by BRUCE NEUBURGER
Germany, November 1938
On November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old German Jewish student walked into the German consulate in Paris and asked to speak to the German consular. When he was told he was unavailable the young man, Herschel Grynspan agreed to speak to a lower-level official, Ernst Vom Rath. When the official appeared Grynspan pulled a pistol and shot him in the abdomen. Vom Rath died of his injury two days later.
Word of Vom Rath’s death reached Germany at a moment when the Nazi Party leadership was in Munich celebrating the anniversary of the 1923 Beerhall Putsch. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, rose to make an impromptu speech to a dinner crowd of Nazi officials. He condemned the murder as an unjustified assault and laid the blame for the murder on the Jewish community as a whole. The speech was not recorded but Goebbels noted in his diary that his remarks were greeted with stormy applause.
Nazi officials at the dinner immediately got on the phones to inform their Nazi colleagues in the SS and other armed units across the country to prepare for violent action against the Jewish community. Within days hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jewish stores were wrecked, and Jewish homes were invaded. Scores of Jews were murdered, and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to Germany’s three main concentration camps. Some Jews, including members of my family, were expelled from their homes. Meanwhile, the Nazi government and press unleashed a drumbeat of condemnation of the entire German Jewish community for the murder of the German consular official. And they claimed the violent pogrom was a “spontaneous reaction” of an outraged German public and a just reward for criminal Jewish behavior. This was a lie. The burning, looting, and murdering were planned and executed by Nazi party leaders and Nazi militants out of uniform.
Neither the Nazi government nor its controlled press made an issue of the more than 400 anti-Jewish laws and decrees enacted between 1933 and 1938, which made life for German Jews almost unbearably hellish. This included the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that stripped Jews of their German citizenship and outlawed sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews. The Nuremberg “blood law” ledto hundreds of Jewish men being put on trial, with many sentenced to penitentiaries,1 for allegedly having such relations. It also intensified an outpouring of unrelenting racial slanders against German Jews.
The German public was left largely uninformed of the particular horror that had provoked Grynspan’s murder of Vom Rath. In late October of 1938 12,000 Polish Jewish immigrants living in Germany were ousted from their homes and deported to Poland with little more than the clothes on their backs. Of the 12,000 deportees, 8,000 were refused entry into Poland and left stranded at the Polish border in frigid weather without money, food, or adequate shelter. Among them were Herschel Grynspan’s parents Zindel and Rivka and his sister Berta, who wrote to her brother in Paris pleading for help; “Herschel, we haven’t got a penny.” These were the immediate circumstances that drove young Herschel to despair. He bought a gun and went to the German consulate with murder on his mind.
The German fascist media repeated the Nazi message that justified the Kristallnacht pogrom: The Jews had it coming.
Israel/Palestine October 2023
On October 7 Hamas militants carried out a cruel spasm of killings of Israeli military personnel and civilians. The Israeli government and media, and the U.S. government and media—almost without exception— were quick to condemn these truly terrible Hamas acts without any effort to explain what might have motivated them. They consciously ignored and suppressed any mention of the seven decades of history of land dispossession, death, destruction, murder, and insult, the hellish conditions Palestinians have been forced to endure due to actions by the Israeli government and settlers against the Palestinians. The actions may not have justified the October 7 killings, but they do explain them. By covering up this history the Israeli and U.S. governments seek to portray the Palestinian people as murderers to justify further murderous acts against them. The Netanyahu government and U.S. backers have withheld the fact that 2023 has been the deadliest year for Palestinians in decades. Furthermore, the Netanyahu government and its U.S. backers condemn Hamas but have nothing to say about Israel’s and the U.S.’s role in helping Hamas come to power as a counterweight to the secular leadership of Fatah several decades ago.2 As Netanyahu told his rightwing Likud party in 2019 “Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.”3
It is an inescapable fact that the Palestinian people have beendemonized and punished every time they have acted to oppose the abuses committed against them by the Israelis over the past 75 years. Today the Palestinian people are demonized by the Netanyahu government the way Goebbels, Hitler, and other Nazi brass dehumanized Jews. They have used explicitly racially explosive language, Nazi-like language, when describing Palestinians.
