Joseph
Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for Germany, used the incident
as a pretext to launch a pogrom against Germany’s Jews. On
November 9th, 1938, Nazi hooligans went on a rampage
throughout Germany destroying over seven thousand Jewish stores
and two hundred synagogues in what has become known as
“Kristallnacht” or the Night of Broken Glass. For Stauffenberg,
this marked the breaking point. “To his military colleagues, he
commented only on the purely pragmatic repercussions: The
damage done to Germany’s honor and reputation in the eyes of the
world. His primary objections, however, were personal. His own
brother, Alexander, was now married to a woman of Jewish
ancestry…Jewish members of George’s (Stefan George) circle, some
of them among his closest friends, were now under threat. The
government and the fuhrer to whom he had sworn his oath of
allegiance was suddenly beginning to appear ugly in the
extreme." [9]
Acts of
violence against minorities was not all that bothered
Stauffenberg about Hitler. Since he became the leader of
Germany Hitler had sought to rearm Germany with aspirations of
retaking lands lost by the Versailles Treaty as well as adding
lands from the countries created by it. In 1936 Hitler
re-militarized the Rhineland, which although part of Germany,
had become a buffer zone between Germany and the rest of Western
Europe after the First World War.
Unopposed by
the League of Nations vis-à-vis the annexation of the Rhineland,
Hitler then set his sights toward his two southern neighbors,
Austria and Czechoslovakia. Austria was annexed in early 1938
after a plebiscite in the country voted for the “Anschluss” or
annexation of Austria into Germany. Hitler followed up that
bloodless conquest with the annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. This action
almost pushed the world into another war but the crisis was
averted by the Munich Agreement which once again gave Hitler
everything he wanted. It is important here to note that had the
British and/or French challenged Hitler at any point until the
Munich Agreement the chances are that Hitler would have been
deposed quite easily for Germany still remembered the price in
blood that it had paid twenty years earlier. Allowing Hitler to
get exactly what he wanted only encouraged his lust for farther
reach in Europe. As Stauffenberg remarked about the chain of
events, “The fool (Hitler) is bent on war and is prepared to
squander the flower of Germany’s manhood twice in the same
generation.”[10] His premonition was to be proven correct
for Hitler continued to demand more from
Europe than it was willing to
give.
When Hitler
demanded a corridor from East Prussia to the traditionally
German city of Danzig the great powers of Europe refused and
warned that any attack on Polish soil for such a purpose would
be deemed an act of war. Hitler didn’t believe England or
France and on September 1st, 1939 sent his armies
marching across the Polish Frontier. Two days later Britain and
France declared war on Germany and the Second World War began.
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Site designed and maintained by Bill Jeffers
Copyright 2005
Public History at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte
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Joseph Goebbels - Minister of
Propaganda and Kristallnacht instigator
One of the thousands of Jewish
owned stores vandalized by the Nazis during Kristallnacht
Prime Minister of Great Britain,
Neville Chamberlain returns to London carrying a copy of the
Munich Agreement which he, as well as many others, naively hoped would bring "peace for
our time"
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