Part 2 (1/2)

ON THE DAY THAT VICHY FRANCE WAS OCCUPIED, the German Sixth Army's last a.s.sault through the rubble of Stalingrad ground to a halt in the appalling conditions of the Wehrmacht's second Russian winter. At the end of their enormously extended lines of supply, ammunition and all other essentials were running short. One week later, on November 19, Gen. Georgi Zhukov launched Operation Ura.n.u.s with major offensives to the north and south of Stalingrad. By November 22, the Sixth Army was surrounded. Out of bravado or sheer ignorance, Marshal Hermann Goring promised Hitler that his Luftwaffe could supply the trapped army by air. The daily minimum requirement of supplies needed to sustain the Sixth was 550 tons, but the Luftwaffe rarely exceeded 300 tons and, as the weather worsened, with temperatures dropping to 22F in mid-January, deliveries diminished to just 30 tons a day. The freezing German soldiers subsisted on a few slices of bread and a small hunk of horse meat daily and were soon suffering from dysentery and typhoid. The fighting continued until February 2, when the last defenders inside the Red October Factory laid down their arms. The German forces suffered 750,000 casualties over that dreadful Russian winter, and of the 94,000 who were captured at Stalingrad just 5,000 would ever see Germany again.

The Red Army had paid an immense price for the defense, encirclement, and final recapture of Stalingrad, losing almost 500,000 killed or missing and a staggering 650,000 wounded-to say nothing of a further 40,000 civilians dead. Yet these horrendous sacrifices had bought the Soviet Union a genuinely pivotal victory. For the first time, a whole German army had been decisively beaten and then destroyed on the battlefield. To mark this unprecedented reverse on the Eastern Front, Radio Berlin played somber music for three days, but it would take much longer than that for the German people to come to terms with the catastrophe. The prestige of the Red Army soared, both in the Motherland and in the Western democracies. Basking in the glory of the victory at the city named after him, Stalin grew in stature both at home and abroad-and his repeated demands for the opening of a second front in Europe by the Western Allies, to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, became more insistent.

IN JANUARY 1943, ALL THE GREAT POWER LEADERS had been invited to attend a conference in the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca. Stalin declined, since the battle for Stalingrad was then reaching its climax. Between January 14 and 24, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, together with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, met at the Anfa Hotel to decide the future strategy for the war in the West and in the Pacific. Churchill was anxious for the war in Europe to be given top priority and his view prevailed. More resources were to be allocated to fight the Battle of the Atlantic, since Britain's very survival and America's ability to deploy armies in Europe depended on defeating the U-boat threat. Despite Stalin's urgings, the outcome of the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942 had confirmed that a major landing on the coast of mainland Northwest Europe simply was not feasible during 1943. Instead, once the antic.i.p.ated victory in North Africa was achieved, Allied forces were to invade first the island of Sicily and then Italy.

In order to mollify Stalin, the Western Allies issued the Casablanca Directive, which dealt with the closer coordination of the strategic bombing offensive against Germany by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force. The objective set for the Joint Bombing Program was ”the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.” The priority targets were U-boat construction yards and operating bases, followed by the German aircraft industry, the transportation system, and all oil-producing facilities. The USAAF retained its faith in daylight precision-bombing missions against specific point targets while the RAF preferred area bombing by night. This combined Operation Pointblank would condemn Germany to round-the-clock aerial bombardment on an unprecedented scale, testing the will of the German people to the utmost.

However, there was one aspect of the Casablanca Conference that did not meet with full accord. President Roosevelt retained a deep disgust for the German military caste that he dismissed as ”the Vons,” and he would not countenance any sort of deal with a German government short of unconditional surrender. Neither Churchill nor the Combined Chiefs of Staff were at ease with such a strategy, but Roosevelt remained adamant and in this his will prevailed, just as Churchill's had over the planned Italian campaign. Citing the implacable resolve of Ulysses S. Grant-”Unconditional Surrender Grant”-during the American Civil War, Roosevelt required a complete and unequivocal victory over Germany. There was to be no repeat of the armistice that had ended the Great War with German troops still on French soil. Its result had been a widespread illusion during the interwar years that the German army had remained undefeated on the battlefield and that Germany was only forced to capitulate by devious politicians.

