Rudolf Hess, who is scheduled to go on trial as a war criminal in November, and Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels personally drew up plans for the “spontaneous” anti-Jewish demonstrations in Germany in November, 1938. it is revealed in secret files which have been uncovered here.
The files disclose that the murder, looting and destruction of synagogues which followed the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, at the German embassy in Paris, was carefully planned at the Brown House in Munich and police received specific instructions on how the pogroms were to be carried out. The secret documents also reveal that the top Nazis tried to hide their complicity in the massacres, because of foreign public opinion, and warned the police not to molest Jews of foreign nationality.
Secret verdicts handed down by German courts against Nazis accused of murdering or raping Jews were also found. Typical verdicts, which were never allowed to be made public, deprived a 33-year-old party member of his membership because he raped a 13-year-old Jewish girl, thereby violating the “racial purity” law, and placed a storm troop leader on three years probation for having shot to death a Jewish man and his wife.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
