Two weeks after La Pasionaria’s farewell to the International Brigades, Franco’s German allies offered a sign of what Europe would face under Nazi domination. On the night of November 9, throughout Germany, Austria, and the parts of Czechoslovakia Hitler now controlled, Nazi storm troopers attacked more than 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses, setting fires, smashing windows with axes and sledgehammers, and killing more than 90 Jews. Homes, schools, and hospitals were vandalized and tombstones in Jewish cemeteries smashed or uprooted. Laughing Nazis threw prayer books and Torah scrolls on bonfires. During Kristallnacht, as it was called because of all the broken glass, including stained-glass windows from centuries-old synagogues, fire departments were ordered to let buildings burn, and to douse the flames only if nearby “Aryan” property was threatened. A few days later, all Jewish children were barred from German schools, and some 30,000 Jewish men were taken off to Dachau, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps.
On a snowy morning six weeks later, Franco launched his last offensive. His armies were flush with new German weaponry, and his air force was bolstered by 400 German-trained pilots to whom the Condor Legion began to hand over some of its Messerschmitt fighters. In a desperate secret trip to Paris Negrín pleaded with the French foreign minister and the British and American ambassadors for help, but in vain. He had also been seeking a compromise peace through the Vatican and other channels, but Franco was not interested. Nor was he interested in attempts to mitigate the war’s toll. When the British sent a special envoy to encourage both sides in Spain to suspend executions, the Republic readily agreed, and halted all of them for some four months. Nationalist Spain, where the number of political prisoners facing the death sentence ran into the thousands, refused to do likewise.
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