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Kurfürstendamm and Red Murder in silence.” Brüning wrote in his memoirs that he and Goebbels made a deal: Brüning arranged a different judge for Helldorff, while Goebbels ensured that Nazis would not disrupt an upcoming visit by French ministers. 46
    As it turned out, the court was wrong and Feistel’s informer, along with liberal and left-wing opinion in Berlin, were right: Goebbels, Helldorff, and Ernst
had
planned the riots. There is conclusive evidence on this point. Even in 1932 a prominent Berlin SA officer had written to Hitler to complain about Helldorff’s “shameful” roll in the Ku’damm “affair”: “At the giving out of the orders [only] Dr. Goebbels, Ernst, and Helldorff were present and yet the police found out about it.” Further confirmation came after the war from none other than Heini Gewehr. In 1960 Gewehr wrote: “Count Helldorff and Karl Ernst had ordered this demonstration and notified the Berlin
Standarten
[SA units].” Later on, Gewehr said, he had been pressured to testify that he, Helldorff, and Ernst had driven to the Ku’damm only to control the violence. “During the trial,” he continued, “there were fights between Count Helldorff and me, because I took the view that one should stand up for one’s actions.” 47
    THE KU’DAMM RIOT was not the first time the Berlin SA unleashed violence aimed at Jews. In October 1930, at the opening of the new Reichstag session,stormtroopers had gone on a rampage around Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz, attacking Jewish-owned shops and business. Goebbels’s
Angriff
naturally blamed the whole thing on provocateurs, “Ali Höhler types” in fact, and insisted that the Nazi Party had nothing to do with it. Here again was Goebbels’s propaganda of the street. 48
    As late as March 1934 Goebbels and his SA allies from the Ku’damm were still getting up to what Ernst Röhm’s biographer Eleanor Hancock has called “political theater.” The occasion was the Berlin premier of a British film on the life of Catherine the Great, starring an Austrian actress of Jewish origins named Elisabeth Bergner. Three days before the premier Goebbels complained that his ban on Jewish actors was being flouted and “requested” that German authorities enforce his ban. At the premiere, rioters, among them many SA men, “shouted anti-Semitic slogans, threw eggs at posters in the lobby, and harassed cinema-goers.” Ernst gave a speech assuring them the film would be banned. Inside the theater Röhm asked the audience to “remember that Germany was a land of law and order.” The next day the film was shut down. By 1934 no such demonstration could have taken place without at least tacit official approval, and Hancock writes that Röhm’s part in the affair was likely coordinated with Goebbels and Ernst. 49
    The Ku’damm riot also prefigured the more famous
Kristallnacht
of November 1938, which Goebbels also stage-managed, although by this time Ernst and Röhm had fallen victim to Hitler’s murderous calculations. As Saul Friedländer writes, by the autumn of 1938 the idea of a pogrom against German Jews had “been in the air” for some time, perhaps since early 1937. But several factors precipitated it. On November 7th a young Polish Jew whose family had just been deported to Poland from their home in Hannover decided to register a dramatic protest. Herschel Grynszpan, who was living underground in Paris, went to the German embassy there and shot an official named Ernst vom Rath. Rath died two days later. Word of Rath’s death reached Hitler and Goebbels at the annual banquet commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923. After speaking to Goebbels, Hitler (very unusually) left the banquet and Goebbels gave a speech in his stead, letting the gathering know that the government would not hinder