Kristallnacht
Organised mobs burned some 1,400 synagogues across Germany and Austria on the night of 9 November 1938 and the day after. The pretext was the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old whose parents were among 12,000 Polish Jews expelled from Germany days earlier and left stranded at the border. When Ernst vom Rath died on 9 November, Goebbels told the Nazi leadership gathered in Munich that spontaneous demonstrations should not be discouraged, and instructions went out through the party apparatus that night: police were not to intervene except to protect German property, fire brigades were to save neighbouring buildings only, and arrests of healthy Jewish men were to be prepared. Some 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, cemeteries and schools were wrecked, at least 91 people were killed outright and hundreds more died in custody or by suicide, and about 30,000 men were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The name comes from the broken glass, and it is a euphemism coined at the time. The Jewish community was then fined a billion Reichsmarks collectively for the damage, and the insurance payments due to Jewish owners were confiscated by the state. Jews were excluded from the economy entirely within weeks. The international reaction was condemnation without any significant relaxation of immigration quotas; the Kindertransport, which brought around 10,000 children to Britain, is the exception. It is generally taken as the point at which persecution became open violence, three years before the killing began systematically. The name has been criticised in Germany for exactly that reason — broken glass sounds like vandalism — and the official commemorations now use the plain term for the November pogroms. Some 115,000 Jews left Germany and Austria in the ten months that followed, and the countries willing to take them were few.
- Year: 1938 CE
- Category: Social
