Kristallnacht was the cataclysmic event of November 9, 1938, that effectively terminated the 2,000-year-long history of Jews in Germany.
A program memorializing this tragic event will be presented by Chevra Ahavas Chesed, Inc. of Baltimore, on November 13, 2005…but first, the story:
Jews had lived in Germany from the time of the Romans; records exist of a thriving Jewish community in the city of Cologne in the year 321 C.E. By 1938, a year before the onset of World War II, Jews constituted only .8 percent of the total population in Germany, some 540 thousand Jews living among 65 million Germans.
On the evening of November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a wave of pogroms against Germany’s Jews. Organized groups of party thugs attacked Jewish homes, and in the space of a few hours, hundreds of synagogues with their holy books, ritual objects, and Torah scrolls were set on fire throughout Germany. Storefronts of Jewish businesses were smashed and their contents looted. Almost 7,500 businesses were destroyed. Cemeteries and schools were vandalized. Thousands of Jews were brutally beaten, and about 100 were killed. At least 30,000 Jewish men were sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald concentration camps. This included the writer of these lines, who was sent to Dachau as a sixteen-year-old.
Of those arrested, between 2,000 to 2,500 did not survive. The murdered were cremated, and their ashes were returned to their relatives with the cynical proviso: “Postage Due on Arrival.” The Jews were made to clean up and repair the destroyed properties. A fine of a billion marks was levied against the Jewish community, and all insurance claims were also turned over to the Reich.
What led up to all this?
The German government claimed that this pogrom was the spontaneous response of the German people to the assassination on Nov. 7, 1938, of Ernst vom Rath, a Third Counselor at the German Embassy in Paris. It all goes back to the Polish government, which legislated, in October, 1938, that certain of its citizens living outside the country’s borders were to be deprived of their Polish citizenship and would thus become stateless. Many Polish Jews had been living in Germany for decades. The Germans, not wanting to have to deal with these newly stateless Jews, reacted by rounding up some 15,000 to 20,000 Jews with Polish passports. On October 29, 1938, this group of people was transported to the Polish border. Polish guards would not let them in, and the Germans would not take them back. These Jews were stranded in a “no-man’s land” near Zbonszyn, Poland in the middle of a bitterly cold winter. Living conditions were intolerable, without food, heat, or shelter.
A young man, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, was living in Paris, alone and far away from his family. He heard of his family’s plight in Zbonszyn. In desperation, young Grynszpan proceeded to the German Embassy in Paris and shot the first person coming in sight. The above-mentioned Ernst vom Rath, was mortally wounded and died on the afternoon of November 9, 1938.
Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass” is a term coined by Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who had also orchestrated this pogrom. Kristallnacht proved to be the crucial turning point in the fate of German Jewry. Among the most assimilated, some isolated few who could not visualize their existence outside a German framework preferred to terminate their own lives. The majority of Jews tried to escape Germany but were by that time largely trapped. Restrictive immigration quotas remained in force in countries to which the Jews wanted to emigrate. And although Kristallnacht events were widely reported in the world press, very little action was taken by other governments in response. The Jews in Germany and Austria were abandoned to their fate, as the Nazis understood that they were free to persecute the Jews with impunity.
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