Violence, Memory, and History

Western Perceptions of Kristallnacht

Colin McCullough, Nathan Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134757848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

This edited collection delves into the horrors of November 1938 and to what degree they portended the Holocaust, demonstrating the varied reactions of Western audiences to news about the pogrom against the Jews. A pattern of stubborn governmental refusal to help German Jews to any large degree emerges throughout the book. Much of this was in response to uncertain domestic economic conditions and underlying racist attitudes towards Jews. Contrasting this was the outrage expressed by ordinary people around the world who condemned the German violence and challenged the policy of Appeasement being advanced by Great Britain and France towards Adolf Hitler's Nazi German government at the time. Contributors employ multiple media sources to make their arguments, and compare these with official government records. For the first time, a collection on Kristallnacht has taken a truly transnational approach, giving readers a fuller understanding of how the events of November 1938 were understood around the Western world.

1 Antisemitism and Racism in Britain

Assessing the Reaction to and the Legacy of Kristallnacht

Jodi Burkett

DOI: 10.4324/9781315879567-2

INTRODUCTION

On the night of November 10, 1938, Jewish people and businesses were attacked throughout Germany in what has historically been termed Kristallnacht or “the night of broken glass.” As the contributions to this book indicate, this event was widely reported by the foreign press. It was an early indication of how the Nazi regime would terrorize Europe’s wider Jewish population. As the contributions in this volume also demonstrate, reactions to this event varied and were highly determined by local contexts within individual states. The sociopolitical realities present in those states as well as the dynamics of their relationship with Germany influenced their reactions; the prevalence of antisemitism within their populations also had an effect. Throughout Europe in the 1930s it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find a population that did not harbor some form of antisemitism, and Britain was no exception to this. As such, the reactions of Britons and their government to Kristallnacht can provide insights into this broader historical issue.

Kristallnacht is retrospectively seen as a portent of the Holocaust. Yet the extent to which people living in 1938 could appreciate this omen has been hotly debated.¹ In the 1980s and 1990s, a growing literature emerged that discussed the degree to which so-called ordinary Germans knew about and participated in the Holocaust. This was part of a wider discussion concerning the actions or inactions of people in different geographic contexts; what could or should have been done to prevent Holocaust-related atrocities was a central query.² There was great interest in whether Allied governments— notably those of the United States of America and Great Britain—as well as Jewish individuals living in Allied countries had failed to save Europe’s Jewish population.³ This historiography has since been given the title of “bystander” history and has been accused of seeking “to find traces of Nazi genocide in the outside world, and then congratulate or condemn the manner in which surprising levels of accurate information pertaining to the Jewish tragedy were used or ignored.”⁴ Since the late 1990s these views have been widely criticized for reading history backwards.⁵ The current chapter and the volume to which it belongs attempt to add nuance to this story. By focusing on the reactions to and the legacy of Kristallnacht within a variety of states, we can begin to unpack the wide range of contexts that helped shape policies and attitudes toward Jews in those crucial years just prior to war’s outbreak.

British historiographical discussions of Kristallnacht have been subsumed within three wider discourses that address the political discussions regarding the policy of appeasement, the treatment of immigrants and refugees, and wider concerns about antisemitism within British society. By late 1938, the policy of appeasement espoused by the government of Neville Chamberlain was the subject of growing political and public debate. The events of Kristallnacht served to increase the pressure on the government to abandon this policy. Within wider debates about reactions to Kristallnacht, Britain has received some attention in relation to the number of Jewish refugees that it allowed into the country.⁶ This debate has questioned whether Britain did enough to help Jews escape from mainland Europe or whether its immigration policies were also shaped by antisemitism.

Britain has a long history of concern about immigrants and refugees entering the country. These concerns reemerged thanks to the number of people who were attempting to enter Britain from mainland Europe in the late 1930s.⁷ In Britain, attitudes toward immigrants were intimately bound up with questions of “race” and national identity, which were once again brought to the fore in the wake of Kristallnacht. Yet, this was further complicated by the widespread belief held by Britons that theirs was a “liberal” nation, leading the world in terms of human rights.⁸ Tony Kushner has explored the idea of liberalism in Britain and argues that this notion of Britain as a bastion of liberality does not preclude antisemitism but does create a somewhat contradictory attitude toward Jews.⁹ The view of Britain as a liberal nation was particularly widespread after the Second World War, when the British war effort was constructed as a people’s war against fascist racial tyranny.¹⁰ With hindsight it is extremely difficult to disaggregate any lasting impacts of Kristallnacht from those of the Holocaust more generally. As Gavin Schaffer has argued, the Holocaust changed the ways in which race and antisemitism were viewed, but its impact was neither equal nor uniform.¹¹ Instead, as Schaffer shows, antisemitism persisted in pockets of British society well into the postwar period.