Objections to the policy of unconditional surrender were advanced by, among others, Roosevelt's U.S. Army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, and his rising field commander Gen. Eisenhower, on the grounds that it would inevitably increase the resolve of German armies on the battlefield. The intelligence community recognized that the policy would effectively scupper any real dialogue with or support for the resistance movement inside Germany, since its leaders would know that even the death of Hitler would not spare their country from utter ruin and humiliation. As Allen Dulles wrote, ”We rendered impossible internal revolution in Germany, and thereby prolonged the war and the destruction.” Apart from Stalin, the only belligerent leaders whose interests were served by this decision were the n.a.z.i hierarchy.

Chapter 3.

THE BROWN EMINENCE.

AFTER THE STAGGERING SETBACKS of Stalingrad and North Africa, it was vital to galvanize the dispirited German people for a protracted war. Hitler's complete military strategy had been predicated on a short conflict of conquest before the material superiority of his opponents-France and Britain, then the Soviet Union-became overwhelming. The era of rapid victories in 193842 had allowed Germany to loot raw materials, agricultural production, and industrial capacity from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the western USSR. These years of pillage had delayed the tipping point after which the imbalance of resources between the Allies and the Axis became at first chronic and then terminal; but they had gained Germany only capital-not a revenue stream-and the point of no return had now been reached.

n.a.z.i Germany entered spring 1943 with no coherent overall military strategy to prosecute the war further. The failure of the invasion of the USSR was already obvious for the world to see. In May 1943, due to a combination of Allied technical and operational advances, the monthly losses suffered by U-boats in the Atlantic suddenly tripled. This forced Adm. Donitz to withdraw his wolf packs from the convoy lanes for three months; they would never recover their dominance. In June and July 1943, the first RAF Thousand-Bomber raids devastated cities such as Essen, Cologne, and Hamburg, and during that summer USAAF daylight raids penetrated deep into Germany to hit industrial targets, drawing Luftwaffe fighter squadrons back from other fronts. In July, the defeat of a new German offensive around Kursk in the Ukraine finally crushed any hope of regaining the initiative on the Eastern Front. Also in July, the Western Allies successfully invaded Sicily, and in September, Italy became the first of the Axis nations to sue for peace. In the coming winter nights the RAF's baleful focus would s.h.i.+ft to Berlin itself-in November alone, 400,000 Berliners were rendered homeless. Despite occupying most of Europe, German forces were now wholly on the defensive and trapped in a war of attrition, reduced to waiting, with dwindling resources, for the Allies to unleash new offensives in the east, the south, and the west. Moreover, there was simply no coherent mechanism for addressing Germany's situation. The Fuhrer's word was absolute and there was no one in the n.a.z.i hierarchy or the armed forces to contradict him.

The German regime's response to the disaster of Stalingrad and President Roosevelt's demand for unconditional surrender was a call for ”total war.” In a widely reported speech given to the Berlin n.a.z.i Party in the Sportpalast (Sports Palace) on February 18, 1943, the Reich minister of propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, demanded of his audience and the German people their complete commitment to ”der totaler Krieg.” Warning that ”two thousand years of Western history are in danger,” Goebbels called for even greater sacrifices in support of the Wehrmacht, the last defenders against the Bolshevik hordes that were threatening the territory and the very cultural ident.i.ty of Europe. To this end, he called for the full mobilization of the German economy and the German people for the exclusive support of the war effort. On the podium with Goebbels was Albert Speer, Reich minister of armaments and war production. Speer was desperate to put the mismanaged German economy on a proper war footing, but was frustrated by a lack of skilled workers. In the face of ever-wider military conscription and Hitler's reluctance to mobilize Germany's women for the same sort of effort that Britain and America had made, much of industry was dependent upon slave labor from the East and conscripted workers from the occupied countries of Europe.

Hermann Goring, that great collector of t.i.tles, had proved equally incompetent in the position of Reich commissioner for the Four-Year Plan as he was in strategic command of the Luftwaffe. Sensing that Goring-after the failure of his boast that he could sustain the Sixth Army at Stalingrad-was falling out of favor with Hitler, Goebbels and Speer tried to persuade Hitler to dismiss him so they could take over control of the domestic economy for more efficient war production. This attempt soon failed, however, in a welter of other plots. In the turmoil following Stalingrad, pent-up rivalries among the hierarchy came boiling to the surface.

