Leipzig, November 21, 1938. The American consul, David H. Buffum, sat down to write a report that could not go by ordinary mail. Its cover sheet said it was to be carried to Berlin by trusted messenger as soon as practicable.

Near the end, he described his own office. For the past ten days, he wrote, the consulate had been a bedlam of humanity. Most of the visitors were desperate women, because their husbands and sons had been taken off to concentration camps.

They had come because they wanted to leave.

I. Coffins on the Square

Buffum's report begins the evening before.

On the night of November 9, a ceremony was held on one of Leipzig's principal squares to honor the Nazi "martyrs" who had died before the 1933 takeover. Apparently, he wrote, anything that could be remotely associated with Nazi martyrdom had been exhumed. The remains were placed in extravagant coffins, arranged around a colossal flaming urn on the Altmarkt, and finally carried, amid marching troops, torches and funeral music, to the Nazi burial ground.

The whole square had been fenced with wooden latticework about ten yards high, covered in white cloth, as a backdrop for black swastikas at least five yards high and broad.

Buffum watched the crowd. Judging from a few very guardedly whispered remarks, he wrote, people were far more concerned about the waste of cloth, at a time when textiles of every kind were scarce and expensive, than moved by any reverence. For obvious reasons, nobody openly disapproved.

The next morning, he added, the city would be much more disturbed.

II. Three in the Morning

At 3 a.m. on November 10, the homes of Leipzig's Jews were broken into.

Buffum set down what he had gathered. In one Jewish neighborhood, an eighteen-year-old boy was thrown from a third-story window and landed with both legs broken in a street littered with burning beds and furniture from his family's apartment and others. The information came from the physician who treated him. Elsewhere, a small dog was thrown four flights down with the household goods and broke its spine.

The raid did not spare the well-to-do. One apartment of exceptionally refined people known to the consulate was ransacked, evidently in a search for valuables that was not in vain, and one of the intruders thrust a cane through a priceless medieval painting of a biblical scene.

Jewish shop windows by the hundreds were smashed across the city. According to reliable testimony, Buffum wrote, the work was done by SS men and storm troopers out of uniform, each group supplied with hammers, axes, crowbars and incendiary bombs.

Three synagogues were set alight at the same time. The fire brigade made no attempt to put them out and only sprayed the neighboring buildings. The walls of the two burned synagogues closest to the consulate were now being torn down. One of the largest clothing stores in the city center burned to a shell, while the coffee house next door had its walls covered with asbestos and hosed down. Hardest of all to believe, Buffum wrote, the owners of the clothing store were charged with setting the fire, dragged from their beds at 6 a.m., and jailed.

At the Jewish cemetery, the chapel and the caretakers' house were burned, gravestones uprooted and graves opened. Reliable eyewitnesses told him that ten bodies had lain unburied there for a week, because every gravedigger and cemetery attendant had been arrested.

III. The Stream in the Zoo

The destruction of property, Buffum judged, was not the worst of it.

The worst was the arrests. Jewish men from sixteen to sixty, German citizens and stateless alike, were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. It had gone on every day since that night. The consulate could not check the numbers, but in Leipzig alone, he wrote, there was very little question that they ran into several thousands.

He recorded something German witnesses told him again and again, sickened as they told it. After wrecking the homes, the attackers threw many of the trembling occupants into a small stream that runs through the Zoological Park and ordered the onlookers to spit at them, smear them with mud and jeer. The slightest sign of sympathy brought fury. The crowd could only turn its eyes away or leave. This went on all morning, he wrote, with no police intervention, and it was done to men, women and children.

He had personally seen at least half a dozen people with bloody, badly bruised faces who fled to the consulate, believing that as refugees they might get their emigration speeded up there.

Then came those ten days: wives and mothers at the door, looking for a way out.

That same evening in the House of Commons in London, the Labour MP Philip Noel-Baker said he understood that in 80 percent of cases, the families of the arrested Jewish men did not even know where they were being held.

IV. The Numbers in Berlin

"Spontaneous" was the word the Nazi press used: a wave of righteous indignation at the murder of Third Secretary vom Rath in Paris by a young Jew.

Buffum did not believe it. Most of the people he saw looking at the ruins, he wrote, seemed stunned and aghast, nothing like an outraged populace. Several people known to his office had been aware at 9 p.m. on November 9 that the "spontaneous" outrage was set for some time after midnight, and some stayed up on purpose to watch.

The Nazis' own papers later said as much. In February 1939, the Nazi Party's Supreme Court sent Göring a secret report. On the evening of November 9, it said, Propaganda Minister Goebbels had spoken to party leaders gathered in Munich's Old Town Hall. Everyone present probably understood that the party should not appear outwardly as the originator of the demonstrations, but should in reality organize and carry them out. Many of them telephoned the instructions to their districts on the spot.

