Herewith Part II of "Kristallnacht" - a jaundiced eye cast upon a widely accepted story. Ingrid Weckert, a German author and an eye witness to the early Third Reich years, speaks of her research and findings:
[start]
National Socialist Ethical Standards
I am always amazed whenever I read books about the Third Reich published after the war. Most give an almost totally false impression of the reality of the Third Reich. The Germany of Adolf Hitler was not the Germany described by such books. It was quite different. I was brought up during the Third Reich. Along with my entire generation, I received an education of the highest ethical standards. We were brought up to love and respect our country and people. We were taught to be proud of its great history. The heroes of Germany's past represented our great ideals. They spurred us to honesty and responsibility in our own lives. In my opinion, the youth of Adolf Hitler's Germany was the finest of all Europe and perhaps of the entire world.
The same ethical standards applied to the SS and SA. The SA stormtroopers were not sophisticated men. They usually preferred to use their fists before using their heads, but they acted according to the ideals which they had been taught: honor, faithfulness, honesty and devotion to their people and country. They were not at all the sadistic beasts portrayed by so-called historians. It was their faithfulness and gallantry which saved Germany from chaos and Communism. It is sheer stupidity to describe the SA men as blood-thirsty killers, as is widely done today. Although some individual SA men may have committed acts of brutality, it is nonsense to blame the entire organization or the whole German people and its government for such behavior. Individual SA men were indeed involved in the Crystal Night incident. But far fewer actually participated than has been claimed. Of the 28 SA Groups which existed in Germany at the time, the available evidence in- dentifies only three as having actually received orders to join the anti-Jewish demonstrations.
What Really Happened During the Crystal Night
Now let us look at what really happened during that fateful night.
After 1945 any harm ever done to any Jew in National Socialist Germany has been described in great detail in many publications and combined with other.stories to give exaggerated figures which have then become the so-called "historical truth."- How strange it is then that despite the passage of more than forty years, no one has established the true extent of the damage done to the Jews during the Crystal Night. All one can learn from history writers is that "all" synagogues were demolished and that "all" shop windows were destroyed. Aside from this vague description, one is given almost no details.
On the basis of the so-called "historical truth" about the Crystal Night, the President of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann, had the chutzpah in 1952 to claim 500 million dollars from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as reparation payment for the damage done during that Nosember night. When Adenauer asked Goldmann for his justification for this enormous request, Goldmann replied: "You find the justification yourself! What I want is not the justification but the money."7 And he got his money! Goldmann may have interpreted the willingness of the German Chancellor to pay a half billion dollars as proof for the claim that all synagogues had been destroyed. Why else would Germany be so foolish as to pay for something which never happened? All the same, the "historical truth" that "all" German synagogues were destroyed is a lie.
In 1938 there were approximately 1,400 synagogues in Germany, of which only about 180 were destroyed or damaged. Furthermore, Jews owned approximately 100,000 shops and department stores in Germany in 1938. Of this number, only about 7,500 had their windows broken. These figures show just how much the so-called "historical truth" differs from what actually happened. The damage and destruction that did actually occur was, of course, a terrible shame, but the exaggerations, especially by German historians who use them to condemn their own people, are also a shame.
History writers tell us that during the Crystal Night all the Jews were frightened, meekly accepted whatever happened to them and watched the destruction of their property with no resistance. The contrary is true. While going through the files on this subject, I found many documents which report precisely just the opposite of what is claimed. The fact is that in many cases Jews and their German neighbors fought together against the attackers, pushing them down staircases. Street mobs were beaten up and chased away in more than one case. Police and Party officials were generally on the side of the Jews. Some Jewish community leaders went to police stations the next morning and asked the police to investigate the damage done to their synagogues. The resulting police reports are still available in the files today.
Also contrary to what we have been told, most Jews were not directly affected by these events. In Berlin, for example, all of the teachers and pupils of the city's largest Jewish school, which served the entire Berlin area, appeared in their classes the next morning without having noticed anything unusual during the previous night. Heinemann Stern, the Jewish principal of that school, wrote in his postwar memoirs that he noticed a burning synagogue on his way to the school on the morning after the Crystal Night, but he thought it was just an accidental fire. It was only after he arrived at the school that he received a telephone call informing him of the destruction of the previous night. He then went on with his classes of the day and only during the first recess did he take the trouble to inform the entire student body about what had happened.8
How can such evidence be reconciled with the claim by Herman Graml, a prominent German historian and associate of the Munich Institute of Contemporary History, who wrote: "Every single Jew was beaten, chased, robbed, insulted and humiliated. The SA tore the Jews from their beds, mercilessly beat them in their apartments and then ... chased them almost to death ... Blood flowed everywhere."9 Is it conceivable that thousands of Jewish children would be have been sent to school by their parents on the morning after that fateful night if the attacks against Jews had been so horrific or extensive? Would any parents have let their children go to school if they had thought there was even the slightest danger of them being attacked by roving gangs of SA men? I think the answer is clearly no! Deplorable things did indeed happen which were bad enough, but the fantasies of modern historians and history writers such as Graml are simply inexcusable.
The Grynszpan Story
It was Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (Gruenspan) who initiated the entire Crystal Night affair by shooting the Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. History writers tell us that the 17-year-old Grynszpan was merely a poor Jewish boy who had been driven to despair by the injustice done to his family and who, in his deep depression, shot the young German diplomat. The fact, however, is that Grynszpan had not shown any previous interest in his family's fate. He had wanted to be free of them and had gone to Paris to live on his own.
When the French police asked Grynszpan why he had shot vom Rath, he gave several contradictory explanations:
Version 1: He did not mean to kill vom Rath. He had wanted to kill the German ambassador but because he did not know the ambassador personally, he shot vom Rath instead by mistake.
Version 2: He had only wanted to kill himself, but wanted to do so directly beneath a portrait of Adolf Hitler. In this way he hoped to become a symbol for the Jewish people, who were being murdered daily in Germany.'
Version 3: He had not intended to kill anyone. Although he had a pistol in his hand, he did not know how to handle it properly and it simply went off accidentally.
Version 4: He could not remember what had happened while he stood in vom Rath's office. All he remembered was that he was there, but did not remember why.
Version 5: He couldn't understand the question at all. He must have had a complete blackout because he no longer remembered anything.
And finally, version 6, which he gave several years later to German officials: Whatever the French police had written down about his reason was nonsense. The true story is that he used to procure young boys for the German embassy secretary because vom Rath had been a homosexual. And he shot vom Rath because he had not been paid for his services. This is the only explanation which he later retracted during interrogation. However, none of these explanations is correct.
The true story is far less heroic. Grynszpan had left his family in Hannover, Germany, in 1936 after finishing elementary school but without graduating. His father had been a piece-work tailor who had moved from Poland to Germany after the First World War. Herschel had a reputation for disliking work and he hung out at the homes of his uncles in Brussels and Paris. In February 1938 his Polish passport expired and the French government refused to renew his residence permit. As a direct result, his Paris uncle insisted that Herschel leave his home because he was afraid of getting into touble with the law. And now the story begins to get extremely interesting.
[end]
Tomorrow: Who Could the Provocateurs Have Been? - Part III
Courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review 'Crystal Night' 1938: The Great Anti-German Spectacle - Ingrid Weckert
(Paper Presented to the Sixth International Revisionist Conference.)
This and other Revisionist articles are posted, among many other websites, at www.ihr.org and www.vho.org
Thought for the Day:
"Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections."
(Vilefredo Pareto)