History Has Taught You Nothing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas
Next week marks the eighty-third anniversary of “Kristallnacht.”
We believe it is vital that we “Never forget!”
Father Roger and Father Skipper
In 2018, eighty years later, Ruth Winkelmann still remembered the night of November 9-10, 1938.
“Our father took me and my little sister in his arms that night, and said, ‘This is the beginning of a very difficult time, and we’ll try to live through it.”
His cautionary words were prescient.
The following morning, “… we saw broken shop windows and shards of glass lying in the streets. And then we saw a shop where someone had painted the word ‘Jew’, and smeared on a star of David.”
At school, “… we heard… that Jewish shops had been smashed up and people brutally killed. Shop windows had been broken everywhere and the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish pig’ written in many places
“In retrospect, I became a grown-up on that day. The pogrom night took away my childhood….”
Kristallnacht rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and Jewish institutions throughout Germany and Austria - burned in full view of firefighters who had orders not to interfere. Especially in Vienna and Berlin – the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich – Jews were attacked in their homes and forced to perform acts of public humiliation. Recent scholarship suggests hundreds were killed and even more may have died of their injuries in the days and weeks after the pogrom and contemporaneous police reports indicated a high number of rapes and suicides in the aftermath of the violence. As many as 30,000 Jewish men were ultimately transferred to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps in the first instance of massive incarceration of Jews based solely on their ethnicity.
On November 19, 1938, New York Times reporter Otto D. Tolischus told America
“A wave of destruction, looting and incendiaries [fires] unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years War [1618 – 1648] and in Europe generally since the Bolshevist revolution [1917 – 1923], swept over Greater Germany today as National Socialist cohorts took vengeance on Jewish shops, offices and synagogues...
“Beginning systematically in the early morning hours in almost every town and city in the country, the wrecking, looting and burning continued all day. Huge but mostly silent crowds looked on and the police confined themselves to regulating traffic and making wholesale arrests of Jews ‘for their own protection.’
“All day the main shopping districts as well as the side streets of Berlin and innumerable other places resounded to the shattering of shop windows falling to the pavement, the dull thuds of furniture and burning shops and synagogues… synagogue fires were merely kept from spreading to adjoining buildings.
While Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, protested, “There are times when the mere instincts of humanity make silence impossible,” the French newspaper La Lumiere warned,
“In the past, when we protested against massacres in Ethiopia, China, Spain, we were told, ‘Silence! You are warmongering.’ When we protested against the mutilation of Czechoslovakia, we were told ‘Keep quiet! You are a war party.’ Today, when we protest against the contemptible persecution of defenseless Jews and their wives and children, we are told, ‘Be silent! France is afraid.’”
On November 15, six days after Kristallnacht, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, opened a press conference declaring
“The news of the last few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States. Such news from any part of the world would produce a similar profound reaction among American people in every part of the nation. I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”
Nonetheless, Roosevelt, feeling the pressure of widespread isolationist and antisemitic feelings in Congress and the country and in his own administration, merely announced that the United States was withdrawing its ambassador to Germany; he offered no help to the thousands of Jews desperately attempting to escape the Third Reich. Americans were afraid of being drawn into another European war and unwilling to confront their own racism – the U.S. Army would not be officially integrated until President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948.
The front page of the November 23, 1938 Los Angeles Examiner headlined “Nazis Warn World Jews Will Be Wiped Out Unless Evacuated By Democracies.
While few Americans were violently antisemitic, there was a prevailing sense that Jews should be kept “in their place” and despite the fact that American immigration law provided for the admission of 27,000 German immigrants each year, the State Department allowed the immigration of approximately 5,000 in 1934, 6,000 in 1935, and fewer than 11,000 in 1936.
But Kristallnacht did not spring sui generis upon the world. On May 19, 1933, 40,000 Germans gathered in Berlin’s Opera Square to hear Joseph Goebbels declaration “No to decadence and moral corruption” to which the crowd responded “Yes to decency and morality in family and state!” as university students burned 25,000 “un-German” books. – ushering in an era of state censorship and cultural control.
Among books destroyed were those of any Jewish authors, regardless of the field of study, all books “degrading German purity,” the works of Albert Einstein, Victor Hugo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud, and the American Helen Keller, whose belief in social justice encouraged her to champion disabled people, pacificism, improved conditions for industrial workers, and women’s voting rights. On May 9, 1933, Helen Keller published an "Open Letter to German Students":
"History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people. Do not imagine your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His Judgement upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung round your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.”
