“Kristallnacht”

On the night of November 9–10, 1938, the first targeted mass action of physical violence and terror against the Jews of Germany took place. These bloody events, led by the Nazi authorities of the Third Reich, went down in history as “Kristallnacht” or ‘Night of Broken Glass” (German: Reichskristallnacht). The formal pretext for the action was a murder of Ernst vom Rath – a staff of the German Embassy in Paris, by the Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan. Grynszpan, found out about his family's deportation to Poland, decided to take revenge and carried out an attack on the German embassy. The death of the embassy's third secretary, von Rath, sparked a wave of anti-Semitic propaganda. On November 7, in a leading Nazi newspaper “Völkischer Beobachter” where a call for pogroms was made: “The German people have drawn the necessary conclusions from your crime. They will not tolerate an unacceptable situation. Hundreds of thousands of Jews control entire sectors of the German economy, rejoice in their synagogues, while their fellow Jews in other states call for war against Germany and kill our diplomats.”. The Nazi authorities used the murder as a convenient pretext for their supporters to attack Jewish property and then to legally exclude Jews from participating in the country's economic life. The pogroms were not “spontaneous expressions of righteous anger” over the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew, as Nazi propaganda attempted to portray. Instead, they were intended to facilitate the implementation of the policy of “Aryanization” that began in the spring of 1938 and to accelerate the expropriation of Jewish property and enterprises, which were planned to be used to finance Germany's rearmament.

Between November 9 and 13, 1938, a wave of pogroms swept through German cities. Jewish homes and shops were looted by Hitler Youth, riot police, and civilians, leaving the streets littered with shattered glass from windows and storefronts (hence the name “Kristallnacht”). As a result of the November events, several hundred Jews were killed throughout the Reich, hundreds were injured and maimed, thousands were humiliated, and at least 300 people committed suicide. About 30,000 Jews were arrested and deported to the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Most of the surviving prisoners were released by August 1939 on condition of written consent to “emigrate” and transfer of property to the state. Moreover, 1,406 synagogues and prayer rooms were destroyed during the pogroms. In Vienna, only one of the 25 synagogues remained intact, all the others were set on fire. 11 of the 14 synagogues in Berlin were completely burned down, the rest were badly damaged. About 7,500 Jewish shops, apartments, cultural centers, and cemetery buildings were also destroyed. After the November pogroms, former German Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed: “For the first time I am ashamed to be German”. The events of “Kristallnacht” are considered the symbolic beginning of the systematic extermination of Jews, which began with the discrimination and expulsion of German Jews from 1933 and ultimately led to the murder of millions of Jews during World War II.