On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jewish population in Germany, annexed Austria, and in the Sudetenland which was seized from Czechoslovakia a month earlier. This event came to be called Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes. Kristallnacht was an unmistakable harbinger of the horrors yet to come and is widely regarded as the beginning of the Holocaust.
German officials claimed that Kristallnacht had erupted as a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment in response to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath was a German embassy official stationed in Paris. Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, had shot the diplomat on November 7, 1938. A few days earlier, German authorities had expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich; Grynszpan had received news that his parents, residents in Germany since 1911, were among them. Grynszpan’s parents and the other expelled Polish Jews were initially denied entry into their native Poland. They found themselves stranded in a refugee camp near the town of Zbaszyn in the southern border region between Poland and Germany.
In reality it was a purposeful, well orchestrated, act of state terror. Vom Rath died on November 9, 1938, two days after the shooting. The day happened to coincide with the anniversary of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an important date in the Nazi calendar. The Nazi Party leadership, assembled in Munich for its commemoration and chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of antisemitic excesses. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a chief instigator of the Kristallnacht pogroms, suggested to the convened Nazi ‘Old Guard’ that ‘World Jewry’ had conspired to commit the assassination. He announced that “the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.”
The violence was largely prompted or provoked by Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA) but also included many ordinary German who held anti-Semitic prejudices and joined in the pogrom. The SA was the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party and often referred to as “Storm Troopers” and the “Brown Shirts.” The SA were mostly violent street thugs and embittered veterans of the First World War who fought Jews, communists, and other perceived enemies of the Reich who they judged to be responsible for Germany’s defeat in the war and her subsequent hardships. Many members wore civilian clothes to support the fiction that the disturbances were expressions of ‘outraged public reaction.’ The “spontaneous” rioters also were to take no measures endangering non-Jewish German life or property; they were not to subject foreigners (even Jewish foreigners) to violence; and they were to remove all synagogue archives prior to vandalizing synagogues and other properties of the Jewish communities.
The SA led mobs shattered the shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial establishments and looted their wares. Jewish cemeteries became a particular object of desecration in many regions. Many synagogues burned throughout the night in full view of the public and of local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. The mobs also attacked Jews in their homes while forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation. Up to 30,000 Jewish males were arrested, with most of them transferred from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachenhausen, and other concentration camps. The Nazis also determined that the Jews should be liable for the damages caused during “Kristallnacht.” “The Decree on the Penalty Payment by Jews Who Are German Subjects” also imposed a one-billion mark fine on the Jewish community, supposedly an indemnity for the death of vom Rath.
“Kristallnacht” provided the Nazi government with an opportunity at last to totally remove Jews from German public life. It was the culminating event in a series of anti-Semitic policies set in place since Hitler took power in 1933. In the weeks that followed, the German government promulgated dozens of laws and decrees to deprive Jews of their property and of their means of livelihood. Many of these laws enforced “Aryanization” policy—the transfer of Jewish-owned enterprises and property to “Aryan” ownership, usually for a fraction of their true value. Ensuing legislation barred Jews, already ineligible for employment in the public sector, from practicing most professions in the private sector. The legislation made further strides in removing Jews from public life. German education officials expelled Jewish children still attending German schools. German Jews lost their right to hold a driver’s license or own an automobile. Legislation restricted access to public transport. Jews could no longer gain admittance to “German” theaters, movie cinemas, or concert halls.
On November 15, 1938, one week after Kristallnacht, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced Nazi Germany’s terror attack on Jews, saying, “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.” FDR made an exception to his practice of off-the-record press conferences by allowing newspapers to quote this statement from his meeting with reporters that day. The president also announced that he had recalled the US ambassador to Germany, Hugh Wilson. The United States was the only nation to recall its ambassador and would not replace him until after the end of the war in 1945.
Tragedy and Farce 