Lessons of Kristallnacht, “Civil War,” and Mass Deportation
Interior view of the destroyed Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, Berlin, burned on Kristallnacht
On a recent trip to Germany, I sought to better understand how the Nazi Party rose to power, and carried out the Holocaust, in which most of my Hungarian Jewish relatives perished. I gained some new insights, and learned several lessons that may be useful in the polarized United States today, with the election looming and far-right agitation growing.
I visited the Nuremberg rally grounds, and stood on the rostrum where Hitler instilled his poisonous views in German minds in the mid-1930s. I saw German synagogues that were attacked on Kristallnacht in 1938, and toured Auschwitz in southern Poland, where most of my relatives were sent in 1944, as well as the Nuremberg courtroom where some Nazi war criminals were put on trial in 1945-46.
The Nazi Party took power in 1933, and in 1935 instituted the Nuremberg Laws that stripped German Jews of their citizenship and many of their basic rights. In August 1938, Berlin ordered the mass deportation of all Jews with foreign citizenship, even if they had been born in Germany.
In October 1938, according to Hannah Arendt, 12,000 Polish Jews (including many born in Germany) were forcibly expelled by Germans shouting “Juden Raus! Auf Nach Palästina!” (“Jews Out! Go to Palestine!”), but Poland would not take them in. (At the same time, Germans were playing a board game called “Juden Raus” to simulate such a mass deportation.)
The Dynamics of Kristallnacht
The key turning point was Kristallnacht, or the “night of broken glass” in November 1938, when fascist paramilitaries carried out a violent national pogrom against Jews, in response to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, by one of those deported German-born Polish Jews. That was the first lesson I learned, that it was the mass deportation of foreign citizens that ultimately set Kristallnacht into motion, which makes me shudder now every time I hear Trump promote the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
In the following few days, Berlin banned Jews from attending school, organizing cultural activities, publishing newspapers, or owning weapons. Paramilitaries joined by ordinary citizens destroyed hundreds of synagogues, and thousands of shops and homes, immediately killed nearly 100 as the police and military stood by, and incarcerated 30,000 in concentration camps.
The second lesson I learned was that Kristallnacht was deeply unpopular in Germany. Many Germans were concerned that foreign reporters’ accounts gave their country a more negative image abroad (which still mattered in 1938), and they deemed the paramilitary mobs as disorderly, chaotic, and illegal, akin to pogroms in Czarist Russia. Kaiser Wilhelm II was “ashamed to be German,” some individual Party members tried to intervene to protect Jews, and a survey showed that 63% of Party members disapproved of the violent pogrom.
The third lesson I learned was that their opinion didn’t matter one bit. Nazi leadership had decided to set mass, violent persecution into motion, so the voices of dissent among newer Party members (who had joined for the job rather than the ideology) had no effect whatsoever. Kristallnacht was not the result of individual opinions or prejudices, but a structural exercise in power by an extremist political minority to crush democracy and human rights. Even if some Party members questioned the Party’s direction, the machinery of persecution moved forward toward its logical outcome of genocide. Even if some church members objected, it meant nothing unless they’d actively resisted and stood in the way of the machine. So now whenever I see a CNN poll showing a similar majority of Republicans disapproving of political violence, it provides little reassurance.
One of the reasons that internal dissenters were ignored was that their opposition was usually couched in legal terms, decrying the violence of Kristallnacht as illegal, insinuating that any government persecution had to be done instead through legal means. So in the ensuing months and years, in response to the criticism, the State changed the laws to give violent persecution a legal veneer.
That was the fourth lesson I gained from Kristallnacht, that if one objects to abuses of human rights and democracy only on legal grounds, we’ll get caught flat-footed when the laws are changed to legalize the abuses. If we object to U.S. armed paramilitaries merely as illegal “vigilantes” (as I pointed out in 2020), we’re not prepared for a situation when the militia members are deputized and issued orders. Using the military for political ends, such as shooting protesters or deporting immigrants, may be technically illegal now, but President Trump can give an official stamp of approval.
A New Civil War?
The entire experience of personally seeing the sites of the Nazi Party’s rise, including Kristallnacht, offered a fifth lesson that has made me question the current American trend to fear a possible “civil war” in the United States. Numerous books, opinion columns and polls envision an upcoming “civil war” between red and blue states, and the Hollywood action film Civil War provides the gory images. But I’ve grown to see the fear of civil war as both inaccurate and misplaced.
Even if the red vs. blue divide led to a violent cataclysm, it wouldn’t be a war between the states, but a war within the states. As a political geographer who has studied many election maps, I can see that the real divide is not between states, but between the blue metro areas and the surrounding red counties. The dynamic would be less like the American Civil War than like insurgencies in which rural-based militias encircled and assaulted what they viewed as decadent, cosmopolitan cities, as the Bosnian Serb Army did to multiethnic Sarajevo in 1992.
