'Kristallnacht' Pogrom of November 1938 - From the testimony of Benno Cohn
'Kristallnacht' Pogrom of November 1938 - From the testimony of Benno Cohn
Source: the testimony of Benno Cohn at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, 25 April 1961, Criminal Case 40/61. [The text is from the transcript of the simultaneous translation and therefore may include linguistic errors.]
Q: ..Will you please come now to November 1938. What do you remember?
A: In November, 7 November, in the evening papers there appeared the news of the shooting of the German Councillor Vom Rath by a young man at the German Embassy in Paris. This was a great shock, and we expected that there would be serious consequences. We started holding various meetings and consultations in the Zionist Organisation of the Reichsvertretung . We simply had to await developments.
Q: Did you learn his name?
A: Yes. I believe that it was published at the time – Hershel Grynszpan. Some years before that, a young Jew, David Frankfurter, had also shot at a Gauleiter at Davos.… The name of the Gauleiter was Gustlof. He shot at him and then handed himself over to the Swiss police and said that he had done what he had done as an act of vengeance for the severe crimes committed against the Jewish people. He is now in Israel. He was imprisoned until 1944.
Q: What happened after 7 November, 1938?
A: On 9 November in the evening, we received news that vom Rath had died as a result of his injuries, and that night was the stormiest night of that whole period. It is called the 'Crystal Night', but this term certainly does not give any idea of the scope of what happened that night. That night, the attacks on the Jewish shop windows began. There was a terrible noise, and in the morning at 6:00 a.m. I was called to the telephone. They told me that in the Meineckestrasse, where the Zionist Offices were, there was a band of people. I dressed immediately. By the time I got there, the people had already gone out and I found my own office destroyed. There was a large notice put up there, and the telephone was cut. The notice said: vengeance for Vom Rath. I went to the Reichsvertretung that morning – it was only ten minutes or so away from the Meineckestrasse – and there we had a consultation and two representatives went out immediately to the Reichskanzlei , to report on these events to the Secretary of State, Lammers, who was the right-hand man….
Q: Do you remember who were these two representatives?
A: One of them Hirsch…
Q: Mr. Hirsch was one of them?
A: I think, but I am not sure. And Epstein. The Secretary of State did not receive them. He promised. He always said that whatever would happen, he promised that order would be maintained. They were not received by the State Secretary, and returned. And everybody connected with the Reichsvertretung received telephone calls from all over the country that that very night gangs of people had not only entered private flats and destroyed whatever they could, but they had also taken away the males to the police, and people thought that this was a matter of concentration camps…and I decided not to await my fate. They would obviously arrest me. We always tried to continue our work, but in a concentration camp one certainly couldn't do this. Therefore, I went to some apartment in one of the suburbs, and from this place, together with many others, we administered whatever we could of our affairs. Tension was great during that day, and during both those days we heard that they were hunting Jews in the streets. They had to fill up a certain quota. Every policeman apparently was given the duty of bringing in so many people, according to statistics, and if they didn't find the people they were looking for, they just picked up passers by in order to fill the quota. At that time, reference was made to a figure of some 30,000 males, until 20 November.
Q: You mean that these arrests continued from the 10th up to the 20th of November ΓÇô ten days?
A: Yes, that's so. That is so. And at the time of arrest, every prisoner was told that if he would prove that he was going to leave Germany, he would be released. That was the information given to them. This caused a tremendous amount of scurrying around. Our own offices were closed. Kuchmann came and closed down the Meineckestrasse offices, but some days later I was summoned to the place, to the hiding place, and I signed minutes.
Q: Were the offices of the Reichsvertretung also closed?
A: All the offices of the Jewish community were sealed off. And then all our rescue work took place in secret, from private apartments. This was the time when our womenfolk rescued the men, and tried to save them. Not everybody escaped. This was the coldest that I could ever remember experiencing in Germany, and the first news came of the death of people and the dispatch of ashes in urns, and so on. Our womenfolk stood in long queues outside the various foreign consulates in order to secure papers for entry to other countries. And I must state ΓÇô and this is well known ΓÇô a planet without visa. There were very few countries, which were prepared to give visas. We were in a state of despair.
Q: What happened if a woman did succeed in obtaining a visa?
A: If she succeeded in getting such a visa, this visa was transmitted to the man, to the police, or to the concentration camp, and the man was released. He was told that he had to leave the country within a limited period of time.
Q: Do you remember the names of the concentration camps where Jews were concentrated who were arrested during those ten days?
A: If I'm not mistaken, there was Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.… I would further like to call your attention to the fact that…on 10 November I passed the synagogue on Zamenstrasse , and I couldn't possibly believe what my eyes say…because this building had been gutted completely by fire and there were fire extinguishers. They didn't lift a finger in order to put out the fire because they had been given orders to use their pumps only if the fire should spread to the Aryan buildings. I saw how the Jews were trying to drag the Torah scroll from one of the great synagogues in order to save it from flames. A crowd was gathered around the synagogue. There were also people without uniforms and they were cheering this harrowing spectacle. We heard also that other synagogues were set on fire in other streets in Germany in various little towns and that the synagogues had also been set on fire….
