In 1911, Zindel Grynszpan, a Jew born in Poland moved to Hanover, Germany and established a small business. On October 27, 1938, the Nazis forced the family out of their home, confiscated their business and deported the Grynszpans to Poland. Since Poland would not accept any more Jews, they were kept interred on the Polish Border. Grynszpan’s son, Herschel, living in Paris with an uncle at the time, tried to take revenge on the German ambassador to France by killing him, but Herschel shot third secretary Ernest vom Rath instead. He died two days later.
In what some feel was the start of the Holocaust, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, launched an attack on German Jews to stop “International Jewry from attacking Adolph Hitler’s third Reich.”
On November 9 and 10, 1938, Goebbels announced that because of this attack by “International Jewry” there will be retribution. It came in the form of Krystallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass.” Up until Krystallnacht, German Jews had been subjected to repressive, albeit non-violent policies since Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933. Krystallnacht was the first manifestation of the Nazis’ cruelty to Jews that culminated in the genocide of 6,000,000 Jews (holocaust) by 1945, the end of World War II.
On the evening of the first day of Krystallnacht, in one of thousands of attacks on Jews, Nazi Storm troopers broke into the Neue Synagogue. The ravagers desecrated Torah scrolls and smashed and set fire to piled-up furnishings. The building itself was saved the next morning by a Berlin police officer, Lieutenant Otto Bellgardt, who drew his pistol, dispersed the crowd, and claimed the synagogue was a protected historic landmark. He then called in the fire department to extinguish the blaze. Bellgardt’s senior officer Wilhelm Krutzfeld covered up for Bellgardt, and Berlin’s Police Commissioner Graf Helldorf, in his turn, only mildly reprimanded Krutzfeld who was later mistakenly given credit for the rescue of the Neue Synagogue much of which would be eventually destroyed during World War II. Lieutenant Bellgardt (first on the scene, and to whom credit should be given), was an anti-Nazi, and he retired early rather than continue serving Nazi interests. Although his actions did preserve the synagogue on the terrible nights of 1938, the synagogue was later destroyed during the war which followed. Today, the surviving remnants serve as an exhibit for the Holocaust, an appropriate designation, as many authorities consider Kristallnacht to be the first manifestation of the Holocaust during World War II.
At least one-thousand Jewish Synagogues were torched in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland. Jews were attacked and violated on the streets and in their homes and Synagogues, and 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. Hundreds of Jews were injured and 91 were killed.
Two of those killed were the wife and daughter of Samuel Rosen…
CHAPTER 16
Pre-war?
Dear Al:
I have a horribly sad story to tell you about. The news of Krystallnacht now is world-wide, and I’m sure you must have heard about it. It was an outbreak of destruction and murder and genocide against Jews here in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland such as the world has never seen, and I’m afraid it is just the beginning.
Because of Krystallnacht, my wife and my daughter were killed in a burning synagogue while I was away tending to an emergency patient’s needs. They were two of a reported ninety-one killed and many hundreds injured. The horror of it is almost more than I can stand. I blame myself. Why didn’t we leave a year or two ago? We were certainly being impacted by Hitler’s barbaric anti-Semitism and we had opportunities to leave, but I kept holding out while I slowly tried to make arrangements to move to Eastern Poland near the Russian border where I had an opportunity, through my wife’s family, to take a job as a traumatic and general surgeon in a large clinic.
Why did I delay? Why? As is Jewish custom, I had my wife and daughter’s charred bodies buried within 24 hours with all the appropriate prayers, but I heard none of those prayers because my mind was full of grief and thoughts of revenge that will occupy the rest of my life. That is all I will live for, especially now when the world is certain that this Hitler bastard is taking us to a war that is all he is living for, and with a single-minded purpose of destroying the world’s Jews.
I, for one, will stand in his way. As he goes about his quest to conquer Europe, he has no thought nor does he care about the innocent victims that fall to his insane ambitions. My beautiful wife and daughter are no more. At least they are together in heaven. Oh, how I wish I could be there with them! I will one day, but not before I do all within my power to end Hitler’s poisonous regime.
So far, he has taken over Austria, and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland while the world, led by Great Britain’s Chamberlain, who thinks that maybe little bits and pieces of this country and that will satisfy him and shut him up. But he is too full of hate, and most of his hatred is levied at Jews, and how far will that take him? I believe it will take him to Poland where there are 3,300,000 Jews. He will have his hands full there, and we must do everything in our power to see to it that if he bites off too much, he will choke on it. Again, and for certain, that now is my life’s work! I beseech you, Oh God to endow me with the strength and will.
Sam…
Dear Sam:
Sorry for my late response to you, but I have spent the last several months in the United States on an unexpected banking assignment. I am numb with grief at your loss. We learned of war first hand, did we not, but in your case you have learned about what international relationships possibly leading up to another war can also do. I understand fully what is going through your mind now. I would be no different. I hope you have the power to keep your resolve and your strength up. I’m not sure I could.
Let me tell you about what I learned while in the United States. There is no doubt that World War I left a great impression on American public opinion. Their policy now leans toward isolationism, and who can blame them? They are separated by two oceans. The warring powers of Japan and China on one side, and likewise the probable European war on the other side. That is the reason they never approved the League of Nations after World War I. They had enough of Europe and were leery of being drawn into another conflict. Again, can we blame them?
Anyhow, the Americans had enough to do trying to come out of their own depression. And as the nations of the world are being drawn into conflict after conflict, what has the League done? Exactly nothing!
In the early thirties, President Hoover and his Secretary of State, Henry Stimson made themselves clear by forming a doctrine stating that the U.S. will not recognize any territory gained by aggression of one country over another. The next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, felt that the United States needed to participate in international affairs, but the country was not in any mood to agree with him especially since the congress of the United States was very isolationist and Roosevelt needed their support for his “New Deal” program meant to get the United States out of the depression. Progress was very slow and so the Americans remain quite isolationist to this day.
Getting back to Poland, here’s my take on it. British PM Chamberlain felt strongly that he had to focus on an increasing aggressive Germany, and avoid war at all costs. His tool was “appeasement,” and the French played along with it doing anything to avoid war.
There were those who argued that trying to appease a man like Hitler would be tantamount to trying to talk a starving lion out of fresh zebra. Anyhow, the people of Great Britain also approved appeasement, reasoning that Hitler, who was untrustworthy, was the lesser of two evils when compared to atheistic Communism. Hitler, at least, was a bulwark against this other poisonous philosophy. In one way this made sense, but the more I studied it, the more I came to understand how appeasement failed to recognize Hitler’s actual agenda.
You know of the infamous “Munich Pact” where the two prime ministers, Chamberlain of Great Britain and Daladier of France, signed the agreement to virtually give Czechoslovakia