Germany in the world, to anybody who had deluded themselves about the Nazi regime and its intentions, by the end of 1938, it is absolutely clear. I mean, that editorial in the Yorkshire Post, I found online a selection, a sort of digest of British newspaper editorials reacting to this, and across the political spectrum. So you've got on the right, the Telegraph, the Express, the Mail, and on the left, you have the Manchester Guardian or whatever.

Across the political spectrum, the utter revulsion at Kristallnacht and what it represents, you know, it's very profound. Yeah, no one can argue about this anymore. Which in turn, Dominic, must mean that in the democracies, the hopes that appeasement will keep war at bay are starting to go into abeyance and retreat. Yeah, I think that's right. And in Germany, therefore, when their ambassadors report this, their certainty that war is coming goes up even further. And the implications of that for German Jews, again, is only bad. Terrifying. Because the closer war comes, the more urgent the Nazi sense that they have to be eliminated.

Absolutely. Because one thing we haven't mentioned, of course, is that this happens in the aftermath of Munich. So Hitler has taken the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. It is clear that he is not going to moderate his ambitions. You know, the world has come very close to war now in the autumn of 1938. People were relieved in Britain and France when that was averted by the appeasement of Munich. But I think a lot of people now think a reckoning is coming. And Hitler certainly thinks that a reckoning is coming. I think what you get from Ian Kershaw's biography is a sense that in his own mind at the end of 1938, those two things that have always been interfused, which is the question of the Jewish population in Germany and his thirst for an apocalyptic showdown in Europe, that those two things now loom larger than ever before. There is even a kind of darker tinge to that, which is that even as Hitler is looking forward to war, planning for war, bringing war about, he is still kind of blaming it on the

Jews, isn't he? Oh, yes. That it is the Jews who will be responsible if war breaks out, even as he is ordering his troops to prepare for invasions. Yeah. In his own mind, I guess, everything that he's doing is reactive. All his preparations for war have been provoked and partly provoked by what happened in 1918. So in January 1939, he has a meeting with the Czechoslovakian foreign minister. He says to him, if there is a war, the Jews here will be annihilated. The Jews didn't bring about the 9th of November 1918 for nothing. This day will be avenged.

And there's this sort of sense, I think, as we enter 1939, that Hitler now feels that the moment of vengeance is almost upon him. Vengeance against the French and the Allies and the Poles and all of these people, but also vengeance on what he sees as the enemy within. We'll just end with this. On 30th of January 1939, it's the sixth anniversary at the moment he became Reich Chancellor. So the sixth anniversary of the kind of Nazis' new order in Germany. And he gives a speech to the Reichstag to mark it.

And this speech is covered in full by the newsreels. And he makes this horrendous prediction. He says, I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and I was derided. He says, you know, back in the old days, I used to prophesy that I would take over the leadership of Germany and I would deal with the Jewish problem. And the Jews used to laugh at me and they're not laughing anymore. And he says, I want today to be a prophet again. If international finance jury inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations

once again into a world war. See, again, as you say, Tom, he's blaming them. Yeah, it's blaming the Jews. The result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry. He says the result will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. And Tom, as everybody listening to this podcast will know, he had every intention of delivering on that prophecy. Well, thank you, Dominic. That brings this episode and the series to a close. Terrible,

terrible story and there is much more, of course, still to be told. The onset of war in Europe, the course of the war, the final destruction of Nazi Germany, but that is all to come. For now, we hope you enjoyed the series. Maybe not the right word, but thank you for listening to it. And Dominic, I guess we'll be picking up this story again, hopefully next January.

But until then, and until the next shows, which will be next week, and hopefully on a slightly jollier theme, we'll see you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

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