Having the ear of Hitler, Party Chief Reichsleiter Martin Bormann suggested that a triumvirate representing the state, the party, and the armed forces be established as a Council of Three with dictatorial powers to control the economy-exactly what Goebbels and Speer were proposing for themselves. They immediately changed tack and now sought an alliance with Goring and Himmler to thwart Bormann. But Himmler was in a separate plot with Bormann to gain more power at the expense of Goring. As the controller of Hitler's personal finances, Bormann finessed the plotters by giving Goring six million reichsmarks to indulge himself away from Hitler's court. In the end, none of these plots succeeded in its object since Hitler was indifferent to such ploys beyond creating divisions among his acolytes.

IN THE WORDS OF DR. OTTO DIETRICH, the Reich press chief, ”Hitler created in the political leaders.h.i.+p of Germany the greatest confusion that has ever existed in a civilized state.” The plots and counterplots of 1943 were a prime example of how Hitler exercised his absolute power by fomenting fierce rivalries among his immediate subordinates so that none could ever acquire sufficient power or influence to challenge the Fuhrer himself. Indeed, such episodes represent the whole n.a.z.i regime in microcosm.

The popular perception holds that the Third Reich was a monolithic totalitarian state that controlled a reluctant population through terror and Teutonic efficiency. While the reign of terror was real enough, the government inst.i.tutions of the Third Reich were in fact ma.s.sively inefficient, hampered by conflicts of interest and muddled chains of command and absurdly wasteful of money, time, and manpower. Hitler showed little interest in or talent for administration; he preferred to wield power through many competing organizations that owed their very existence to his good offices. In line with his conception of creative chaos, different individuals and agencies were given ill-defined responsibilities in closely related fields of activity in everything from postal administration to weapons development. The price demanded for Hitler's support in the resulting turf wars was total personal loyalty. This might earn supplicants a loosely expressed general directive that they could interpret as endorsing their particular agendas. In pursuit of these rivalries, empire building and bureaucratic obstruction were rife and were deliberately encouraged by Hitler, according to his simplistic view that the strongest would prevail through compet.i.tion.

The architecture of the n.a.z.i state machinery defied all logical explanation. Before the war, the operations of government were nominally entrusted to seventeen ministries, yet the last actual cabinet meeting had taken place in November 1937. On August 30, 1939, the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the State had been formed. It was composed of six of Hitler's closest followers and bureaucrats; this body, chaired by Goring, could enact laws at Hitler's will. Commissioners were appointed with broadly defined powers within various areas of government activity, but there was no actual machinery for coordinating their work. Worse, there was at every level a divisive duplication of authority caused by the parallel prerogatives of state and n.a.z.i Party functionaries. Virtually every state body was replicated with a party equivalent, with each vying for resources and favor.

Heinrich Himmler, as national leader of the SS and chief of German police, was already ruler of the entire security and police apparatus, but his ambitions for expanding his SS empire knew no bounds. The whole machinery of government was interpenetrated by Himmler's practice of awarding parallel SS ranks to functionaries of every kind. Adm. Canaris's Abwehr military intelligence department, answerable to the Armed Forces Supreme Command, was a particular target for Himmler's ambition. Its activities were mirrored by the intelligence and counterintelligence branch of the SS, the Security Service-Sicherheitsdienst. This was commanded until June 1942 by Himmler's deputy, SS and Police Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Office. Each agency scrabbled for supremacy at the expense of efficient operations against the common enemy.

Canaris and Heydrich, who shared a mutual love of riding and of music, maintained an ostensibly cordial relations.h.i.+p. They sometimes dined together en famille. The cold-blooded killer Heydrich was also an accomplished violinist and he often played for Canaris's wife. When the professional rivalry became too intense, however, Canaris betrayed Heydrich's movements in Czechoslovakia to Britain's MI6. Two parachutists of the Czech Brigade, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, threw an ant.i.tank grenade at Heydrich's open-top Mercedes in a Prague street on May 27, 1942. Several fragments and bits of horsehair seat upholstery entered Heydrich's back. He was at first expected to recover from the operation to extract the debris, but the wounds became infected and he died a week later. The death of the central architect of the ”Final Solution”-which he had unveiled at the Wannsee conference that January-led to ma.s.s reprisals that killed about 5,000 Czech men, women, and children.

