THE real course of Kristallnacht November 9/10, 1938.

DID Hitler approve of Goebbels's orders for a pogrom? Police orders certainly went out even after midnight via Gestapo HQ in Berlin triggering further acts of mayhem. The clear evidence is however that until midnight Hitler was in the dark, when the adjutants (von Below in particular) brought to his attention that synagogues were on fire in Munich. Below himself described this to me. Hitler sent for Goebbels, furious. Schaub confirms this. Goebbels had to phone around for hours to halt the destruction. Hitler's erstwhile adjutant Fritz Wiedemann, writing a very few weeks later, reports this. At 2:56 a.m. Deputy-Führer Rudolf Hess's office issued a nationwide urgent teletype to gauleiters, to halt the arson attacks "on orders from the very highest level". At 3:45 a.m. Heydrich himself ordered a total halt to the wave of arson attacks ("all kinds of arson are to hindered"). It could not be clearer.

Next morning Hitler again sent for Goebbels, and Goebbels issued an edict (right) cancelling the instructions for mayhem he had previously given. Anti-Nazi resistance hero Ulrich von Hassell and Colonel von Groscurth both stated that Goebbels was the instigator. So did Heinrich Himmler himself -- "When I asked the Führer about it, I had the impression that he did not know anything about these events."

As for the version given by Goebbels in his diaries, on which Evans relies so heavily, I stated in my closing speech to the Court: "The Goebbels diary is sometimes a very deceitful document; it must be recognized as such and treated very gingerly indeed. It is the diary of a liar, a propagandist. The fact that it was evidently written up not one, but two or even three days later, after the Kristallnacht episode, calls for additional caution in relying on it for chronology and content. It was furthermore in Goebbels' interest to maintain that he had been acting at all material times on Hitler's orders, although those in the know (Rosenberg, Von Hassell, Groscurth, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Hitler's adjutants Wolff, Brückner, Below, Wiedemann, all of whose evidence was in the Court Bundle) clearly recognised that this was untrue." Look in vain for any of these documents in conformist historians' writings on the Kristallnacht!

See too my Document Book (pdf) for the arguments.