Could we have done more to save the Jews?

Martin Gilbert

(HarperCollins, £14.99)

How much do most non-Jewish people, brought up in post-war Britain, know about the events in Germany of November 10, 1938? I suspect that many, like me, believe that it involved little more than the smashing of glass in Jewish shop windows by officially sanctioned thugs (bad though that in itself would be).

Gilbert, an Oxford historian who made his name as official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, has put the record straight: the whole country resounded to noises far worse than just that of breaking glass.

He tells us that within that fateful 24-hour period, which dawned just five weeks after Chamberlain flew back from Munich with his "Peace in our Time" message, more than 1,000 synagogues were torched, thousands of homes and shops were destroyed, and more than 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up in full public view and herded off to concentration camps. At least 91 were murdered there and then.

The excuse for the fake-spontaneous attack, well orchestrated by Brownshirts with clipboards and lists of targets, was that a 17-year-old Jewish youth named Heschel Grynszpan, at that time living in Paris, had on November 6 bought himself a pistol and shot Ernst vom Rath, third secretary at the German embassy, who died of his injuries on November 9.

The teenage assassin had received a card begging for money from his sister Bertha. She and her parents were among 12,000 Polish Jews who, one night in October, had been woken up and ordered to leave Germany with nothing but one suitcase each.

The family had lived legally in Germany for decades. All the same, they had been left to starve on the border while the Polish authorities dithered about whether to let them in.

The book, based on dozens of eye-witness accounts, tells a few tales of brave Gentiles trying to defend their Jewish friends and neighbours; chillingly though, those stories are more than counterbalanced by others about neighbours looting the Jews' homes and shops.

Could Germany's neighbours have taken in more asylum-seekers after this warning of what lay in store? Quotas were imposed everywhere, though many individuals and organisations, particularly with regard to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, tried to circumvent them. Arguments will rage forever over the answer to the question. This book will fuel the discussions with facts.