AMONG THE ABHORRENT FIGURES at the pinnacle of the n.a.z.i hierarchy, popular history recalls in particular the flamboyant, drug-addicted Luftwaffe commander in chief Hermann Goring, the occultist security overlord Heinrich Himmler, and the odious propaganda minister and de facto interior minister Joseph Goebbels. In truth, however, the most devious of them all, and the master of palace intrigue, was the relatively faceless party chief Martin Bormann. Hitler's shadow and gatekeeper for much of the Third Reich, Bormann was a figure forever lurking in the background at the Fuhrer's elbow. His battlegrounds were the card-index file and the double-entry ledger. His princ.i.p.al weapon was the teleprinter, through which he issued a torrent of instructions to his ubiquitous regional gauleiters (district leaders). To these party officials, Bormann was known behind his back as the ”Telex General.”

Bormann had come to the n.a.z.i Party relatively late, joining only in 1926, so the Alte Kampfer (”Old Fighters”) who had supported Hitler in the Munich putsch attempt tended to dismiss him. Nevertheless, he held the party members.h.i.+p number 6088 and was therefore eligible for the Gold Party Badge, awarded to party members with a registration number under 100,000. Bormann's first job was to run the relief fund for the storm troopers of the Sturmabteilungen (SA-the party's brown-s.h.i.+rted uniformed part-time activists) who were injured in brawls and riots. He cannily negotiated reduced premiums to the insurance company concerned while at the same time increasing the contributions from NSDAP members by 50 percent; furthermore, the payment of dues was now compulsory, while any payment of benefits was at Bormann's sole discretion. In short order, this scheme raised 1.4 million reichsmarks in a single year-much to Hitler's delight. The Fuhrer moved Bormann and the SA fund into the NSDAP proper. Bormann now worked at the Brown House, the party headquarters in Munich, where he aspired to taking over the post of party treasurer from Franz Xaver Schwarz.

Meanwhile, he progressed to controlling the finances of the Adolf Hitler Spende der Deutsche Wirtschaft, the ”Adolf Hitler Fund of German Business.” This AH Fund was originally established as ”a token of grat.i.tude to the leader” in order to provide campaign funds and finance for cultural activities within the NSDAP. In reality it became Hitler's personal treasure chest, with revenues gathered from many sources. The most important were the contributions made by industrialists-such as Krupp and Thyssen and of course IG Farben-who were benefiting enormously from German rearmament. In essence, this was a tax amounting to one-half percent of a company's payroll, payable directly to the Fuhrer. In its first year alone, 30 million reichsmarks poured into the coffers of the AH Fund.

In 1929, Bormann married Gerda Buch, the daughter of a senior party official, and on July 3, 1933, he was appointed chief of staff to the deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess. Hess was as uninterested as. .h.i.tler in paperwork, so Bormann's skill in turning Hitler's spontaneous verbal directives into coherent orders was invaluable. The Fuhrer would comment approvingly that ”Bormann's proposals are so precisely worked out that I have only to say 'yes' or 'no.' With him, I deal in ten minutes with a pile of doc.u.ments for which with another man I should need hours.” On October 10, 1933, Hitler appointed Bormann as a party Reichsleiter or national leader, making him fourth in the n.a.z.i hierarchy behind Hitler, Goring, and Hess. The intertwining of party and state authority, as described above, would henceforth give Bormann all the freedom of maneuver that he needed.

BORMANN'S ABILITY TO INGRATIATE HIMSELF with the Fuhrer was uncanny. He altered his sleeping pattern to coincide with Hitler's and even mimicked his master by eating vegetarian food and avoiding alcohol when they were dining together-although in private he gorged himself on schnitzel, wurst, and schnapps. As one regional gauleiter commented, ”Bormann clung to Hitler like ivy around an oak, using him to get to the light and to the very summit.” This he achieved after Deputy Fuhrer Hess-already a marginalized figure-embarked on his bizarre solo flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, apparently to seek a peace agreement with opponents of the British government. Hess's departure from the scene allowed Bormann to get even closer to Hitler. He was now entirely responsible for arranging the Fuhrer's daily schedule, appointments, and personal business. He was always at his master's side and never took a vacation for fear of losing influence. His reward came in April 1943, when he was appointed secretary to the Fuhrer and chief of the party chancellery. The latter post gave him immense influence over the gauleiters who controlled every district (Gau) across the Third Reich. He was now so indispensable that the Fuhrer was prompted to say, ”To win this war, I need Bormann.”

