Late in 1938, Nazis across Germany attacked Jews and their homes, businesses and places of worship and arrested about 30,000 Jewish men. The attacks became known as Kristallnacht – the “Night of Broken Glass” – for the streets littered with broken glass from the vandalism.
But the pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, went beyond the broken glass of Jewish-owned shops on the streets of German cities and has rightly been called a major turning point in the history of the Holocaust.
As a scholar specializing in the impact of the Holocaust on the law, human rights, German criminal law and international humanitarian law, I believe it’s important to see Kristallnacht as the logical culmination of Hitler’s malevolent intentions going back many years before 1938. Seeing it that way allows us to view the two different kinds of antisemitism in Hitler’s thinking, one involving emotions and the other involving the law and reason.
Indeed, the November pogrom and its aftermath foreshadowed the mass shooting squads and death camps of the early 1940s – institutions that were likewise products of a willful malice toward Jews.
Hitler’s two kinds of antisemitism
From early in his political career, Hitler’s thinking about Jews vacillated between attacking them violently or through patient, step-by-step legal measures. He even had terms to describe these two approaches.
In a September 1919 letter, Hitler recommended that the status and treatment of Jews could best be addressed through the “antisemitism of reason” rather than the “antisemitism of emotion.”
Hitler wrote that emotional antisemitism, which was expressed in the episodic violence of pogroms, would not have lasting effect.
In contrast, he wrote, the “antisemitism of reason” would work through law to achieve an enduring solution to what he called the “Jewish problem.” The “final objective” of rational antisemitism, according to Hitler, “must be the total removal of all Jews from our midst.”
Much of Hitler’s career reflected his adherence to this antisemitism of reason.
This ideological conviction, however, clashed with the antisemitism of emotion also in Hitler’s thinking. In interviews with journalists in the early 1920s, Hitler sometimes said he would attack and eradicate German Jews when he came to power.
Late in 1938, Nazis across Germany attacked Jews and their homes, businesses and places of worship and arrested about 30,000 Jewish men. The attacks became known as Kristallnacht – the “Night of Broken Glass” – for the streets littered with broken glass from the vandalism.
But the pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, went beyond the broken glass of Jewish-owned shops on the streets of German cities and has rightly been called a major turning point in the history of the Holocaust.
As a scholar specializing in the impact of the Holocaust on the law, human rights, German criminal law and international humanitarian law, I believe it’s important to see Kristallnacht as the logical culmination of Hitler’s malevolent intentions going back many years before 1938. Seeing it that way allows us to view the two different kinds of antisemitism in Hitler’s thinking, one involving emotions and the other involving the law and reason.
Indeed, the November pogrom and its aftermath foreshadowed the mass shooting squads and death camps of the early 1940s – institutions that were likewise products of a willful malice toward Jews.
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