Turning their backs, and allowing a free hand
These are not the only similarities between the Kristallnacht of November 1938 and the murderous attack on Gaza in 2023. In July 1938 an international conference was held in the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains to discuss the crisis faced by German Jews. Delegates from 32 countries came to the gathering including the United States, England, France, and other European nations. U.S. President Roosevelt sent a personal friend but no official U.S. representative to that conference. Despite public hand-wringing over the terrible treatment being meted out to German Jews at the time, only one country agreed to take any substantial number of Jewish refugees— the Dominican Republic. Hitler gloated after the conference in Evian declaring that “no one wants the Jews.” Hitler could be confident that there would be no action taken against Germany should it continue and intensify its assault on Jews. The path was clear for Kristallnacht a few months later.
In Israel, the aggressive and violent attacks on Palestinians, the building of Israeli settlements, the Israeli settlers’(assisted in some places by members of Christian fascist sects from the United States) emboldened and murderous attacks on Palestinians, even the violation of theMuslim sacred space of the al-Aqsa mosque, have elicited little beyond tepid words, if that, from the U.S. and European governments. Clearly the Netanyahu government concluded from this that Israel has a free hand to do what it wishes to Palestinians! And what other purpose than provocation could explain the Israeli government’s repeated public insults to one of Islam’s holiest shrines?
They had been waiting for this
On November 10, 1938, 30,000 Jewish men were picked up by the German police and Gestapo agents and placed in concentration camps. My grandfather was among them. One of those picked up and sent to Dachau on November 10, and who survived the Holocaust, said in an interview years later that he was told by prisoners held in Dachau before Kristallnacht that the camp had been expanded in anticipation of a large influx of detainees—evidence that a Kristallnacht-like event had been anticipated by the Nazi government.4 On the night of November 9 when word of Vom Rath’s death reached Munich, it took little time for Hitler and Goebbels to decide to call for the pogrom. The Nazis could not have anticipated the act of a German Jewish student in Paris, obviously, but they could well have anticipated a reaction to their relentless persecution that might be a useful pretext for mass, violent repression. And they were apparently ready to act to make that violence happen.
Likewise, while the Netanyahu government might not have known of the particular plans Hamas was developing, Israeli government officials could not have missed the growing sense of outrage and desperation among the Palestinians whose villages in the West Bank are being decimated, whose people are being murdered by settlers in growing numbers, whose religious center was and is being violated. How could today’s Israeli government not have anticipated a reaction when Netanyahu and other Israeli governmentrepresentatives publicly and repeatedly proclaimed their intention to continue building Israeli settlements in an increasing tempo of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands? And, when according to Ilan Pappe in his recent talk at Berkeley law school, Hamas publicly declared that it would not sit by while thousands upon thousands of Palestinian political prisoners languished in Israeli jails? 5
Drive them out
Reynard Heydrich, head of one of the Nazi security agencies, and who, after 1941,would become the chief architect of the Holocaust, admitted that in 1938 it was Nazi policy to force Jews to leave Germany, and to do so by making life so unbearable that they would agree to leave. Up until November 1938 despite the immense pressure put on them, many Jews opted to remain in Germany. This was, after all, their home and the home of their parents and grandparents, a country they had identified with, a land they had contributed to in many ways. They were, after all Germans, and they had a right to stay. This was the attitude of many in my own family.
For many Palestinians staying in Palestine has been an act of resistance. Therefore, while the Nazis found it necessary to dramatically increase the level of oppression on German Jews, so too have the Likud fascists who now govern Israel ratcheted up the pressure on the Palestinian community. The Hitler government believed that Kristallnacht gave them the leverage to dispossess Jews and drive them out of Germany. Jewish men held in concentration camps were pressured to sign over their properties to the Nazi Reich in order to be released from the camps. Now the Israeli government believes it has the license to unleash genocidal violence against Palestinians, destroying their homes, seizing their property, killing their children in a clear act to drive Palestinians out of Palestinian lands. This was stated by a rightwing member of the Knesset Amir Weitmann in a paper proposing a total ethnic cleansing of Gaza given that there is “currently a unique and rare opportunity” in the wake of the Hamas’ October 7 attacks.
Let’s talk about the source of criminality
Counterpunch for more