Witness to Kristallnacht — November 9, 1938

Johannes U. Hoeber’s eyewitness account of Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938. (Click image for larger view.)

The following is the unedited account by my father, Johannes U. Hoeber, of what he experienced on the night of November 9-10, 1938 in the large north German city of Düsseldorf . 

Wednesday November 9, 1938.  The Nazis had been celebrating that day, as every year, the anniversary of Hitler’s 1923 putsch.  That night an old friend of ours had come to see us.  We had been associated in the early days of the Third Reich in some underground activities, trying to build out of the remainders of the Catholic, liberal, Socialist and Communist opposition a group of resistance against the rising tide of Fascist tyranny.  He had been caught in 1934 circulating illegal leaflets and sentenced to 18 months hard labor.  He had served his term and now lived in a small village far remote from his former center of activities.  He rarely could risk to come to see us, because no Gestapo agent would have believed either him or us that we would talk anything but politics.  Only a few weeks before he and we had again been subject to a Gestapo investigation and therefore had to be more on our guard than ever before.

The conversation had centered around the recent political events, Chamberlain’s Munich surrender and its repercussions on Germany’s internal policy.  Munich undoubtedly had bolstered the regime’s declining morale and everybody viewed with alarm the reviving arrogance of the Nazis after a period of relative moderation.  Incidentally our friend told us that he had heard on his way to our house that Herr vom Rath, secretary of the Paris German embassy, who had been shot by a young Polish Jew, driven to despair by the treatment of his parents by the Nazis, had died that afternoon.  We did not discuss the implications of this news item.  Not because we did not fear them.  But in the past six years of our life under the Nazi government we had developed a habit that might be called a technique of mental self defense:  not to speculate on the possibilities of disaster implied in any news, before we were confronted with this disaster and could cope with the concrete emergency by concrete maneuvers.  No one of our company that night was Jewish but we all had some very close Jewish friends.  I myself have some Jewish ancestors, not enough to make me subject to the humiliating clauses of the infamous Nüremberg laws, yet enough to brand me as a second class citizen in the Germany of today, the Germany of the Bohemian born Hitler, the Egyptian born Hess and the Baltic born Rosenberg.

The possible consequences of vom Rath’s death were uppermost in my mind, when I drove to the station at about 11 p.m. to mail some letters.  [Illegible] in the streets I noticed an unusually large number of brownshirts.  First I thought they were on their way home from some of the day’s celebrations.  Then I noticed that they did not go in the direction of the residential quarters but hurried towards the center of the city.  So, on my way home, I drove through some of the main thoroughfares of the downtown business section and found on two different places brownshirts gathering quietly in front of Jewish business establishments.  I went home and without telling my wife what I had seen offered our friend who had to leave at midnight to drive him to the station and asked my brother in law to accompany us.  After having dropped our friend at the station we hastily drove downtown.  We had not to drive very far to find what we had anticipated.  In front of a large shoe-store, owned by a Jewish woman whose husband had been killed in action in the world war and who therefore, despite of six years of Nazi boycott, had still one of the largest businesses in the field, a detachment of brown shirts had assembled.  We just came in time to see two of them starting – on a given signal – to break the shop windows.  This done they forced the entrance and the whole group rushed into the store.  It was one of those modern outfits with plenty of glass, attractive wood paneling on the walls, every shelf full of shoe-boxes.  Twenty minutes later it was so completely devastated that no bombshell could have done a more thorough job.  No piece of glass, no piece of wood was unbroken.  The carpets were cut up, the lamps torn from ceiling and walls, shelves, tables, chairs smashed to pieces.  The problem to destroy thousands of shoes in a hurry otherwise than by fire had been solved in an ingenious way:  they had been strewn all over the place and then oil paint had been poured over and into them.  When they had finished their job the wrecking crew on the blow of a whistle assembled in front of the store, in a line two deep, stood at attention in perfect military discipline, drilled into them by endless training, and marched off.

We got into our car and drove on.  A few blocks away we encountered another group of stormtroopers looting a fashionable lady’s outfit store.  This was on our city’s “Fifth Avenue” and the wrecking crew corresponded to the distinction of the district.  Our city is the seat of a higher district leader of the Nazi party.  Every such district leader has a staff of his own and a body guard of his own whose members are easily recognized by red squares on the lapels of their brown uniform coats.  The squad that wrecked this store was composed almost entirely out of members of the district leader’s staff and body guard under the personal command of a well known Nazi-Lawyer and S.A. officer.  A few yards away a police car with two higher police officers was parked at the curb.  The two officers watched with apparent interest the work of destruction carried out under the leadership of the chief aide of their superior.

The next time we stopped in front of a tailor’s workshop.  Here a particular problem presented itself to the wrecking crew:  how to destroy the stock of bolts of cloth.  It was solved no less efficiently than the shoe problem had been solved:  one man unrolled the bale and another poured ink over it from one end to the other.  Then they left it lying in the street.

After an hour of driving around town we were convinced that not one single Jewish business in [Düsseldorf ] would survive that night and that more than a hundred thousand people would have to pay for one man’s act of despair with the destruction of their lives’ work and their basis of existence.

What happened during the next hour, however, outgrew the wildest anticipations any one of us, trained by six years’ lessons of terror and used to incredible brutalities, had ever entertained.  At 1.30 A.M. we stopped in front of an apartment house, because we noticed two SA sentries guarding the house-door.  On the opposite pavement stood a small group of civilians looking at a brightly lighted apartment on the fourth floor.  We joined them and asked one of them what were going on.  “They are revenging von Rath” he said.  “Which firm has its offices up there?” I asked.  “That is no office, that is a private apartment occupied by a Jewish tenant.”  Before we could continue our conversation one of the S.A. sentries came across the street and ordered us to move on.  A few seconds later the windows of the apartment came down in splinters and one after the other the lights went out in the apartment, the last one being a large crystal lamp that we saw wildly swinging up and down before we heard it crashing to the ground.

Then panic gripped us. …

The account ends here. Johannes and my mother, Elfriede, spent the rest of the night and the next day helping rescue friends and neighbors whose homes had been attacked.  Then, three days later, Johannes fled to Switzerland and from there to America.

November 9th this year [2013] marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when the Nazis launched the most vicious attacks to that point against Germany’s Jews and their businesses, homes and synagogues.   This account, written in English in a tiny, painstaking script on small sheets of tablet paper, was discovered among Johannes’ papers in May 1989, 22 years after he died and some 50 years after he wrote it.  

Johannes U. Hoeber, 1938

NOTE ON THE TERM “KRISTALLNACHT”: In Germany, the events described here are known as Reichspogromnacht, or the night of the pogrom of the Third Reich.  The term Kristallnacht suggested the breaking of crystal, implying that the Jewish victims that night were wealthy.  The current usage in Germany avoids that derogatory stereotype.  I have nevertheless used the term “Kristallnacht” in this English version because the events are still known by that term in the United States.

More stories about the Hoeber family are to be found in Against Time: Letters from Nazi Germany, 1938-1939, published by the American Philosophical Society. Information is available here. Also available at Amazon.com