But the United States is not going to have a civil war for one simple reason: one side has nearly all the guns. The political right romanticizes guns and militarism, and far-right militias tend to target human beings (killing at least 114 people in the U.S. in 2001-21). The political left romanticizes peace and relies on legal political movements, and even its most militant factions usually go only so far as to vandalize or destroy property. After all, how many liberals, progressives, or leftists do you know who actually own a weapon?
The only realistic scenario for a new civil war would be if the U.S. military itself divided along political lines, and both sides gained heavy weaponry. Some military enlistees and officers did question the possibility of attacking protesters in 2020, and resisted the Iraq War a decade earlier. The troops are about 43 percent people of color, so (like during the Vietnam War) some could refuse or frustrate orders to use their weapons at home. But there is no evidence of a schism within the military that even approaches the divisions leading up to our original Civil War, or for that matter civil wars in any other country.
So my conclusion is that instead of thinking about a two-sided civil war that isn’t going to happen, it would be much more useful to think through what we would do in case of a one-sided spasm of violence directed at marginalized communities (such as undocumented immigrants), and any governments that defend them. We’re narrowly drawing from our own history in envisioning a new civil war, when what we should really be worried about is a Kristallnacht.
American Kristallnacht
We’re seeing a preview of mob violence in the recent anti-immigrant riots in British and Irish cities, and attacks on refugees and asylum seekers in Germany. Our own history has plentiful precedents of militarized mob violence against Black, Native, Latin, and Asian communities, and violence against LGBTQ+ communities. In the aftermath of a contested election, it’s conceivable that a one-sided mass assault could be directed not just against government officials or buildings such as the Capitol, but against immigrants, Muslims, Jews, real and perceived leftists in higher education and media, or a combination of individual attacks lashing out at any “enemies of the people.”
It’s possible that the U.S. came within one inch of such a scenario on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. What would have been the spontaneous reaction from armed Trump supporters had the assassination attempt been successful? The identity of the shooter would have been less relevant than the opportunity to take revenge against Trump’s “enemies.” The 1994 Rwanda genocide began with the downing of a plane carrying the president, signaling to Hutu militias not only to massacre the Tutsi ethnic group, but any Hutus who stood in the way.
When we look forward to any contested election results on November 5, the certification on January 6, 2025, anti-immigrant riots, a threatened mass deportation, or some other trigger for far-right violence, we should heed the lessons of the one-sided Kristallnacht pogrom rather than focus on fanciful visions of a two-sided civil war. No matter if a pogrom is legal or not, or is popular or not, it’s a moral atrocity and an exercise of far-right power to crush democracy and human rights. It can only be stopped by a mass mobilization of people, using our numbers and creativity to exercise our own power to stand in the way.
Resistance to mass deportations
Such a mass mobilization could involve large counterdemonstrations to defend human rights. In Germany, counterdemonstrations grew against extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party leaders, after a recording revealed in January that they were secretly planning mass deportations of refugees and immigrants. The huge rallies may have isolated the AfD and suppressed its share of the European Parliament election vote, even if the party has made major gains in eastern states.
This German experience is of little solace to Americans, given that Trump supporters are openly waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs, with little pushback from Harris or her supporters. But if mass deportations and family separations are threatened, immigrant workers and their communities may strike and march as they did on the “Day Without Immigrants” in 2006 and 2017, or professional players could carry out a “sports strike” as they did in 2020.
Another mass mobilization could involve popular noncompliance with anti-immigrant directives. In 1994, California Republican Governor Pete Wilson won a ballot initiative to establish a state-run citizenship screening system. Proposition 187 would have prohibited undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services, and required all providers to report the names of anyone they thought was undocumented. But health care workers, educators, and many others collectively refused to comply en masse with the directives, and a federal judge later overruled Prop 187.
If any future president decided to carry out mass deportations of refugees and up to 11 million undocumented immigrants, it would be a logistical nightmare, requiring either unrestrained mob violence or (as Trump proposes) the use of military personnel. It may be critical to proactively reach out to active-duty Army and National Guard soldiers, preferably via veterans and military families, to educate them about the injustices facing war refugees and undocumented workers. The soldiers could be educated about their own rights and power, not just about becoming individual public refusers, but about more covert collective disobedience (akin to “search-and-avoid” missions in Vietnam and Iraq).
The United States could certainly at risk of a second civil war, but our country is even more frighteningly unprepared for a national pogrom resembling Kristallnacht. If Trump again sabotages the peaceful transfer of power, it may not be another January 6 in Washington D.C., but a far more violent upsurge that is spread across the country. And whether Trump wins and instigates mass deportations, or Harris wins and is pressured by far-right riots like those occurring in Europe, the main targets could well be refugees and undocumented immigrants (or anyone who looks or speaks like them). By preparing and organizing for these grim possibilities, we can have more proactive ways to respond than relying on our weakened legal system, and not be caught surprised again.
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