You might know that today is the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when vast state-endorsed terror against German and Austrian Jews was unleashed. I want to mention a few facts about the events of Kristallnacht that aren't very well remembered by the general public.
First, a couple already-known facts bear repeating. Mobs, encouraged by Nazi officials, played a horrific role in violence against their fellow citizens.
In addition, despite five years of prior harassment, arrests, and punitive laws under Nazi rule, Kristallnacht was a watershed moment in the brutalization of German Jews.
(While I wrote that mobs played a role in violence against their fellow citizens, of course, they had *previously* been fellow citizens, because the state had made sure that German Jews were no longer citizens by the time they encouraged this kind of violence.)
Here, however, is what is sometimes missed with regard to Kristallnacht. Approximately 40,000 Jews were arrested in this brief window, with some 30,000 sent to concentration camps. Yet nearly all of them were released.
Less than a year after Kristallnacht, only 1,500 Jews were still held in the entire Nazi concentration camp system. So some 95 percent of those Jews arrested during Kristallnacht were no longer in camps.
Some, tragically, were dead, as a result of the savagery the detainees had faced. But the vast majority were released. Though they were generally brutal and horrific places, detention in Nazi concentration camps at that point was not a death sentence.
In addition, before Kristallnacht, concentration camps had not been the main instrument used to oppress German Jews. This kind of mass detention of Jews was new.
They released German Jews from concentration camps after Kristallnacht because they wanted them to leave. But the world's inaction in the face of such monstrosity & its continued refusal of refugees led the Nazis to realize that terrorizing Jews into fleeing would not be enough.
German Jews had made up less than 1 percent of the population of Germany during the middle of the Weimar Republic in 1925. Once the Nazis launched World War II, they were invading areas to the east with much higher Jewish populations.
Overcrowding in existing or expanded camps during wartime degraded conditions to a horrific level in many places well before the full mid-war institution of the Final Solution and genocide. Yet the camps pre- and even briefly post-Kristallnacht were much less lethal.
Why does this matter? Because it took five years of grotesque laws, propaganda, and a much less dangerous camp system for the Nazis to unleash violence against Jews on a vast level. It took six years and a war to turn the camps into something that spiraled out of Nazi control.
And it took almost a decade of building a concentration camp system and culture for even the Nazis to conceive of camps as a tool that could sit at the heart of genocide.
Camps had to be legitimized, laws had to be passed, & people had to be taught fear of a (bogus) alien threat. It took time. Germany was more ripe for this approach than a lot of countries (and its crimes, thankfully, have yet to be equaled), but the formula has worked many times.
France offers an interesting counterexample from the same era. Plenty of people in France also hated Jews. Antisemitism was spouted from the floor of the French legislature. The country had grotesque magazines, graffiti, & caricatures that would have fit in nicely in Nazi Germany
And French policemen and the Vichy regime *did* do awful things during the war. (Read my book to get the full story on French culpability.)
YET, despite apparent Nazi efforts to help domestic right-wing groups bomb synagogues in France more than a year after the beginning of the Occupation, two days of organized terror in October 1941 did not lead to the Kristallnacht-style event that the Nazis had hoped for.
A publication of the German command noted that month, "Although they do not like the Jews, the French are displeased when they see Jews massacred and when their places of worship are blown up." (From Renee Poznanski's excellent book JEWS IN FRANCE DURING WWII.)
Though there were many reasons for this, a key one was that the French had not been forcibly subjected to propaganda while living in a police state for very long, & the Nazis had not yet learned how to fan existing bigotry & transform it into a machine for its own purposes there.
In other words (in addition to French society having some key differences), the Nazis and their allies did not have the same skill with their intended targets or enough time to move the population to achieve the same effect.
However, if a society begins to accept extrajudicial detention of certain groups, if a party or government can present propaganda as fact to a substantial part of the population for long enough, it is foolishness to assume that the institutions of that society would remain intact
Are you likely to end up with genocide and the kinds of concentration camps that Auschwitz represents? No, you're highly unlikely to ever get there. But you're far more likely to get to something like Kristallnacht. And that is when events begin to spiral out beyond prediction.
