Although the attacks were especially vicious in rural areas, Berlin, regarded hitherto as something of a refuge for Jews from the provinces, was also very hard hit. In preparation for the action there, Police Chief von Helldorf ordered that gas and telephone lines to Jewish houses and shops be cut off. Barricades were placed around the areas to be targeted. Then, at 2:00 A.M., SA groups received the signal to embark on their “spontaneous” rampage. They immediately set fire to nine of Berlin’s twelve synagogues, among them the famed temple in Fasanenstrasse, which was completely gutted. The huge “New Synagogue” in Oranienburger-strasse, by contrast, received only light damage because a courageous lone policeman held the SA at bay. A handsome red brick synagogue in Worthstrasse in Prenz-lauer Berg was spared because it stood next to valued non-Jewish buildings, including a brewery. Jewish-owned shops around town were stripped of their wares and then wrecked. SA men carried off the loot, joined by townspeople who could not pass up such a bargain. Other targets included Jewish aid organizations and the Zionist headquarters on Meineckestrasse, which was reduced to “splintered wood and mounds of torn records.” Thugs invaded Jewish mansions in Grunewald to arrest the men, rape the women, and collect the contents. The Jews who were pulled out of their suburban villas that night belonged to the hundreds of Berliners who were packed off to “protective custody,” mainly in Sachsenhausen. In the late afternoon of November 10, Goebbels went on the radio to announce that the anti-Jewish action had accomplished its “desired and expected purpose,” and was now over.
Burned-out interior of the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in the wake of the of the night of the Broken Glass
That morning young Peter Gay rode his bicycle on an inspection tour through “a city that seemed to have been visited by an army of vandals.” The facades of the Jewish-owned stores along Tauentzienstrasse “had been efficiently reduced to rubble, their huge display windows shattered, their mannequins and merchandise scattered on the sidewalk.” Over on Olivaerplatz, a ladies’ clothing shop owned by Gay’s uncle had obviously provided a night of entertainment for some Nazi thugs:
Its waist-high glass counters holding stockings, gloves and ladies’ underwear had proved irresistible; they had been smashed and their contents savagely torn to pieces. But the wall cabinets had given the wrathful German people avenging the death of vom Rath even more entertaining targets. One of the cabinets, well over five feet tall, with an array of shallow glass-fronted drawers, had held innumerable fine shadings of thread; the other, quite as high and as minutely subdivided, had contained buttons, with a sample sewn onto the front of each drawer. Both had been ripped from the wall and emptied pell-mell, their contents mingling with glass fragments strewn all over the floor. It was as though the store had been swept by a hurricane.
Scholars have suggested that Reichskristallnacht was a “degradation ritual,” a sadistic rite designed to let the Jews know that they were pariahs who could expect no protection from the state or their fellow citizens. Although intended primarily to intimidate the Jews, it served also to warn gentile Germans that they had best not show any sympathy for these outcasts. Fortunately for young Peter Gay and his mother, his father got the point. As a consequence of the pogrom, “a determination was born in him to do anything, no matter how illegal, to get the three of us away from the German nightmare.”
The response among the capital’s non-Jewish citizenry to this night of terror was mixed, as it was in other German cities. Some Berliners joined in the action, or at least took obvious delight in the Jews’ distress. Inge Deutschkron, a young Jewish girl living in a fashionable Berlin quarter, recalled a barber calling out to her father “Hey, you Jew!” as Herr Deutschkron inspected the damage to the Fasanenstrasse synagogue. Inge’s mother, unintimidated, wheeled on the barber and yelled, “You damn swine!” prompting admonishments from her husband to “keep quiet, for God’s sake.” Ursula von Kardorff saw some Nazi thugs beat up a young girl who had taken pictures of the pillaging. Nobody intervened to help her. Foreign journalists who witnessed the action reported that some citizens cried “Down with the Jews,” while others seemed “deeply disturbed by the events.” There were, in fact, plenty of expressions of outrage and shame. Watching the looting, a janitor was heard to remark: “They must have emptied the insane asylums and penitentiaries to find people who’d do things like that!” One group of elderly Berliners fell back in horror when SA looters offered them bottles of wine that they had just stolen from a Jewish-owned restaurant. A gentile shop owner could not understand why the police did not stop some children from throwing stones through the windows of a synagogue: “After all, it is private property.”
Expressions like this (and one could quote many more) suggest that much of the public dismay over the Night of the Broken Glass probably derived less from sympathy for the Jews than from outrage over the hooliganism of the perpetrators. These actions challenged deeply entrenched ideals of order and decorum. Some Berliners reasoned, moreover, that if the Nazis could do this with impunity to the Jews, could they not visit similar indignities on non-Jews? Or might not the Jews themselves find a way someday to punish all Germans for the Nazi crimes? As one woman predicted on the day after Reichskristallnacht: “We Germans will pay dearly for what was done to the Jews last night. Our churches, our houses, and our stores will be destroyed. You can be sure of that.”
The Nazi leadership was not uniformly pleased with the pogrom, and not just because of the ambivalent public response. Göring worried that it would be hard to replace all the fine Belgian glass smashed by the looters. Himmler was appalled by the disorderliness of the action, which he was afraid would give Germany a black eye abroad. He also hated to see the SA unleashed so soon after its recent “disciplining” by his SS. Unwilling to hold Hitler responsible for the fiasco, Himmler blamed “that airhead Goebbels,” whom he associated with the urban rowdiness and loose morals of the national capital. (Himmler, we should remember, was a Bavarian.)
Hoping to deflect further criticism of the action, especially from abroad, the Nazi leadership argued that the Jews had brought the riot on themselves by inciting “the people’s fury.” Accordingly, the regime levied a billion mark fine on Germany’s Jews to pay for the damages. In Berlin as elsewhere, local Jews were also required to pay for the cleanup following the pogrom. Goebbels called these measures “a nice bloodletting.”
But there was more to come. In the immediate aftermath of Reichskristallnacht, the Nazis instituted a new wave of “aryanization” designed to shift Jewish property to gentile hands. In Berlin the hands were eager, if discriminating: 1,200 Jewish firms were put up for auction, but 500 remained unpurchased because, even at rock-bottom prices, they were considered unattractive. Beginning in December 1938 Berlin’s Jews were forcibly segregated by a “ghetto decree,” which prohibited them from living in the government district or the wealthier western suburbs. One district after another was declared “Jew-free.” Jews’ movement in the city was further restricted by measures that banned them from theaters, movie houses, concert halls, museums, swimming pools, the exhibition buildings at the Funkturm, the Deutschlandhalle, the Sportpalast, and the Reichssportfeld. Off-limits too was the Wilhelmstrasse from Leipziger Strasse to Unter den Linden; the VoBstrasse from Hermann-Göring-Strasse to the Wilhelmstrasse, and Unter den Linden from the University to the Prussian Armory.