In early 1938, in the weeks leading up to the March Anschluss, Adolf Eichmann was dispatched to Vienna as a specialist on Jewish affairs to organize forced Jewish emigration. Once in Vienna, he found an enormous punch card operation working around the clock. The Hollerith program superseded every other aspect of German preparations.19
“For weeks in advance [of the Anschluss],” remembered Eichmann, “every able-bodied man they could find was put to work in three shifts: writing file cards for an enormous circular card file, several yards in diameter, which a man sitting on a piano stool could operate and find any card he wanted thanks to a system of punch holes. All information important for Austria was entered on these cards. The data was taken from annual reports, handbooks, the newspapers of all the political parties, membership files; in short, everything imaginable…. Each card carried name, address, party membership, whether Jew, Freemason or practicing Catholic or Protestant; whether politically active, whether this or whether that. During that period, our regular work was put on ice.”20
The German racial census scheduled for May 1938 was postponed a year to allow Dehomag to draw up new plans to count the population of Austria as well. Dehomag opened several additional branches throughout the greater Reich to accommodate the extra load. More than twenty-five offices would tackle the task of profiling the expanded base of some 70 million Germans and Austrians.21
Hitler’s reign of terror against the Jews continued throughout 1938 to the continuing astonishment of the world. The final stage of confiscation was launched on April 27 as the Reich ordered Jews to register virtually all possessions.22 Hollerith machines were kept busy tabulating assets.
Conditions in Nazi Germany became ever more nightmarish. Beheading was adopted as the dreaded new punishment of the unappealable Peoples’ Court, which adjudicated in secret but announced its executions to the world media as a warning to all those the Reich considered special enemies. Scores of ghastly concentration camps were opened throughout the Greater Reich, each spawning its own infamy of cruel torture and degradation depicted in the newsreels and magazines of the day. Mob violence during the day, a dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night, humiliating public campaigns, and endless decrees forcing Jews further into starvation and impoverishment rained terror on Jewish existence in the Greater Reich.23
World revulsion against Germany was inspired not just by its anti-Semitic outrages, but by a continuous assault of highly publicized oppression against Catholics, Protestant church groups, intellectuals, and others the Nazis did not agree with.24 Hitler’s war menacing clearly identified Czechoslovakia for imminent takeover. Poland and France seemed next. Many thought it was just a matter of time before Europe re-ignited into a total war that America would be compelled to enter. It became increasingly hard for anyone to argue Germany’s case, even euphemistically in code. Then came the turning point for Americans and indeed the world: Kristallnacht—The Night of the Broken Glass.
November 10, 1938, on the twentieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender in the Great War, all Germany exploded into a national pogrom of depravity and violence against Jews heretofore not seen. The Reich’s pretext was the assassination of a German consular official in Paris by a despondent Jewish refugee. Within hours of the news, disciplined cadres of shock troops driving in open cars, directed by uniformed SA leaders, with merciless synchrony, deployed in virtually every town and city of the Third Reich during the early hours. Almost on cue, Hitler’s Germany erupted into a tempest of shattered glass. Store panes, display cases, fixtures, office doors, and ordinary windows—if it was glass, the Nazis smashed it. Synagogues, cafes, schools, offices, homes—wherever there was unexcised Jewish presence, the Brown Shirts struck.25
Then Jewish possessions were systematically ripped, splattered, and looted. Brown Shirts spread Torahs across the ground and danced upon the scrolls. Furniture was thrown into the street. Valuables were carted away as trophies. Pictures, books, and curtains were torn.26
Kerosene came next. Floors and drapes were methodically doused. An enthusiastic drenching was reserved for Torahs, prayer shawls, holy books, and devotional bimahs in synagogues. Tossed matches. Rolled incendiary bombs. Lobbed petrol bombs. Nearly everything Jewish was set aflame. Not just in Berlin. Not just in Vienna. In every town and city of the Third Reich.27
More than 15,000 Jews dragged from their homes were brutalized before the cheering onlookers, herded into trucks, dispatched to jails, and in many cases, directly to concentration camps. Firemen watched the flames with laughter, taking care that neighboring Aryan structures were unaffected. Policemen studiously directed traffic, allowing the marauders complete freedom of operation.28
Here among the ruins was the final overnight summary of Jewish existence in Germany and a prophecy for their bleak fate in Europe. Jewish life would ultimately be incinerated everywhere. The consequences of identification had been irrevocably unmasked. Whatever doubt the world had about the intentions of the Hitler regime, that doubt vaporized with the curls of smoke rising from hundreds of synagogues and Jewish offices in Germany.
Newspapers, newsreels, and radio broadcasts across the globe burned with headlines condemning Hitler’s Reich as savage and barbarous. The New York Times printed a tall page one banner headline: “Nazis Smash, Loot and Burn Jewish Shops and Temples.” The newspaper tellingly noted that the only Vienna synagogue not torched was one “that the authorities have protected… because it contains records of the Jewish community of Vienna that could not be replaced.”29
Washington recalled its ambassador from Berlin. Western diplomats called for concerted action to stem the anti-Semitic outrages. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a sharply worded denunciation in which he personally penned the words, “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.” Gallup Polls asked whether Hitler could be believed when he said he had no more territorial ambitions in Europe beyond Czechoslovakia; 92 percent of American respondents and 93 percent of British respondents declared Hitler could not be believed. Hitler’s followers in America had already been prosecuted in high-profile cases under various civil rights statutes. Now, the term “Nazi sympathizer” became widely used. And Nazi collaboration and propagandizing was deemed sufficiently subversive and “un-American” that eventually a special Congressional committee investigated.30
American reaction to the riots was almost wholly disregarded by Hitler. After Kristallnacht, Jews were forced to vacate their apartments, sometimes on just a few days’ notice, as Hitler loyalists queued up to move in. In Munich, all Jewish families were given just forty-eight hours to permanently leave the city. The order was soon rescinded as impossible—although later the demand was re-imposed. Jews were collectively fined 1 billion marks for inciting the Kristallnacht riots. And the last phases of confiscation and asset registration were set in motion.31