Double Agent by Peter Duffy Page B

lies” that accused him of coercing confessions and assisting escapes. The most bizarre moment in the character-assassination campaign came when an elderly Russian landlord testified that Turrou lived under the name Leon Petroff in his house on Douglass Street in Brooklyn more than twenty years earlier. “One day Petroff say, ‘I kill myself,’ ” the man recalled in his accented English. “I say, ‘Listen, you no kill yourself in my house.’ So he started to drink something from a bottle so I run for police. Police go for doctors. Doctors put ice in mouth. So they took him to hospital.” Was it Kings County Hospital? George Dix wondered. “Yes,” the Russian said, “that’s the hospital for crazy people.”
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    But at this point in world events, the spy trial had become of less pressing interest. The public was focusing its attention on a shocking act of Nazi criminality that caused even the most disinterested observer to concede that Hitler was truly a menace: the pogrom against the Jewish population of the newly expanded Reich that the
Times
’ correspondent in Berlin, Otto D. Tolischus, described on page 1 as “a wave of destruction, looting, and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years’ War” of 1618 to 1648. During the night of November 9 and into the morning of November 10, Nazi hordes set fire to more than a thousand synagogues and destroyed at least seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses, smashing their Belgian plate-glass windows with such fervor that the night would be forever known as
Kristallnacht
. Jewish homes and apartments were ransacked, and thirty thousand Jewish men, “especially rich ones,” were incarcerated in concentration camps. Jews were cursed at, slapped, spat upon, beaten, murdered. The official death toll was ninety-one, but the actual number, which should include the hundreds who died in the camps before most inmates were released, was many times higher. The violence was followed by a spate of legal measures that all but ended the possibility of a Jewish existence in the Third Reich. German Jews were ordered to pay a billion-reichsmark fine and robbed of their businesses, land, stock, jewels, and artworks in a process known as Aryanization. They were banned from collecting welfare payments, holding driver’s licenses, owning carrier pigeons, attending German schools, publishing Jewish newspapers, possessing precious metals or stones, and visiting most public places. During a conference of high-ranking officials that discussed the restrictions, Hermann Göring joked about confining animals that resembled Jews to certain sections of forests (“the elk has a crooked nose like theirs”) and mused to no one in particular, “I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.” Yet Hitler didn’t go so far as to require Jews to wear special badges on their clothing or force them to live within exclusionary ghettos, probably in the belief that the German people were still unprepared for a radicalism that recalled not the great war of the seventeenth century but the dark era of the Middle Ages. Although it wasn’t easy for Jews to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy or gain access to the necessary funds, the official policy of Nazi Germany was to induce them to emigrate, in the hopes, according to a Foreign Ministry circular, of increasing anti-Semitism in Western countries and thus producing sympathy for Germany’s plight.
    Few outside of the ideologically blinkered believed that the night of horrors was a spontaneous eruption of what Goebbels called the “healthy instinct” of the German people. “The foreign press is very bad,” he confided to his diary. “Mainly the American.” George Gallup found that 94 percent of Americans now disapproved of Nazi policy toward Jews, “a vote of condemnation so nearly unanimous as to constitute one of the most decisive expressions of opinion in any of the more than 800 surveys conducted by the