In a foretaste of some American prejudices and attempts at censorship in 2021, among the works burned on May 6, 1932 were those of Dr. Magnus Hirschfield’s Institut fur Sexualwissenchaft (Institute of Sexual Research), whose unique collection included works on intersexuality, homosexuality, and transgender topics. Numerous reports indicate that Dora Richter, the first transgender woman known to have undergone sex reassignment surgery, was killed during the attack.
In January 1939, the Gallup polling organization began asking Americans: “It has been proposed [A bipartisan bill crafted by Sen. Robert Wagner, a New York Democrat, and Rep. Edith Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican] to bring to this country 10,000 refugee children from Germany – most of them Jewish – to be taken care of in American homes. Should the government permit these children to come in?”
A [hopefully today] frightening 61% said the government should not permit the children to enter the country – despite the fact that, because they were children, they presented no danger of taking away American jobs. Even more frighteningly, Laura Delano Houghteling, wife of the US commissioner of immigration and cousin of President Roosevelt, warned “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”
In May 1939, the German liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg for the port of Havana, Cuba, carrying 937 passengers; most were Germans, some from eastern European countries, and a few officially “stateless,” almost all were Jewish refugees. When the Cuban government canceled their landing permits – despite the best efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the United States and Canada proved equally unwilling to admit the desperate passengers, who could see the lights of Miami as the ship sailed north through the night.
“It is useless now to discuss what might have been done. There seems to be no help for them now. The St. Louis will soon be home with her cargo of despair,” declared a New York Times editorial writer. “If these Jews were to find a home [in Canada], they would be followed by other shiploads… the line must be drawn somewhere,” said Canadian immigration minister Frederick Blair.
Although Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands admitted some and other passengers were eventually able to obtain immigration visas to the US, 254 passengers were ultimately killed in the Holocaust.
The fate of the St. Louis passengers should not have surprised anyone. On September 15, 1935 Hitler’s regime announced the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Because Hitler saw the presence of Jews in Germany as a threat to the “Aryan race,” the law defined a citizen as a person who is “of German or related blood” and Jews were defined as a separate race – regardless of how many centuries their families had lived in German provinces. The Protection Law banned “Rassenchande” – “race defilement” – through intermarriage and sexual relationships to prevent “mixed race” children from defiling German purity.
Subsequent laws demanded that Jewish children be given Jewish first names, selected from a government-approved list; required the letter “J” to be stamped on Jewish passports; and, beginning in September 1941, required Jews in Nazi Germany to wear a yellow, six-pointed star with the word “Jude” in the middle.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s German army invaded Poland; two days later France and Britain declared war on German. World War II had begun.
At the end of October 2021, the American Jewish Committee announced that nearly one in four American Jews had been subject to antisemitism over the past year; 17% of respondents said they had been the subject of antisemitic remarks in person and 12% on-line; and, three percent said they were the target of an antisemitic physical attack. Thirty-nine percent of American Jews reported having changed their behavior in the previous year in order to avoid posting online content or wearing items that would identify them as Jewish.
Some 90% of American Jews think antisemitism is a problem in the U.S., as opposed to just 60% of the general population.
In August 2021, the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association listed a series of “the most banned and challenged books of the past three years,” including Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, and the entire Harry Potter series.
Yet, on Halloween 2021, Texas Governor and would-be presidential candidate Greg Abbott wrote a letter to the state association of school boards decrying “pornographic or obscene” books in Texas school libraries. Clearly, the governor does not understand that no one – especially middle and high school and college kids - reads pornography; it’s free on the Internet. Just ask the kids. They’ll tell you how to find it, Governor.
In July 2021, following a 50-state canvass of state officials, Bloomberg Government reported, “Prosecutors across the country found evidence of voter fraud compelling enough to take to court about 200 times since the November 2018 election… nearly all of the instances found by state officials were insignificant infractions during a timeframe when hundreds of millions of people participated in thousands of elections around the country.”
At the end of August 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union reported “in recent years, more than 400 anti-voter bills have been introduced in 48 states. These bills erect unnecessary barriers for people to register to vote, vote by mail, or vote in person. The result is a severely compromised democracy that doesn’t reflect the will of the people. Our democracy works best when all eligible voters can participate and have their voices heard.”
Heading into the 2022 and 2024 elections, some politicians are preparing to appeal to a segment of the population by promising, again, to “repeal birthright citizenship” and, like German Jews who never knew another country or homeland, DREAMERS – some of America’s best and brightest – continue to await their expulsion.
History repeats itself.