PART I
Ten Men
Kronenberg
November 9, 1638:
“HEAR, YE TOWNSFOLK, HONEST MEN”
It is ten o’clock at night—give or take ten minutes. The great E-bell of the Katherine Church has begun to strike the hour. Between its seventh and eighth strokes, the Parish bell begins to strike. You would suppose that the sacristan of the Parish Church had been awakened by the Katherine bell, pulled himself out of bed, and got to his bell rope just in time to avoid complete humiliation (like a man running shirtless and shoeless to a wedding to get there before the ceremony is over). But you would probably be wrong, for every night, ever since there have been two bells in Kronenberg, the first stroke from the Parish Church has come just after the seventh from the Katherine; in deference, perhaps, for the Katherine Church was once (up until the Reformation a century ago) a cathedral.
Now Kronenberg has, besides two church bells and two churches, six thousand churched souls; and a university, with a theological faculty and almost a hundred students; and a Castle, which crowns the hill on which the closely packed, semicircular town is built (a hill so steep in places that some of the houses can be entered only from the top floor); and a river at the foot of the hill, the Werne. The Werne isn’t navigable this far up from the Rhine, but its course around the flowering hill conspires with the Castle at the top, the massed gables of the timbered old houses that climb to the edge of the Castle park, and the cobblestoned lanes and alleys that gird the hillside like tangled hoops, to make of Kronenberg a picture-book town on a picture-book countryside.
The town has had its troubles, as what town hasn’t? In the half-dozen centuries past it has changed hands a dozen times. It has been stormed, taken, liberated, and stormed and taken again. But it has never been burned; its prettiness (for it is small enough to be pretty rather than beautiful) may have shamed off the torches which have gutted so many old towns; and now, in 1638, Kronenberg is always designated as “old Kronenberg,” an ancient place.
The Great War of Europe is twenty years old, but maybe it is over; the Prince of Hesse has decided to join the Peace of Prague, to drive the Protestant Swedes out of the Catholic Empire without, it is hoped, incurring submission to the Catholic Emperor in Vienna. True, Catholic France has just attacked Catholic Spain and, in alliance with Protestant Sweden, has just declared war on the Emperor. But Kronenberg has only heard vaguely about these wonderful events, and who knows what they mean? “The King makes war, and the people die”; it’s an old, old saying in Kronenberg.
Times have been very hard everywhere these last years, in Kronenberg, too; taxes and tolls always higher, men, animals, and grain taken, always more, for the armies. But the war, moving from north to south, from south to north, and from north to south again, has spared the town, except for a siege which was driven off by the Protestant armies. All in all, the Kronenbergers can’t complain. And they don’t.
Pestilence and famine recur in Kronenberg—as where don’t they?—and, where there are Jews, what is one to expect? After the Black Death of 1348, the Judenschule, or prayer-house, was burned in Kronenberg, and the Jews were driven away. (Everyone knew they had poisoned the wells, all over Europe.) A few years afterward the finances of the Prince of Hesse were so straitened that he had to pawn Kronenberg to the Jews in Frankfurt, but in 1396 Good King Wenceslaus declared void all debts to the Christ-killers. But that wasn’t the end of it, because the princes always brought the Jews back, to do the un-Christian business of banking forbidden Christians by canon law. So it was, until 1525, when the Bürgermeister of Kronenberg implored the Prince to drive the Jews out again. “They buy stolen articles,” he said. “If they were gone, there would be no more stealing.” So the Prince drove them out again; but he exercised the imperial privilege given by Karl V to keep a certain number of Jews in the town on the condition that they pay a protection tax, a Schutzgeld. If they failed to pay the Schutzgeld, the Prince removed his protection.
Those were good times, before the Great War of Europe. Times are hard now; but they might be worse (and nearly everywhere are) than they are in Kronenberg, and tonight the burghers and their manservants and their maidservants are sleeping contented, or as contented as burghers and their manservants and maidservants may reasonably expect to be in this life. So are their summer-fattened cattle and their sheep in the meadows (it is not yet cold in early November), and their pigs and chickens and geese and ducks in the barn at the back of the house; sleeping, all, at ten o’clock.
November 9, 1938:
“HEAR, YE TOWNSFOLK, HONEST MEN”
The public room of the Huntsmen’s Rest, at the corner of Frankfurterplatz and the Mauerweg, is alight tonight and crowded with a company of old soldiers celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of the homeland from the chains of Versailles. It is the anniversary of the “Bloody Parade” in Munich, in which the Führer was arrested and imprisoned. The old soldiers are the Home Reserve Troop of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, or SA, and the Huntsmen’s Rest is their regular meeting place.