He also needed Bormann to control his personal finances. At a dinner party with Himmler in October 1941, Hitler had declaimed, ”As far as my own private existence is concerned, I shall always live simply, but in my capacity as Fuhrer and Head of State I am obliged to stand out clearly from amongst all the people around me. If my close a.s.sociates glitter with decorations, I can distinguish myself from them only by wearing none at all.” This claim of monkish asceticism was not strictly true. Hitler enjoyed a lavish lifestyle at his Bavarian residence, the Berghof, in the mountain village retreat of Berchtesgaden in Obersalzburg munic.i.p.ality. Besides the Berghof itself, separate villas were provided at Obersalzberg for all the notables of the n.a.z.i hierarchy. This compound had all been created for the Fuhrer by Bormann and financed from the AH Fund to the tune of about 100 million reichsmarks. With its splendid views of the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof was. .h.i.tler's favorite retreat. This was where he spent time with his mistress, Eva Braun, and entertained foreign visitors and his close and trusted a.s.sociates-his Berg Leute, or mountain people.

As Otto Dietrich would write, Bormann then a.s.sumed economic and financial direction of the entire ”household of the Fuhrer.” He was especially attentive to the lady of the house, antic.i.p.ating her every wish and skillfully helping her with the often rather complicated arrangements for social and state functions. This was all the more necessary, since she herself tactfully kept in the background as much as possible. Bormann's adroitness in this matter undoubtedly strengthened his una.s.sailable position of trust with Hitler, who was extraordinarily sensitive about Eva Braun.

There was, however, no love lost between Bormann and Braun; behind his back she called him an ”overs.e.xed toad.”

With his brilliant business ac.u.men, Bormann found many ways to bolster Hitler's personal fortune. Apart from the considerable income derived from royalties on Mein Kampf-which, since it was required reading in German schools, sold millions of copies-Bormann devised a scheme to capitalize on image rights whereby Hitler received a payment for every use of his likeness, be it on a postcard or even a postage stamp. These monies were paid into a separate Adolf Hitler Cultural Fund to support the performing arts and to purchase paintings for the Fuhrer's personal collection. By the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler's annual income was immense, but-thanks to a deal that Bormann had arranged with the authorities-he paid no income tax. Like other n.a.z.i leaders, Hitler had foreign bank accounts, including one with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Bern and another in Holland. These accounts received the royalties earned on Hitler's book sales abroad and, more importantly, allowed him to indulge the one pa.s.sion in his life besides politics-his obsession with art.

Chapter 4.

THE RAPE OF EUROPE.

AS A YOUNG MAN IN VIENNA before World War I, Hitler had nurtured ambitions to be an artist and an architect, despite the fierce objections of his overbearing father, Alois Schicklgruber. In 1907, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts but failed the entrance examination. Desolated, he applied again the following year but was rejected again, his portfolio winning only a cursory glance. This was a turning point in Hitler's life. Attributing his rejection to the panel of academicians being Jews, he nursed a deep embitterment toward the Jewish race, although, ironically, on the few occasions that Hitler ever sold any of his paintings, it was through the Jewish Hungarian art dealer Josef Neumann.

For the next few years. .h.i.tler lived a vagrant's life ”of hards.h.i.+p and misery,” as he later recalled in Mein Kampf. His only solace was found in Vienna's many art museums and the city's deep tradition of cla.s.sical music. His musical tastes were catholic-Beethoven, Bruckner, Chopin, Grieg, Schubert, Schumann, and even Mahler and Mendelssohn-but his abiding favorite was Richard Wagner and he knew the opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg by heart. Hitler gave up painting after World War 1 as his political career progressed, but he retained an illusion of himself as a great artist throughout his life and his interest in architecture never diminished.

Once in office as chancellor, Hitler pursued his obsession of ”racial purity” with ruthless zeal, in parallel with a breakneck program of centralizing all power in the party's hands. The n.a.z.is' election in 1933 was followed almost immediately by their virtual destruction of the German const.i.tution in response to the Reichstag fire and, on the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934, by Hitler's a.s.sumption of the dual leaders.h.i.+p of the n.a.z.i Party and the state as Fuhrer (leader)-a coup d'etat endorsed in a plebiscite by 38 million German citizens. Once parliament and the courts were castrated, the regime enjoyed unfettered power and was free to inst.i.tute a policy of Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity), consolidating its hold over the nation by the elimination or neutering of any organized bodies that were outside the complete control of the n.a.z.i Party. A spate of decrees revoked individual liberties and rights of a.s.sociation, silenced the media, banned rival political parties and free labor unions, and destroyed the independence of regional governments and the judiciary. The death penalty was introduced for a wide range of politically defined ”crimes,” and there were ma.s.s arrests not only of communist, social democratic, and Jewish activists but also of freemasons, gypsies, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, and any others deemed deviant in the eyes of n.a.z.i orthodoxy. Most of these ”pariahs” were incarcerated in the fifty concentration camps that were opened during the n.a.z.is' first year in power.

