Page 205 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

192 The American Diplomats

shipped to concentration camps. But in leipzig the “insatiably sadistic per-
petrators” committed an additional abhorrent crime. after destroying the
dwellings of Jewish families and throwing their “movable effects” into the
streets, they threw many Jewish men, women, and children “into a small
stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding horrified
spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight.”
even the “slightest manifestation of sympathy” for the Jews by bystand-
ers “evoked a positive fury on the part of the perpetrators.” several Jews
were reliably reported to have been beaten to death. all these “tactics were
carried out the entire morning of November 10th without police interven-
tion.” at the end of the dispatch, Buffum reported that three professors
at the University of Jena who voiced disapproval of this “insidious drive
against mankind” had been sent to concentration camps. the stamps on the
cover of this document indicate that it reached the desk of George Messer-
smith, now an assistant secretary of state. 119
several reports from other parts of Germany that were similar to Buf-
fum’s reached the department of state, and a few of them included refer-
ences to an ultimate solution of the Jewish question, which is of special
interest because they touch on an ongoing controversy among historians
over the date when the Nazi leadership decided on the most drastic mea-
sure against the Jews. the policy of extermination was not put into effect
until 1941–42, and there is no evidence that a decision on such a policy
had been reached before then; but, as already noted, occasional hints had
emerged that some Nazis were contemplating such a course. in a dispatch
of November 23, 1938, Prentiss Gilbert, then the chargé d’affaires at the
Berlin embassy, called attention to another reference to the possible physi-
cal elimination of the German Jews. that article, which Gilbert character-
ized as one “of unusual vulgarity and cynical ruthlessness,” appeared in the
ss newspaper Schwarze Korps. the author mocked the “super-democrats”
in the United states who criticized Germany’s Jewish policies: “Neither
Mr. roosevelt nor an english archbishop nor any other prominent super-
democrat would put their young daughter in the bed of a greasy eastern
Jew. However, when it is a question of Germany they suddenly are ig-
norant of any Jewish question but only see the ‘persecution of innocent
people for their faith’—as if we ever were interested in what a Jew did or
did not believe.” the author went on to boast that Germany had now built
up its military strength to such a level that no country “can hinder” it from
“undert[aking] a total solution of the Jewish question, which signifies not

For more details on this controversy, see below, pp. 204–5.