It has been widely argued that Kristallnacht was a turning point in thinking about the plight of European Jews. It is also held to have provided tangible evidence of the extent to which the Nazis hated the Jews.¹² A close examination of British reactions shows that, while condemnation may have been swift from political quarters, particularly with regard to Britain’s foreign policy outlook, it is much harder to discern a significant change in popular attitudes—among everyday Britons, so to speak—toward the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In attempting to map reactions to Kristallnacht and antisemitism in Britain, this chapter approaches the question on a number of fronts. First, I explore public reactions to the pogroms in political and press circles. These two arenas were closely intertwined and are thus treated together. Second, I examine questions of antisemitism among the wider British public, exploring the extent to which the events of Kristallnacht altered everyday attitudes toward Jews. This is a much more complicated area due to lack of evidence. It is not possible to make sweeping statements about the extent to which the public was or was not antisemitic—no society is homogeneous in this way.¹³ This section, however, looks at two particular areas in relation to British antisemitism. First, it uses the archives of Mass Observation to look at antisemitic attitudes during the war. It then examines the far right in Britain. The far right, in particular Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) and postwar Union Movement (UM), has been the subject of a large body of historical literature. There has been a great debate within the literature about when exactly the BUF became antisemitic and whether this was an indigenous or exported attitude. There is even less agreement within the literature about whether, in the wake of the war and the Holocaust, Mosley and his supporters abandoned their antisemitism. What the evidence presented in this chapter shows is that, although Kristallnacht changed the nature of public debate and may have altered the course of politics and foreign policy in Britain, underlying attitudes toward Jews within the British public remained remarkably consistent. Kristallnacht and indeed the Holocaust for a period after war’s end seem to have exerted little influence on the way everyday Britons felt about Jews or the degree to which they sympathized with antisemitism.

REACTIONS TO KRISTALLNACHT WITHIN THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND PRESS

There is a great deal of literature about Britain’s relationship to Germany in the 1930s that concentrates upon the debate surrounding appeasement. These discussions of high politics tend to only touch upon Kristallnacht and its short-term consequences. Maurice Cowling, for example, sees Kristallnacht and Chamberlain’s reaction to its destructiveness as really being a discussion about the Munich accord. Cowling argues that Chamberlain felt he had to ignore events like Kristallnacht in order to maintain a good relationship with Adolf Hitler after the Munich deal was brokered. This, Cowling says, indicates that there was a fatality about Anglo-German relations.¹⁴ Others have been even more extreme in their sidelining of the November pogroms.¹⁵ Kristallnacht is credited only with increasing existing divisions within the cabinet about the wisdom of appeasement. Cowling points to Neville Henderson, a member of the diplomatic service stationed in Berlin between 1937 and 1939, and notes that he exonerated Hitler from any wrongdoing in relation to the pogroms. However, he also finds evidence that Lord Salisbury, Conservative member of the House of Lords and a political opponent of Neville Chamberlain, found the events of Kristallnacht “outrageous” and felt that they made negotiation impossible.¹⁶ Peter Neville also argues that Kristallnacht and in particular the reaction of the head of the British embassy in Berlin, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, to Kristallnacht helped transform the thinking of the Foreign Office about Germany.¹⁷ Parker also highlights the importance of Ogilvie-Forbes’s reaction to the events.¹⁸ However, the overriding impression given by these works about the reaction of the British government to Kristallnacht is that it was of minimal consequence. It may have helped shape thinking at the Foreign Office, but it was only one of a long series of events to do so.

A detailed examination of parliamentary debates shows that in the months before Kristallnacht, the plight of the Jews was discussed a number of times by the British political elite. These discussions were, however, always centered upon the entry of refugees to either Britain or Palestine and the colonies. The government was questioned many times about the number of Jewish refugees admitted to Britain from Germany and Austria. For example, on May 2, 1938, Sir J. Withers, a Conservative MP for Cambridge University, asked the government for the specific number of Jews who had entered Britain and how many had been naturalized. The government response, given by Sir Samuel Hoare, the secretary of state for the Home Department, showed the government’s desire to avoid giving concrete answers to such questions and to uphold Britain’s reputation as a bastion of liberality. He stated that the government did not:

Make inquiry as to the religion or race of any foreign person who seeks permission to enter the country or applies for naturalisation and it is not, therefore, possible to give the information asked for in the first part of the question. The statutory period of residence for naturalisation is five years and the second part of the question does not, therefore, arise.¹⁹

This quotation demonstrates a number of things about the British government’s attitude toward Jews and the widespread nature of some antisemitic ideas both in Parliament and in British society more generally. First, Hoare allows for the idea that Judaism is not simply a religious identity but also a racial one. The government’s desire to avoid answering the question suggests that it recognized that giving any sort of number would fuel the argument that a limit needed to be placed on these refugees. The issue of naturalization also shows an acceptance of the idea that any Jewish refugees were still very much foreigners. Although Withers may have been concerned that they would dilute the British stock, the government quickly pointed out that the question of naturalization was still many years away. This is not to suggest, however, that there were not voices within the British parliament who argued that more Jewish refugees should be allowed into the country. One of these calls came from George Lansbury, the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, on November 14, 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. He asked the government why it did not petition the Commonwealth countries to help find space for all remaining Jews in Germany, which he approximated to be 500,000 people. He a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Violence, Memory, and History
• 1 Antisemitism and Racism in Britain: Assessing the Reaction to and the Legacy of Kristallnacht
• 2 “One Country Alone Says Nothing”: French Press Reactions to “La Nuit de Cristal”
• 3 “An Accident in the Way of the Franco-German Policy of Appeasement”: Kristallnacht in France, 1938
• 4 Between “Just Punishment” and “Unthinkable Fascist Crimes”: Reactions to Kristallnacht in Civil War Spain
• 5 Uneven Perceptions: Kristallnacht in the Yiddish- and French-Language Press of Montréal
• 6 Hitler’s Assault on Civilization: Antisemitism and English Canada’s Response to Kristallnacht
• 7 “No Repercussions Down Under”? Australian Responses to Kristallnacht
• 8 The Historiography of the Kristallnacht
• Contributors
• Index