Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction by Sir Martin Gilbert, HarperCollins Books, 2006, 314 pages, $21.95

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.— The name of Sir Martin Gilbert sells this book. He is deservedly renowned both as a biographer of Winston Churchill and a historian of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, himself, gives this latest book his hechsher. However, one is forced to wonder whether HarperCollins would have chosen to publish it if someone else had been the author.

It starts off compellingly enough with an account of Herschel Grynszpan, in Paris, reading a letter from his sister Berta about how she and their parents were summarily expelled at the end of October from their home in Hanover and dumped by Nazi storm troopers on the border of Poland, the nation from which Grynszpan's parents had immigrated. Poland—which could vie with Germany for being the most anti-Semitic nation in Europe— refused to accept the Grynszpan family nor thousands of other suddenly dislocated Jewish refugees.  Many of these Jews were trapped at the frontier, with some being  forced to camp without protection from the elements at a freezing border station in Zbaszyn.  

In her letter, Berta pleaded for Herschel, 17, to send some money from France to help his family.  Instead, according to Gilbert's account, he used his cash to purchase a pistol, and on November 7, 1938, walked into the German Embassy in Paris, asking to see the ambassador.  He was shunted off to the office of the Third Secretary, whom he promptly fired at five times "in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews."  

Ernst vom Rath didn't die immediately.  He lasted two days—long enough for all of Germany to be roiled up by a Nazi campaign that had been waiting for just such an incident.  Adolf Hitler sent his personal physicians to look after vom Rath, and newspapers said the assassination typified crimes against the German people by Jews.

Given the attention Gilbert devotes to the assassination, it is surprising that the historian never tells what happened to Grynszpan or to his family after his immediate arrest for the shooting. Maybe Gilbert didn't want to get sidetracked, as that is a murky story with different versions. In one Grynszpan survived the war, and returned to Paris to live under an assumed identity.  In the other, he was killed sometime after the Germans captured Paris. There was also debate over Grynszpan's motives.  While Gilbert told the most popular version, that Grynszpan was angry over the way Nazis treated the Jews, another version was that vom Rath was one of the better known homosexuals in Paris's café society and that Grynszpan had been his boy toy.  What possible difference could that have made?  Simply that the assassination the Germans used as an excuse to rampage against the Jews  might have been personal rather than political.

A day after vom Rath was shot, an order was issued in Germany forbidding Jewish children to attend public schools anywhere in the country—another in a long series of restrictions aimed against the Jews since Hitler had become Reich Chancellor in 1933. On the same day,  numerous Jews incarcerated at Buchenwald concentration camp were murdered.  After vom Rath died on November 9, all hell broke out in Germany. That night and into the following morning, synagogues, Jewish businesses and residences were burned down or vandalized, and Jews were beaten up by mobs as police and firefighters—who were co-conspirators with the mobs— stood by.

It was Kristallnacht—the day that many historians, including Gilbert,  consider to be the beginning of the Holocaust.

In painful detail, Gilbert quotes eye witness accounts of the torchings and beatings in cities and hamlets throughout Germany.  The eye-witness accounts  from "every corner of the Reich" are startlingly similar, proving, if proof were needed, that these were orchestrated riots, not spontaneous ones.  The incidents were so similar, in fact, one wonders why Gilbert didn't simply summarize them and put specific instances in an appendix,  rather than forcing the reader to slog through what essentially was repetitive information page after page after page.

Although Gilbert  provides mountains of specific details, there is little in this section advancing our overall knowledge of Kristallnacht.  Account after account of what Nazi thugs did in town after town dulls the reader's senses.  Okay, okay, we silently remonstrate with the book in our hands, we get the picture.  Now what point do you wish to make about all this?

In subsequent chapters, Gilbert flashes back to the harsh laws that Hitler had decreed against the Jews in the years leading up to the Holocaust, and about the refusal of many western countries to expand immigration quotas to rescue the Jews. While the pre-Kristallnacht history is familiar to anyone who has gone to a Holocaust museum, Gilbert's section on the efforts of rescuers deserves commendation. He gives considerable attention and context  to diplomats and civilian workers like Captain Frank Foley of Great Britain, Varian Fry of the United States, Feng Shan Ho of China, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes of Portugal, who did their best to get as many Jews as possible out of Europe. 

Gilbert also spends some effort, but not nearly as much as necessary, relating the story of such  malevolent American bureaucrats as Cordell Hull and Breckenridge Long who conspired to block escape routes to the Western Hemisphere for the Jews.  Why these men were so hostile to the Jews that they helped guarantee their annihilation is a scab on the American body politic requiring historic biopsy.

Gilbert's book later moves into an examination of the deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria to the killing camps of Latvia and other death factories.  Throughout this section, Gilbert reminds us that the synagogue in this or that town had previously been destroyed during Kristtallnacht, but I was never sure why he made such a point of this.  The Nazis wanted to kill all  Jews, whether their mobs had destroyed the synagogues in their towns first or not.  

Why does Gilbert repeatedly make the connection?  Was it simply a historian's way of bragging, ""see here—here's another town where the Kristallnacht atrocities have been documented in my research."?  Or was it a way to link the title of his book with the events that came afterwards?  Whatever the explanation, the writing seemed quite forced.

The verdict?  This, assuredly,  is not one of Sir Martin Gilbert's best efforts.