November 15

As the second world war ground onward, Heinrich Himmler, commander of the Nazi SS, found himself increasingly preoccupied with the alleged presence of homosexuals in the elite paramilitary organization. In 1936, he had established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans were arrested for sexual crimes, and tens of thousands were sent to camps, where the policy of “Extermination Through Work” dominated. In early 1941, Himmler declared that the gay infestation had touched the strings of the Nazi party. “The party,” he announced, “with its branch organizations and the Wehrmach must proceed with ruthless severity against every case of homosexuality that appears in their ranks. If this happens, then the machinery of the state will remain clean, and it must remain clean.”

On November 15, 1941, Himmler’s philosophy was enacted in a secret document, signed by Hitler himself, titled “The Fuhrer’s Decree Relating to the Purity of the SS and Police.” The document announced that "to keep the SS and Police clean of vermin with homosexual inclinations," any SS member member or police officer "who commits unnatural acts with another man or lets himself be abused for unnatural acts shall be punished with death." Offenses deemed "less serious" would result in imprisonment or hard labor for six months or more. As for the number of SS or police officers subjected to these punishments, no reliable figures appear to exist.

Exactly two years later, Himmler issued an order dooming hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Romani people to the Reich's concentration camps scattered across Europe. The Romani and Sinti -- groups commonly known in English as Gypsies -- had been subjected to many of the same laws that pertained as well to Jews; although Nazi racial scientists distinguished between "pure" and "mixed-race" Gypsies, the former group was believed to consist of only about 10 percent of the overall population. During the early years of the Second World War, Gypsies were herded into ghettos or -- as happened more frequently in Eastern Poland and German-occupied Russian lands -- summarily shot by SS officers. Others were transferred to work camps. On November 15, 1943, Germany removed the distinctions between Jews and "nomadic" or "impure" Gypsies, who were henceforth "to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps." Where doubt existed as to the racial identity of a particular individual, "the police commanders will decide who is a Gypsy."

The porajmos -- "the devouring," as it has come to be known among the Romani -- ultimately consumed between 200,000-500,000 lives.

November 9

On November 9, 1938, Ernst Vom Rath -- a German official living in Paris -- died from a gunshot wound he’d sustained several days before. Vom Rath’s killer, a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, shot him out of frustration over the expulsion of thousands of Polish Jews -- including his own sister -- from their homes in Germany. Unwilling to accept the refugees either, the Polish government herded the deportees into squalid camps. After making his way to the German Embassy, Grynszpan shot Vom Rath on the morning of November 7.

After Von Rath died, Nazi mobs erupted throughout Germany and Austria. In an event known ever since as Kristallnacht -- usually translated as "the night of broken glass" -- Jewish property and community institutions were sacked with the approval and encouragement of German and Austrian authorities, who issued orders that police were not to interrupt the pogroms. More than 8,000 Jewish shops were damaged or destroyed, as civilians and SA stormtroopers attacked buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in shards of broken windows. Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps; and 1,668 synagogues were ransacked, with 267 set on fire.

In Dinslaker, an industrial city in western Germany, a Jewish orphanage came under assault.

I opened the door: about 50 men stormed into the house, many of them with their coat- or jacket-collars turned up. At first they rushed into the dining room, which fortunately was empty, and there they began their work of destruction, which was carried out with the utmost precision. The frightened and fearful cries of the children resounded through the building. In a stentorian voice I shouted: "Children, go out into the street immediately!". . . .

Facing the back of the building, we were able to watch how everything in the house was being systematically destroyed under the supervision of the men of law and order – the police. At short intervals we could hear the crunching of glass or the hammering against wood as windows and doors were broken. Books, chairs, beds, tables, linen, chests, parts of a piano, a radiogram, and maps were thrown through apertures in the wall, which a short while ago had been windows or doors.

In the meantime the mob standing around the building had grown to several hundred. Among these people I recognized some familiar faces, suppliers of the orphanage or tradespeople, who only a day or a week earlier had been happy to deal with us as customers. This time they were passive, watching the destruction without much emotion.

In the aftermath of the two days of rioting, a police report from Muggendorf observed that "[o]ne segment of the people is of the opinion that the conscious actions and associated arrests and destruction were far too mild."

Indeed, Kristallnacht only marked the beginning of worse things to come. In the ten months before Germany invaded Poland and launched the second World War, well over 100,000 Jews fled the country.

November 8

On the evening of November 8, 1923, several hundred young German national socialists led by Adolf Hitler attempted to seize control of the German state. Descending on a Munich beer hall, the young Nazis attempted to seize the Bavarian commissar and other government officials while they were attending a political meeting; over the next 24 hours, the plot unraveled spectacularly, and 20 people -- 16 plotters and four Bavarian police officers -- lost their lives. Hitler and the leaders of the putsch were tried, convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. During his confinement, Hitler passed his time working on a book.

On 8 November 1937, an art and documentary exhibit Der Ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew") opened at Munich's German Museum, as the Nazi party escalated its political scapegoating of European Jews. Over 412,000 visitors viewed the exhibit, which lasted three months in Munich before traveling to Vienna and Berlin for extended runs throughout 1938 and into early 1939. Representing the most extensive collection of anti-semitic propaganda in pre-war Germany, Der Ewige Jude was loaded with vile caricatures of Jews, who were depicted as Asiatic, sadistic Bolshevists with hooked noses, sloping brows and thick lips. Pseudo-scientific charts, attesting to the perils of race-mixing and the physical inferiority of Jews, also lined the halls of the German Museum. The exhibit followed on the heels of a similar display of over 600 examples of "degenerate," cosmopolitan art inspired -- or so it was alleged -- by the decline of "heroic" classical forms and the Aryan virtues they possessed. Several weeks after the opening of Der Ewige Jude, the Reich Propaganda Directorate assumed control over the degenerate art exhibit along with the Great Bolshevik Exhibition, thus clarifying the three perceived dangers to the German volk.

Before Der Ewige Jude closed its run in Berlin on 31 January 1939, German Jewish children were expelled from public schools; the Kristallnacht occurred, as anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Germany and Austria in early November 1938; the compulsory "Aryanization" of the German market was completed, as Jewish merchants were obliged by law to sell their businesses for minimal compensation; and tens of thousands of Austrian and German Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, including Mauthausen and Dachau.