In this article I will be covering some of the issues of contention brought up in part one along with addressing further claims made by Holocaust fabulists. To play the role of defender of the official Kristallnacht narrative, I will employ Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDoT). A reminder on why I use HDoT in this way: HDoT is a project of Deborah E. Lipstadt, an orthodox historian and celebrated scholar of Holocaust studies, in collaboration with Emory University’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. Readers may also recognize Lipstadt as the envoy for the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism under Biden. HDoT is as official as it gets.
The Introduction to Kristallnacht from HDoT begins with the following paragraph:
Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) was a violent state-sponsored pogrom authorized by Adolf Hitler. It took place throughout Germany and Austria on November 9 and 10, 1938. The Germans claimed that the pogrom was a spontaneous public uprising in response to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath. Indeed, a Polish Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan shot vom Rath, a Nazi German diplomat, in Paris on November 7th (vom Rath died on the 9th). Grynszpan was angry over the recent deportation of his family, who had been living in Germany for some time. In October 1938, the Nazi government began rounding up Polish Jews living in Germany and deporting them to Poland. When the Polish government initially refused to admit the 12,000 deported Polish Jews (the Grynszpan family among them), the Polish Jews became stateless and were stuck along the Poland-Germany frontier regions. Conditions were poor and food was scarce.
I’d like to point out how it is not mentioned any where in this article why the German government was deporting the Polish Jews that were living in Germany. This is more of that one-sidedness that I talked about in part one.
Now, let’s ask ourselves why conditions were poor in the Poland-Germany frontier region. Better yet, let’s ask ChatGPT:
Oh, very interesting. Thank you, ChatGPT. If you have been keeping up with my “Who Started WW2” series, you will already know about the disastrous results the Treaty of Versailles. If not, you’d better get reading. HDoT would have you believe that the poor conditions were all Germany’s fault and they subjected Jews to these conditions on purpose. That clearly isn’t the case when things are put in context.
The next claim I’d like to examine comes from HDoT’s Kristallnacht: Damages and Death article. A claim that is also repeated in Wikipedia’s Aryanization article. To quote HDoT:
Irving claims that there were 100,000 Jewish shops in Germany at the time of the Kristallnacht pogrom. Realistically, by November 1938 most Jewish businesses had been ‘Aryanized’; that is, most Jewish-owned businesses had been forcibly sold to Germans. The Nazis made Jews sell their businesses far below actual value. This process of legalized theft meant that only about 9,000 businesses were still owned by Jews at the time of Kristallnacht. Irving’s starting figure of 100,000 Jewish businesses would mean that 7.5 percent of Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed. However, 7,500 destroyed businesses out of 9,000 constitutes a staggering 84 percent of Jewish-owned businesses that were damaged or destroyed.
I can quickly dismiss Wikipedia’s source as it’s just a pdf from Yad Vashem. A document which has no outside sources or citations whatsoever. Sorry, Yad Vashem, I’m not going to take your word for this claim.
Things are more convoluted with HDoT’s source. The figures HDoT uses, which comes from Richard J. Evans; David Irving, Hitler and Holocaust Denial. Evans’ says, “As the historian Avraham Barkai, an expert on the economic life of Jews under the Nazis, has discovered, according to official figures there were only about 9,000 Jewish shops left in the Altreich in July 1938. Thus, during the pogrom the vast majority of Jewish shops in Germany were destroyed“. The following is his citation for the claim:
The first problem here is that HDoT said “businesses” and their source said “shops”. As Evans’ citation points out, shops and businesses are not the same. The citation from above says that there were 30,000–40,000 Jewish businesses in the Altreich at the time of Kristallnacht, not just 9,000. It is clear to me that HDoT said 9,000 businesses instead of 9,000 shops because they wanted to make it seem like the NSDAP German government closed down a staggering 91,000 out of 100,000 Jewish businesses since Hitler took power, leaving on 9,000 businesses of which the majority of were destroyed during Kristallnacht. HDoT’s claim that “This process of legalized theft meant that only about 9,000 businesses were still owned by Jews at the time of Kristallnacht.“ is a false statement according to HDoT’s own source. Whether this was a mistake or a lie, the result is still the same. HDoT is an unreliable source of information.
The actual number of physical Jewish businesses is a point of contention that I am unable to conclusively solve. The German book that Evans referenced, Schicksalsjahr 1938, by Avraham Barkai, is unavailable to me and I cannot confirm the claim, which is something that needs to be done given the poor track record of reliability with these Kristallnacht claims.
I was, however, able to find the November 12th meeting that Evans referenced. During the meeting they did give figures for the number of Jewish owned businesses. But this was for Austria, not Germany. There is no mention of 9,000 Jewish shops. In fact, it is said that the total amount of Jewish stores is unknown and given the context they are most likely referring to the number of damaged Jewish stores:
Daluege: The number of Jewish stores is unknown. Until yesterday, 7,500 were reported to us
and the number does not increase.
Because I cannot confirm Evans source and I do not have access to the necessary German government economic records, I can only come to the conclusion that 7,500 out of an unknown number of physical Jewish businesses were damaged during Kristallnacht.
Lastly, we will examine the claim from HDoT that there were “No attempts were made whatsoever to quench the fires.” HDoT provides no direct source for this claim; however, a similar claim is also made in the Kristallnacht in Leipzig Wikipedia article:
I went to the source that Wikipedia provided for the claim and found the following paragraph:
The main Gemeinde synagogue in the Gottschedstrasse was attacked first. At 3:51 in the morning the fire department answered a call there, only to find the building engulfed in flames. The synagogue was too far gone; it remained only for them to prevent the fire from spreading to other buildings, which they were able to do. The fire department listed the cause of the fire as “unknown”. (my emphasis added)
So, Wikipedia, your source says the building was too far gone to be saved and they could only prevent the fire from being spread. That is very much different from only attempting to protect gentile property. Not only is Wikipedia misrepresenting what the source said, it is also using one instance to make generalizations about all the fires.
For Holocaust fabulists it is important that people believe that first responders were not serving the Jewish population. This is because they want you to believe the German government authorized and allowed the criminal behavior to happen. Continue to part three for more.