On the 71st Anniversary of Kristallnacht

Seventy-one years ago today, my grandfather Felix Müller was dragged from his home in Frankfurt to the Buchenwald concentration camp.  His brother, my great-uncle Leopold, was arrested at his home in Bad Kissingen and locked up in the local jail.  It was "Kristallnacht," the night of mass action against German Jews ostensibly to punish them for a Jew's having shot and killed a German consular official in Paris.

A few years ago, I found my great-uncle's Gestapo file in an archive in Würzburg, Germany.  It included this record of his November 10 arrest.

We tend to remember Kristallnacht as a moment in the larger episode we call "the Holocaust," and therefore can't help but see it as one step in a larger genocidal plan.  But that's not what it was at the time.  At the time, it was an act of reprisal against an internal enemy for that group's supposed collective responsibility for one individual's murder of a government officer.

It's worth noting that in today's New York Times, David Brooks takes the country to task for our "patronizing" speculation in recent days that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan might be something other than the evil jihadi Brooks understands him to be.  Says Brooks:  "If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage."  This rush from (rather than to) judgment "wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation," he argues.

On this seventy-first anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms, I beg to disagree. 

Comments

[Steven Lubet]

You make a good point about Kristallnacht, but your comment about Brooks is very unfair. Plans for Kristallnacht (or something like it) were at the heart of Nazi ideology, and the killing of Vom Rath was an excuse for something that would eventually have happened one way or the other.

Brooks doesn't argue for anything of the sort.

[Eric Muller]

Steven, I criticize Brooks for asserting that a "morally or politically serious nation" would not work against quick attributions of state-endangering motive in the name of avoiding backlash against innocents. I think something like the opposite is true: I think it's a sign of maturity that a nation would put the breaks on a mode of public theorizing that would endanger vulnerable innocents.

Clearly I do not suggesting that Brooks is arguing for lynch mobs.

What he does argue is that if we were serious about our security, we would play up rather than play down the theory that Hasan is a jihadi. He strongly implies that we as a country could handle such a strategy without risking serious harm to innocents. I am not so optimistic.

[David Bernstein]

Well, this works both ways: if we want to protect innocents, we must also acknowledge that 13 innocents were murdered, and it seems that this occurred in part that people didn't follow up on concerns about Hasan because they didn't want to be "insensitive" to issues of "diversity." Plus, people aren't stupid. People have enough reasons to mistrust the government without having the government "play down" events.

[Steven Lubet]

Dear Eric: In your comment you say, "Clearly I do not suggesting [sic] that Brooks is arguing for lynch mobs."

But your OP said, "On this seventy-first anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms, I beg to disagree [with Brooks]."

It certainly appeared to me that you were criticizing Brooks for encouraging violence against minorities. If not, then what precisely were you suggesting by cautioning Brooks about Kristallnacht?

[jordans 3]

I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, fear.