On November 11, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police, sent Göring a secret express letter summing up the reports so far: 815 shops destroyed and 171 dwellings set on fire or destroyed, figures he admitted showed only a fraction of the damage; 191 synagogues set on fire and 76 more completely destroyed; 20,000 Jews arrested; 36 deaths reported and 36 seriously injured.

A note was later added to the letter, dated November 15: the Field Marshal has been informed. No steps are to be taken.

V. The Meeting at the Air Ministry

At 11 a.m. on November 12, Göring chaired a meeting on "the Jewish question" at the Reich Air Ministry. A stenographic record survives.

Göring opened by complaining about money. When a Jewish shop was wrecked, he said, a German insurance company paid; the bales of clothing that went up in flames were exactly what he was short of everywhere. He had had enough of these demonstrations, he said.

Heydrich said that even with the Jews removed from economic life, the main problem remained: to get the Jews out of Germany. In Vienna, he said, a center for Jewish emigration had pushed out 50,000 people, while the Reich proper lost only 19,000 in the same period. He explained the method. Through the Jewish community organization, money was extracted from rich Jews who wanted to emigrate, plus a sum in foreign currency, and that paid for poorer Jews to leave as well. The problem, he said, was not making the rich Jew leave but getting rid of the poor.

Göring worried about foreign currency. Might this cost so much that Germany could not hold out?

Near the end, Göring announced that German Jewry would pay a "contribution" of one billion marks as punishment for its "crimes." Then he said something the record kept word for word: incidentally, I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.

Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk added that every possible means, including more exports, should be used to shove the Jews into foreign countries.

Make them leave, and make them leave their money. Both were settled in the same meeting.

VI. The World Outside the Door

But where could they go?

On November 14, George Rublee, director of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, cabled from London in something close to alarm. The attack on Germany's Jews, he wrote, together with the participating governments' indifference to the victims, had brought the committee to a critical stage.

He laid out the balance. Germany's neighbors faced so many illegal border crossings that local authorities could no longer cope and were shipping refugees back into Germany without distinction, many of them straight into camps. Belgium and the Netherlands had eased off, but only because they understood he was about to go to Berlin. As for countries of final settlement, he wrote, apart from the United States, which kept its quota, and the British Isles, admitting people at about the same rate, doors had been closed everywhere since the Evian conference. He had talked with the Latin American republics, the British dominions and the colonial empires and met a negative response. One example: the British Colonial Secretary had agreed the week before that the Empire could take 25 settlers in Kenya, whose families might possibly follow later.

The only constructive sign, he said, was that some countries might reconsider if Germany let emigrants take a substantial part of their property with them. In other words, they would consider propertied settlers but would not even discuss penniless refugees.

And property was exactly what the Air Ministry meeting had decided to keep.

The next day, Ambassador Hugh Wilson saw Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in Berlin to press again for Rublee's visit. Ribbentrop said the German government "obviously" could not negotiate German internal affairs with the representative of a committee it did not recognize, but that faster emigration had advantages for Germany, and perhaps unofficial persons could take the matter up with Rublee in Holland from the ground up. Then he asked Wilson whether Rublee was a Jew.

Certainly not, Wilson replied; his ancestors were French Huguenots.

On November 18, Secretary of State Cordell Hull told reporters that President Roosevelt had asked Myron Taylor to go to London again for a meeting of the committee. The events of the past few days in Germany, Hull said, had redoubled the urgency of finding new homes for hundreds of thousands of people; the United States was already admitting these unfortunates to the full extent permitted by law.

The full extent permitted by law meant the quota.

VII. London: Hard Even to Reach the Door

On the evening of November 21, the Commons debated the treatment of racial, religious and political minorities. Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare rose to reply.

He admitted that over the past ten days the visa machinery in Germany, and his own Home Office, had been strained to the breaking point. An organization built for a limited number of immigrants was now facing applications running into thousands a day. About 11,000 German refugees had settled in Britain, he said, but visas were granted case by case after inquiries, and every case had to be checked, so delays were unavoidable.

Mr. Bellenger, an MP, asked: must the applicant travel in person to Berlin or Vienna?

Hoare first said yes, then corrected himself. Visas could be obtained at any British consulate; Berlin and Vienna were the central offices. The applicant had to get in touch with the nearest British consul himself.

Another MP, Henderson Stewart, pressed him. Everyone knew, he said, that there were long queues, hundreds and thousands of people, waiting outside these consulates, and sometimes it was physically impossible for them to reach the door. Could the offices not notify the people whose visas had been granted?

Hoare said the particulars had to be checked on the spot. He described the difficulty: he received innumerable letters, and often it was hard to identify the person meant; even when identified, the person might have left his address, or been taken off to a concentration camp, and contact was lost, so that a visa granted could not be delivered. He had been told that day, he said, that where long queues had formed, the people turned away on a given day were being contacted and given priority the next.

Then he turned to the children. That morning, he said, Lord Samuel and others had brought him a proposal: to bring over in large numbers the Jewish and "non-Aryan" children whose maintenance could be guaranteed by their funds or by generous individuals. He had agreed at once that the Home Office would provide the facilities. He could not help thinking, he said, what a terrible dilemma it was for Jewish parents in Germany: to choose between sending their children into the unknown in a foreign country and keeping them in the conditions they now lived under.

