A Marker in Blood

...the night ot horror " Crystal got into the matter from the thousands of broken windows of Jewish shops, stores and homes smashed by Nazi hoodlums the night of November 9, 1938 The fragments produced a crystalline glitter on the sidewalks all over Germany that evening and the following day The technicians of terror had not yet revved up the machinery of extermination to its maximum efficiency On Knstallnacht they had to make do with a variety of ugly but amateurish harassments such as burning synagogues, forcing rabbis to desecrate the Sacred Scrolls and inflicting only enough physical injury to cause the death of some 2,000 Jews These acts, of course, were only a warm-up, a preliminary trot around the track, for the main event at Auschwitz, Belsen and Bu-chenwald Still, the situation was already ripe The ideological groundwork had been carefully laid, the social engineering was far advanced Where hate and hysteria already stirred, they had been cunningly inflamed, where they were doimant and smoldering, they had been energetically blown upon and brought to roaring life, where they had not before existed, they had been systematically generated Psychologically and emotionally, Germany had been well groomed by its leaders to become the first West European nation in hundreds of years to stage a pogrom It was literally triggered by a young Jewish drifter named Her-schel Grynszpan when he assassinated Ernst von Rath, the third secretary of the German Embassy in Pans Grynszpan's family, Polish Jews, had been brutally abused by both the Nazi and Polish authorities By way of vengeance, Herschel, a brooding neurotic who had been sponging off relatives in Pans, bought a 6 35-calibre pistol and shot the official At first the murder was routinely reported on the inside pages of the German press But the Goebbels apparatus, if caught nodding at the outset, soon recovered and shifted into high gear The crime of a half-crazed boy was transformed into evidence of a "world Jewish conspiracy' against the German people Grynszpan, it was asserted, had been acting as the agent of international Jewry Hence, the German people were not merely justified but obligated to strike back The pogrom was on Storm Troops swarmed into the streets, smashing windows, looting, plundering, and driving Jews off their property, which then was appropriated by deserving Aryans The event is well worth re-examining, since it was a marker in blood along the way to total holocaust This book, therefore, has a certain value as a reminder, as another literary semaphore sending out lest-we-forget signals It is, unhappily, not up to its subject Crystal Night is badly organized and badly written, or translatedmost likely both By far the best writing in the volume is the diplomatic report of the American consul at Leipzig, David H Buffum (Quoted matter throughout is more vivid than the dreary and confused prose the authors themselves produce ) As in all such horrors, there were several subsidiary abominations to the Knstallnacht In an irony that would have been hilarious had it not turned out to be the opposite, all that window-smashing enraged Hermann Goenng He was furious because German insurance companies would now have to pay out tens of millions in claims This dilemma, however, was handily disposed of by making the Jews pay the claims' A chapter headed "The Nations That Looked On" presents the sorry story of world reaction to the atrocity and to the intensified persecution that followed Many countries expressed genuine outrage and indignation, but little or nothing was actually done Only a tew weeks passed before Herr von Ribbentrop was being officially feted in Pans at banquets from which lewish cabinet ministers were excluded What happened to Herschel Grynszpan is not known Seized by the Germans when they invaded France, he was never brought to trial and has not been heard of since The peculiar development that Grynszpan, in German captivity, claimed to have had a homosexual relationship with von Rath is only skimpily dealt with by the authors, although much was made ot this in postwar German journalism If true, it would naturally throw a different light at least on the pistol-shot that set off an explosion of brutality and oppression...

...A Marker in Blood_ Crystal Night By Rita Thalmann and Emmanuel Femermann Translated by Gilles Cremonesi Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 192 pp $5 95 Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "Putsch' How Hitlei Made Revolution" The event is misleadingly called Kustallnatht—Crystal Night"—which makes it sound like one of those homey, jolly German holidays Fastnacht, say, or Silvesterabend While it was happening, though, an American consul on the scene gave it its proper name...