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NEWS
Hitler Led Kristallnacht
by Yated Ne'eman Staff
A German historian researching the diaries of Josef Goebbels,
the Nazi propaganda minister, has revealed that Hitler
himself led the Kristallnacht pogrom in Munich on November 9,
1938 as head of a Nazi group that razed Ohel Yaakov, the
central synagogue of Munich, capital of Bavaria. Angela
Hermann, a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary
History in Munich, managed to decode a mysterious passage
that has stumped scholars ever since this section of Goebbels
diaries was retrieved from Moscow in 1992.
"We have real evidence now that Hitler pulled the strings,
that he personally directed Kristallnacht," she said.
In his diary entry for November 9, the Nazi propaganda
minister recounts a rally at the Munich Town Hall in which
Hitler told him the police should let people vent their anger
over the vom Rath assassination. "Hitler's Stosstrupp [Storm
Troopers company] goes out immediately to clean up
Munich...and a synagogue is smashed," he wrote.
This had historians puzzled, as there was no force known as
''Hitler's Stosstrupp'' in 1938, but Dr. Hermann found
letters and documents showing that the term referred to the
veterans of Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in 1923,
known as the Beer Hall Putsch. She uncovered invitations to
Hitler's former comrades to attend a demonstration held on
November 9th — the same 39 people who later razed the
beis knesses under his command.
In a parallel development Israeli reporter and researcher
Yaron Svoray recently found a massive dump north of Berlin
that he claims was used as a dumpsite for Jewish property
stolen and destroyed by the Nazis. Citing reliable sources he
says most of the findings at the site arrived there following
the looting of botei knesses and Jewish stores during
Kristallnacht. Among the items found were mezuzas, wine
bottles stamped with a Star of David and parts of windows and
engraved chairs from a shul. Now the Holocaust Remembrance
Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei HaGeta'ot is planning to send a
youth delegation to the site to continue the digging.
Less than two weeks away is the 70th anniversary of
Kristallnacht, which marked a new low point in the treatment
of Jews in Nazi Germany. The massive countrywide pogrom broke
out after a Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan walked
into the German embassy in Paris and shot dead diplomat Ernst
vom Rath. By November 10th at least 92 Jews had been killed,
over 200 botei knesses had been desecrated and
thousands of Jewish businesses across the country had been
looted.
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