A Quaker representative had arrived that morning from Germany and Holland. Hoare passed on what he said: he had asked the Jewish organizations in Germany, and the parents were almost unanimously in favor of facing the parting and letting their children take the risk of a foreign country, rather than keeping them to face the unknown dangers at home.

Here a family in the visa line was broken into parts: the father in a camp, the mother at the consulate door, the child perhaps traveling alone.

VIII. The Report Reaches Washington

Buffum's report went by messenger. It bears a receiving stamp: Assistant Secretary of State, January 4, 1939, Mr. Messersmith. Six weeks passed between Leipzig and that stamp.

On December 8, Rublee cabled again from London, passing on what Paris had told his office by telephone about French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet's talk with Ribbentrop on refugees. Ribbentrop, by this account, said the Jews in Germany were without exception pickpockets, murderers and thieves, that their property had been acquired illegally, and that the German government had decided to treat them like criminals and take that property. The German government could not help it if some of these "criminals" escaped to countries that seemed so anxious to have them. It was not, however, willing to let them take the property with them.

This is a report of a report, not Ribbentrop's own record. But it matches the stenographic record of the Air Ministry meeting: the people may go; the money stays.

On the other side stood the line from Rublee's cable: propertied settlers might be considered; penniless refugees would not even be discussed.

Epilogue

Buffum did not record the names of the women at the Leipzig consulate door. He did not say whether they ever got visas.

He wrote only why they came: their husbands and sons had been taken, and they wanted to get their families out.

Behind that door lay a chain of papers they could not see. Berlin had decided to let them go and to take their money. London said every case must be checked one by one, and the children could come first. Washington said everyone the quota allowed would be admitted. Most other countries had already shut their doors.

The line outside the consulate was what all of that looked like when it finally landed on one person.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Consular report: David H. Buffum, American Consul at Leipzig, "Antisemitic Onslaught in Germany as Seen from Leipzig," November 21, 1938, approved by Consul General Ralph C. Busser, "to be carried to Berlin by trusted messenger"; receiving stamp "Assistant Secretary of State, Jan. 4, 1939, Mr. Messersmith." Nuremberg document L-202, in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington: GPO, 1946), vol. VII, pp. 1037–1041, read in full from the Library of Congress PDF: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llmlp/2011525363_NT_Nazi_Vol-VII/2011525363_NT_Nazi_Vol-VII.pdf . The Nuremberg text is an excerpt, not the full 16-page report; only what appears in it is used. The boy, the dog, the painting, the store owners' arrest and the ten unburied bodies are Buffum's record of what physicians, witnesses and acquaintances told him, and are marked as such; "several thousands" is his estimate. A line in the report dating the broadcast of vom Rath's death to "10 P.M. November 10" appears to be a slip and is not used. 2. German documents: Heydrich's secret express letter to Göring, November 11, 1938, with the November 15 note (3058-PS, NCA vol. V); stenographic record of the meeting on the Jewish question chaired by Göring, November 12, 1938 (1816-PS, NCA vol. IV); report of the Nazi Party Supreme Court, February 13, 1939 (3063-PS, NCA vol. V). All read from the Library of Congress PDFs of the Nuremberg prosecution's English translations: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llmlp/2011525363_NT_Nazi_Vol-IV/2011525363_NT_Nazi_Vol-IV.pdf ; https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llmlp/2011525363_NT_Nazi_Vol-V/2011525363_NT_Nazi_Vol-V.pdf . 3. US diplomatic records: FRUS 1938, vol. I, docs. 795 (Rublee via Kennedy, London, Nov. 14), 797 (Wilson, Berlin, Nov. 15) and 805 (Hull, Nov. 18, press statement): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1938v01 . Also L-205 in NCA vol. VII (Rublee via Kennedy, London, Dec. 8, 1938); Ribbentrop's words to Bonnet reached Rublee by telephone from the French side and are presented as a report of a report. 4. British parliamentary record: HC Deb 21 November 1938 vol 341 cc1428-83 (Noel-Baker's motion; Hoare's reply and interventions by Bellenger, Maxton, Henderson Stewart and others), read at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/nov/21/racial-religious-and-political-minorities . 5. Boundaries: no individual family's visa application, consular registration or letters were read. The plan's "one family" could not be documented from archives, so the story uses the wives and mothers in Buffum's report and the parents' dilemma Hoare described as glimpses of families, without naming them or guessing their fates. The 20,000 arrests and 36 deaths are Heydrich's first-report figures, which he himself said understated the damage; they are not offered as final totals. The workings of the British children's scheme and the date of the first arrivals lie outside the documents read here and are not described. No invented dialogue, inner thoughts, or sensory scene-setting. 6. Rights: US government publications and British parliamentary records are public documents; the narrative is original, and quotations are short.