Wednesday, November 7, 2007 12:11 AM CST
REVIEW: 'Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction' By Martin Gilbert 2006, HarperCollins Publishers
By HERB MEEKER, Staff Writer
hmeeker@jg-tc.com
Today, broken glass is taken for granted when it comes to violence in this country.
So that is why “Kristallnacht” — literally, The Night of Broken Glass — might seem an inappropriate title today for the opening act of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
But in Martin Gilbert’s book “Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction,” we can learn how a cycle of violence 69 years ago this week was about more than vandalism against German Jewish shops. It forced many Jews out of the country for good.
Some were deported and lucky enough to make it to safety in Great Britain, Canada or the United States. Others ended up in weigh stations in other countries before World War II broke out and brought Nazi domination and doomsday through the Final Solution in camps of death.
Gilbert offers vital details through survivors’ memories, many from children or teenagers on Nov. 9, 1938, when the Nazi Brownshirts came knocking at the doors to round up Jewish men for detainment in prison camps that became infamous concentration camps a few years later.
Many Germans joined in the violence against Jewish shops, synagogues, schools and even homes across the country. Other Germans stood by in shock as the assaults unfolded.
“I was on my way to school when I saw flames and smoke rising from the big synagogue. ... The fire engine stood by but did nothing. There was a huge crowd of people standing there and I remember clearly that there was a complete silence,” was the memory of Kristallnacht told by Henry Stern, a 14-year-old student in Stuttgart in 1938.
Some of the men taken away by the Nazis were starved, beaten and broken in spirit in the camps. They were forced to sign documents claiming they were treated right by the German authorities. Gilbert tells how some of the detainees never told the full details of their confinement to their families, fearing retaliation by the Nazis.
The German propaganda machine termed the assaults of Kristallnacht as a spontaneous outburst by the German people against violent acts of the Jews — the shooting of a German diplomat by a Jewish emigre in Paris on Nov. 7, 1938, sparked the Nazi onslaught.
Foreign press reports shot holes through the Nazi lies very quickly, as Gilbert recounts in vivid detail. There were also cases, as Gilbert shows, of Germans helping shelter or protect their Jewish neighbors.
There were herculean efforts to help Jewish children enter Great Britain well up to the final days before the second World War broke out in 1939. Gilbert was one of those lucky children finding safety in the darkest hour.
But the United States offered a cold shoulder to many European Jews seeking safety from the Nazis. State Department policies refused to raise the quotas to allow more Jewish refugees.
The SS St. Louis was held off the coast of America for weeks in 1939, full of hundreds of Jewish refugees. They were denied asylum repeatedly in America and Latin American countries.
The ship went back to Europe, where the German Blitzkrieg of World War II brought many back under Nazi control. Many later perished in the concentration camps.
Gilbert’s book shows Kristallnacht could not shatter the glass wall of prejudice against Jewish people even in America or elsewhere.
Contact Herb Meeker at hmeeker@jg-tc.com or 238-6869.
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