The Long Path to Auschwitz – Part 3

Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes

Part III: 1939 to 1941: Kristallnacht to the Final Solution

Kristallnacht: A Nazi Pogrom

On the night of November 9–10, 1938, a nationwide anti-Jewish riot swept across Germany. Twenty-four hours of state-sponsored terror ensued. Synagogues were burned while firefighters watched, Jewish-owned shops were vandalized and looted, and 26,000 Jewish men were arrested, humiliated, and thrown into the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. This time of violence, conceived and executed by radicals within the Nazi party, has come to be known as Kristallnacht. (*5)

Kristallnacht was the first time that the Nazi regime arrested German Jews for no reason other than that they were Jewish. Many men were pulled from their beds and taken to prison in their pajamas. Sent on to concentration camps where conditions were brutal, the arrested men died from beatings and illness. After six weeks, most who were still alive were released if they promised to leave Germany immediately. The men―fathers, sons, and brothers―returned to their families covered in bruises, their heads shaven, thin, and shaken―broken men changed forever.

In response to the news of Kristallnacht, London newspapers condemned the mobs on the streets of German cities. Soon the British government began the rescue effort known as the Kindertransport, which allowed unaccompanied minors from Germany to enter the UK as refugees. Sympathetic outcry came from the US as well, and the United States withdrew its ambassador from Berlin.

In Germany, much of the populace was angered by the Kristallnacht riots, though perhaps they were more upset by the destruction and unrest than by the treatment of their Jewish neighbors.

As depicted in my novel, Immigrant Soldier, my grandmother and my uncle Herman, the youngest of her children, were among the Jews still in Germany during Kristallnacht. Mother and son remained in their homeland while other family members had fled. Whether it was denial that kept them in Germany or false confidence that they were safe because of their family’s wealth and assimilation, after Kristallnacht everything changed.

In the early morning hours of November 10, Herman evaded arrest and found refuge in his widowed mother’s apartment. A young man of only nineteen, he hid in the small apartment for six weeks. He realized it was past time to emigrate and, once the immediate danger had passed, he filed the necessary paperwork and traveled to the safe-haven of his uncle’s home in London. Six months later, Clara (Herman’s mother and my grandmother) finally fled too, just days before local police began to herd the city’s Jews into ghetto housing.

Kristallnacht marked a new stage in the Nazi government’s Jewish policies. From this point on, persecution accelerated, and events moved steadily toward the “Final Solution,” an emerging policy that would lead to gas chambers and crematoria.

An assault of restrictions: The list of prohibitions grows.

For those Jews still in Germany, life was restricted from every side. Jews must sit on special yellow benches in public parks. They were barred from swimming areas altogether. They endured strict curfews. Signs at restaurants and shops declared “Jews not wanted here!” Jews were forced to add the names “Israel” and “Sara” to their identification documents, and Jewish passports were stamped with a large red J. Worst of all, they had to constantly avoid SA thugs who roamed the streets looking for Jews to bully or beat.

In the spring of 1939, the Nazi regime added to the segregation of the remaining Jews by moving them into controlled communities away from the general German volk. With the aid of new rental laws, municipalities moved their Jews into abandoned buildings turned into Jew houses (Judenhäuser) or into ghetto camps in old barracks.

War

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and WWII erupted. The war offered Hitler an opportunity to test Jewish policy he had not dared to try in Germany. Special “Death’s Head” SS units followed the German military when they invaded Poland and, later, Russia. Mass murders followed, starting with Jewish men and soon devolving into the murder of women and children. The takeover of Poland brought two million Polish Jews under German authority. The fall of Russia brought an additional four hundred thousand. The Jewish population under German authority grew as the war continued to gobble up countries. Hitler wanted all Jews liquidated, and the search was on for an efficient method to accomplish this mammoth task.

Restrictions escalate: The beginning of the end.

While the killing of Jews became normalized in the conquered countries of Eastern Europe, back in Germany the Jewish situation had deteriorated too. With war raging throughout Europe, the Nazi government was no longer concerned with the opinions of the international press. Anti-Semitic laws fell on the German-Jewish population like hailstones in a storm.

Almost immediately, all radios were confiscated. Not long after, Jews were forbidden the use of rental libraries and the purchase of magazines and newspapers. This effectively cut them off from any news.