In April 1933, Julius Streicher, the notorious Jew-baiter and editor of the n.a.z.i weekly newspaper Der Sturmer (The Attacker), orchestrated an economic boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, head of the newly founded Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, called for the ”cleansing by fire” of ”un-German” books, particularly those by authors of Jewish background such as Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Marx-and even the works of the revered German nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, whose tragedy Almansor contains the warning ”Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.” On May 10, a crowd of 40,000 watched the burning of 25,000 books in Berlin's Opernplatz. In November 1933 a national referendum showed that 95 percent of the population approved of n.a.z.i policies, even as their rights and freedoms were being systematically destroyed.

IN THE HEADY DAYS following their electoral victory, the n.a.z.is concentrated on eliminating political opponents of the center and left. Now they had the opportunity to turn on the Jews. By 1934, all Jewish shops were prominently daubed with the word ”Juden” or the Star of David, and storm troopers of the SA frequently hung around outside them to discourage customers from entering. Increasingly, Jewish business people were forced to close down as they lost their livelihood. Soon, German Jews were being forced out of the professions and government employment as doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and civil servants. Shops and restaurants refused to serve Jews and they were banned from public parks, swimming pools, and even public transport. German children were imbued with anti-Semitism during school lessons and even during playtime-the object of a popular children's board game was to render particular areas of Germany Juden Frei or ”Jew-free.”

A major step in the process of ”Aryanization” of all aspects of German society was taken on September 15, 1935, with the enactment of the so-called Nuremberg Laws. Henceforth, marriage or s.e.xual intercourse between Jews and Aryans was expressly forbidden, and Jews were deprived of their political rights as citizens. Increasingly, Jews attempted to emigrate to France, Switzerland, and further afield, but they were rarely made welcome and many were refused entry. Out of a total Jewish population of some 525,000, about 170,000 had already left Germany before October 5, 1938, when a decree invalidated their pa.s.sports. The Swiss insisted that German Jews who needed traveling doc.u.ments for emigration purposes be reissued pa.s.sports with a large ”J” for ready identification and rejection at the border. Many Jews could not afford the ever-increasing cost of emigration. Those who could were not permitted to take any capital with them, and few had any money left after being forced to sell their homes and businesses at greatly discounted prices to pay the Reichsfluchtsteuer (”escape tax”). Dealers in art and antiquities were specifically targeted, and this enforced liquidation of about 80 percent of such businesses in Germany caused a glut on the market and a sharp slump in prices.

On November 9, 1938, racial violence-sparked by the a.s.sa.s.sination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish Pole whose family had been deported from Germany-reached new heights. That night Jewish homes, properties, and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria and the Sudetenland were attacked and burned in the orgy of destruction known as Kristallnacht-”Crystal Night” or the Night of Broken Gla.s.s-from the amount of broken gla.s.s it left carpeting the streets. At least ninety-one Jews lost their lives; another 30,000 were arrested and largely consigned to concentration camps. The survivors were actually forced to pay the material price of this pogrom. Replacing all the broken windows would cost some 25 million reichsmarks, and since almost all plate gla.s.s was imported from Belgium this had to be paid in scarce foreign currency. By now, the avaricious Hermann Goring was in charge of the ”Program to Eliminate Jews from German Economic Life” and he decreed that all Jews remaining in Germany were to provide the Reich exchequer with ”atonement payments,” totaling 1 billion reichsmarks, to cover the costs of repairing the damage. In addition, any insurance payments made to German Jews were confiscated by the state.

KRISTALLNACHT WAS THE CLEAREST WARNING YET to German Jewry of their perilous situation, and, between then and the outbreak of war in September 1939, approximately 100,000 Jews somehow found ways to leave the Reich. Another n.a.z.i legislative novelty was about to suggest that any who were unable or unwilling to do so might find themselves at the mercy of a state prepared to commit ma.s.s murder.