Their regular meeting night is Friday, and this is Wednesday. But November 9, whatever the day of the week, is the greatest of all National Socialist Party celebrations. January 30 (the day the Führer came to power) and April 20 (the Führer’s birthday) are national celebrations. November 9 is the Party’s own.
The formal celebration was at 7:30 P.M. in the Municipal Theater. There were too many speeches, as usual, and one of the Party’s poets, Siegfried Ruppel, recited too many of his Party poems. Then the four troops of the SA Kronenberg marched in uniform to their regular meeting places, the Reserve Troop to the upstairs room of the Huntsmen’s Rest Promotions were announced, as they always were on November 9, and then the troop followed Sturmführer Schwenke down to the public room for a glass of beer or two. It is ten o’clock.
“TEN COMMANDMENTS GOD HAS GIVEN”
The talk in the public room of the Huntsmen’s Rest is (as might be expected of old soldiers) of old times, and Sturmführer Schwenke does more than his share of talking, as usual But you have to hand it to him, he knows how to tell a story; when a character in the story roars, Schwenke doesn’t say he roared—he roars himself. He tells how the SA Kronenberg got its orders fifteen years ago to assemble on November 9 and await word for the Putsch. There were 185 of them, waiting for trucks to take them to Frankfurt. They waited all day. The word never came, the trucks never came.
“I wasn’t too disappointed,” says Schwenke. “The time was too soon. I always said so. That’s the trouble with the men at the top—they stand between the Führer and men like me who know the people and the conditions. N’ja [which in Hessian dialect means “Yep” or “So”], when the Führer got out of prison and reorganized the Party and accepted only those he knew were faithful to him, that was the right principle. With that principle, selecting the best, nothing could stop us.”
The talk turns to another historic November 9, in 1918, and here again the Sturmführer does most of the talking: “I was on duty in Erfurt that night A Bolshevik in civilian clothes came to the post and wanted to talk to the soldiers. The men chose me to represent them. The Bolshevik said we should join the townspeople and form a Workers and Soldiers Council. I said we would form our own Councils without any Reds. He said they had three cannon trained on the post, and I said we had two machine guns trained on them and we’d take our chances. They didn’t have any cannon, and we didn’t have any machine guns, but I hollered him down.” ‘Til bet you did,” says one of the younger SA men, who has drifted in from another troop.
Somehow the talk drags this evening. Something is up, no one seems to know what.
Two days ago the German Councilor of Embassy in Paris, vom Rath, was shot by a Polish Jew. Immediately an intense campaign against the Jews began on the German National Radio. Are Germans to be sitting ducks all over the world for Jew murderers? Are the German people to stand helpless while the Führer’s representatives are shot down by the Jew swine? Are the Schweinehunde to get oft scot free? Is the wrath of the German People against the Israelite scum to be restrained any longer? “If vom Rath dies, the Jews of Germany will answer to the German People, not tomorrow, but today. The German People have suffered long enough from the parasite assassins.”
This was the work of Dr. Goebbels, whom most people hated and nobody loved; even in Schwenke’s loyal circle the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment was known, quietly, as Jupp der Stelzfuss, Joey the Crip. The university people didn’t listen to this kind of broadcast—or, if they listened, they listened fearfully. The townspeople—the townspeople just listened. They listened as the campaign mounted hourly. Vom Rath’s condition grew hourly worse. He was certain to die, and he died, on November 9, on the anniversary of the greatest day in the history of the German People, the day on which the liberators of the Homeland had shed their blood for liberty in Munich fifteen years ago.
All afternoon and evening the pitch has been mounting over the radio, and by now the Daily Kronenberger has joined in. Everywhere there are rumors. “Something will happen.” What?
At the celebration in the Municipal Theater, earlier this evening, nothing was said about vom Rath or the Jews; strange. The spirit of repression is infectious; at the Huntsmen’s Rest, where, ordinarily, SA men (SA men, particularly) tell stories of Jewish depravity and the SA’s leadership in the Judenkampf, nothing is said this evening about the Jews, or even about the murder in Paris. No one knows why. “Something will happen.” No one knows what.
“WHO OBEYS THEM WILL BE SHRIVEN”
The door of the Huntsmen’s Rest opens, and the commander of the SA Kronenberg, Standartenführer Kühling, enters, in uniform.
“Attention!” says Sturmführer Schwenke.
The SA men stand.
“Heil Hitler!” says Sturmführer Schwenke, saluting.
“Heil. Be seated,” says the Standartenführer, without returning the salute.
The SA men sit.
“Sturmführer, kommen Sie mal her, come here a minute,” says the Standartenführer. Schwenke rises and comes to him.
The Standartenführer says, “Heute geht die Synagogue hoch, The synagogue will be burned tonight.”
It is almost midnight.