One after another, they were stripped of everything they owned—first luxuries like furs, electrical appliances, cameras, and binoculars. The confiscation of typewriters made letter writing difficult. The loss of bicycles forced Jews already barred from buses and streetcars to walk wherever they needed to go. Finally, they were forbidden even small conveniences as simple as razors and hair scissors. Jewish men could not trim their beards, and Jewish mothers could no longer cut their children’s hair. The list of prohibitions was endless.

As wartime rationing took effect, Jews were issued fewer coupons for limited types of foods, and their shopping hours were restricted to the late afternoon when shelves were already bare. Those few Jews who still had jobs were deprived of holiday or wage benefits other Germans received. Crammed into dilapidated buildings, whole families sharing one room, with little to eat and no resources, their situation was desperate.

On September 1, 1941, all Jews in the Reich were ordered to wear an identifying badge—a yellow Star of David with the word “Jew” written at the center. Women frantically sewed the requisite cloth star on their threadbare coats and jackets. The new law demanded that the star be clearly visible, and from then on, any Jew without a star on their outer clothing was subject to arrest. A few wore the star proudly, but most found it humiliating, akin to being branded.

By this time, my family’s story was taking place in California and London. They were among the lucky ones who no longer lived under Hitler’s government. Most of their extended family members (cousins, aunts, and uncles) were scattered across the globe, everywhere from New York to Chicago, from Argentina to Palestine. One uncle and his niece found refuge in Shanghai, where they were soon in a ghetto administered by the Japanese. Many of the deep connections between family members were broken for decades, if not forever . . . but at least most of my relatives were alive.

The Final Solution: The coordinated and planned mass murder of European Jews

In July of 1941, the mass killing of Jews was officially authorized by Herman Göring with Hitler’s approval and backing. Already, several killing centers built especially to murder large numbers of people existed.

On January 20, 1942, a group of top Nazi Party officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”—the eradication of the Jewish race in Europe. The policy was decided. The men who participated in the Wannsee Conference were tasked simply with devising the best way to implement it.

Later, in 1942, slowly at first, the deportations of German Jews began. In the beginning, many were sent to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia that the Nazis touted as a “model ghetto” but which was actually a transit camp from which trains left regularly for Auschwitz and the gas chambers.

The Final Solution was the result of the accumulated persecutions of the previous nine years. Hitler was determined to get what he and his most ardent followers had wanted all along—a Judenfrei Greater Germany. But his obsession would, in the end, devastate the newly revised economy and detract from the war effort. Some believe that the efforts expended to kill six million Jews caused the Third Reich to lose WWII.

*5 – (see Remember Kristallnacht)

*

Note to readers: This article makes no attempt to cover all aspects of Germany’s Jewish policy or the Holocaust. I have not dealt with the plight of Gypsies, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, or the many others persecuted during the Nazi years. I have left out the horror visited on the Jews of Eastern Europe. I have not dealt with the execution of the Final Solution. My intention is to show the incremental aspect of Jewish persecution from 1933 to 1941 in the German homeland. Specifically, I have concentrated on aspects of Jewish policy that affected my family and thus affected the characters, both real and fictional, who people my novels, Immigrant Soldier and Ashes and Ruins.

To purchaseImmigrant Soldier

To purchaseAshes and Ruins

Bibliography

For those who want to learn more, the book by Peter Hayes, Why? Explaining the Holocaust, is perhaps the most accessible to the general reader.

• Beck, Hermann; Before the Holocaust:  Antisemitic violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions During the Nazi Takeover; Oxford University Press; 2022
• Blumenthal, W. Michael; The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews, a Personal Exploration; Counterpoint; 1998
• Browning, Christopher R; The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Policy, September 1939 – March 1942; University of Nebraska Press and Yad Yashem; 2004
• Hayes, Peter; Why? Explaining the Holocaust; W.W. Norton & Company; 2017
• Hogan, David J. (editor); The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures; Legacy Publishing, 2009
• McDonough, Frank; The Hitler Years; Triumph 1933—1939; The Head of Zeus; 2019
• Schleunes, Karl A; The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933 – 1939; University of Illinois Press; 1990
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The “Final Solution” Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/final-solution-in-depth;   accessed on 04/29/2026
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Wannsee Conference and the “Final Solution” Holocaust Encyclopedia.  https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/wannsee-conference-and-the-final-solution;   accessed on 04/29/2026