On 9 November
In November 1938, the persecution of the Jewish population in Germany entered a new, violent phase. During the November Pogroms, Jewish shops, houses and synagogues were violently destroyed and Jewish people were killed or deported to concentration camps. What impact did 9 November have in Switzerland?
On the night of 9–10 November 1938, the exclusion and mistreatment of the Jewish population in Germany reached a new level. Since 1933, the elected National Socialist (Nazi) government had enacted numerous laws that made life in Germany more and more impossible for Jewish people. On 9 November 1938, this policy and mentality were expressed physically in a planned and brutal manner against Jewish people, against Jewish businesses and homes, but above all against synagogues. Academic estimates indicate approximately 1,400 destroyed synagogues, 7,500 looted Jewish businesses, between 1,000 and 1,500 Jewish people murdered, and 30,000 Jewish men deported to concentration camps. That night was the beginning of the Shoah, the physical destruction of Jewish life.
How did this new level of violence come about?
The trigger for which the Nazis had been waiting was the assassination of the German envoy Ernst vom Rath in Paris on the morning of 7 November 1938 by Herschel Grynszpan, whose parents were trapped in the ‘no-man’s land’ between Poland and Germany. They had been expelled by Germany but not accepted by Poland – a fate shared by many Jewish people at the time. The Nazi terminology spoke of a Volkszorn, or ‘public anger’, which had apparently ‘erupted’ after the death of Rath on 9 November. However, the Nazis had already ‘tested’ this ‘public anger’ during the day and evening of 7 November in Kassel in northern Hesse, Germany. There, Jewish shops were looted, people attacked, and the synagogues desecrated and their interiors completely destroyed. There were no protests against it. Instead, people watched, even participated. The Nazis interpreted this as clear approval for further action, which then took place on 9 November.
And Switzerland?
Shortly before the pogroms, Switzerland and Germany had agreed on the ‘J stamp’ in the passports of Jewish German citizens in order to be able to recognise them more quickly at the border and to prevent people without a visa from crossing. Jewish people were not political refugees, but ‘illegal immigrants’, who were to be repatriated. Since the spring of 1938, after the annexation of Austria by Germany, there had been massive movements of Jewish people fleeing from Austria towards Switzerland, especially in the Rhine Valley. It is incomprehensible that the Swiss authorities could have underestimated the significance of the pogroms of November 1938 as the beginning of the extermination, given that the Swiss envoy in Paris, Walter Stucki, had a conversation afterwards with the German State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, who indicated to him that the approximately 500,000 Jewish people who remained in Germany would face extermination if they were not taken in by another country.
