Kristallnacht Totally Explained

Everything about Kristallnacht totally explained

Kristallnacht (literally Crystal night) was a pogrom in Nazi Germany on 9–10 November, 1938. On a single night, 91 Jews were murdered, and 25,000–30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps.
   The Nazis coordinated an attack on Jewish people and their property in Germany and German-controlled lands as a part of Hitler's anti-Semitic policy.
   On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year old German Jew enraged by his family's expulsion from Germany, walked into the German Embassy in Paris and fired five shots at a junior diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. 2 days later, the diplomat died and Germany was in the grip of skillfully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence. In the early hours of November 10, an orgy of coordinated destruction broke out in cities, towns and villages throughout the Third Reich.
   The consequences of this violence were disastrous for the Jews of the Third Reich. In a single night, Kristallnacht saw the destruction of more than 1,000 Synagogues, and the ransacking of tens of thousands of Jewish businesses and homes. It marked the beginning of the systematic eradication of a people in Germany who could trace their ancestry to Roman times, and served as a prelude to the Holocaust that was to follow. although Hitler didn't gain absolute power until the Enabling act was passed on March 23, after the Reichstag fire. By 1938, Jews had been almost completely excluded from German social and political life. Many sought asylum abroad, and thousands did manage to leave, but as Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936, "The world seemed to be divided into two parts — those places where the Jews couldn't live and those where they couldn't enter." Historian Eric Johnson notes that in the year before Kristallnacht, the Germans “had entered a new radical phase in anti-Semitic activity.” Although controversial, some historians believe that the Nazi government had been contemplating a planned outbreak of violence against the Jews for some time and were waiting for an appropriate provocation; there's evidence of this planning that dates back to 1937. The Zionist leadership in Palestine wrote in February 1938 “a very reliable private source – one which can be traced back to the highest echelons of the SS leadership, that there's an intention to carry out a genuine and dramatic pogrom in Germany on a large scale in the near future.”

Timeline of events

Kristallnacht was the result of more than five years and nine months of discrimination and persecution. From its inception in Germany, Hitler's regime moved quickly to introduce anti-Jewish policy. The roughly 500,000 Jews in Germany, who accounted for only 0.76% of the overall population,
During 1933 the German government enacted forty-two laws restricting the rights of German Jews to earn a living, to enjoy full citizenship and to educate themselves. The most draconian of these laws, the law "for the reconstruction of the civil service", forbade Jews to work in any branch of the civil service. The pressure against the Jews continued unabated. During 1934, a further nineteen discriminatory laws were introduced. During 1935, the government had enacted a further 29 anti-Jewish laws. The most draconian were the Nuremberg Laws "for the protection of German blood and honour." Signed personally by Hitler, these laws prohibited Jews from being citizens of the Reich and forbade marriage between "those of German or related blood" and Jews, Roma (Gypsies), blacks, or their offspring.
In an attempt to provide help to the Jews affected by these laws, an international conference was held on July 6, 1938 on the shores of Lake Geneva. The conference hoped to address the issue of Jewish immigration to other countries. When the conference was held, more than 250,000 Jews had fled Germany and Austria, which had been annexed by Germany in March 1938. However, more than 300,000 German and Austrian Jews were seeking shelter from the oppression. As the number of Jews wanting to leave grew, the restrictions against them also grew with many countries tightening their rule for admission.

Expulsion of Jews from Germany

On October 18, 1938, on Hitler's orders, more than 12,000 Jews were expelled from Germany. They were Polish-born Jews who had been living in Germany, legally, for many years. They were ordered to leave their homes in a single night, and were only allowed one suitcase per person to store their belongings. As the Jews were taken away, all of their remaining possessions were seized as booty by both the Nazi authorities and by their neighbours.
The deportees were taken from their homes to the nearest railway stations, where they were put on trains to the Polish border. Four thousand were granted entry into Poland; however, the remaining 8,000 were forced to stay at the border. There, in harsh conditions, they waited for the Polish government to allow them into the country. Hundreds more, one British newspaper told its readers, "are reported to be lying about, penniless and deserted, in little villages along the frontier near where they'd been driven out by the Gestapo and left."

Vom Rath shooting

One expelled couple, who had been living in Hanover for more than 27 years, had a seventeen-year-old son, Herschel Grynszpan, living in Paris.
Grynszpan received his sister's short message on November 3. The next day he read a graphic account of the deportations in a Paris Yiddish newspaper. On the morning of Sunday, November 6 he bought a pistol, loaded it with 5 bullets, and on the following day went to the German embassy where, "in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews," he shot Ernst vom Rath, fatally wounding him.

From the Germans

The reaction of non-Jewish Germans to Kristallnacht was varied. Martin Gilbert believes that “many non-Jews resented the round up”, his opinion being supported by German witness Dr. Arthur Flehinger who recalls seeing “people crying while watching from behind their curtains”. Some even went as far as to help Jews, but the majority merely sat inside watching in horror, feeling helpless to do anything. Other non-Jewish Germans took part in the violence, as it wasn't just Stormtroopers rioting. Evidence of this can be established in that riots broke out on the night of November 7 and continued in some places after the pogrom was called to a halt; thus it may be surmised that these successive actions were not those of the Nazis. Also, several sources mention women and children as participating in the riots, and these were clearly not Stormtroopers but ordinary citizens. The number of German citizens involved in the riots is impossible to know, as many Stormtroopers were wearing civilian clothes and were thus indistinguishable. According to Daniel Goldhagen, Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman, published a compendium of Martin Luther's writings shortly after the Kristallnacht; Sasse "applauded the burning of the synagogues" and the coincidence of the day, writing in the introduction, "On November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words "of the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews." Diarmaid MacCulloch argued that Luther's 1543 pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies was a "blueprint" for the Kristallnacht.
In an article released for publication on the evening of November 11, Goebbels ascribed the events of Kristallnacht to the "healthy instincts" of the German people. He went on to explain: "The German people is anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race."
Eyewitness accounts featured at kold.com show the general response. Reports of the destruction are the main focus of the article.

"They ripped up the belongings, the books, knocked over furniture, shouted obscenities,"

The scholarly response in that article is very much the same:

"Houses of worship burned down, vandalized, in every community in the country where people either participate or watch,"
   While November 1938 predated overt articulation of "the Final Solution," it nonetheless foreshadowed the genocide to come. Around the time of Kristallnacht, the Schutzstaffel newspaper "Das Schwarze Korps" called for a "destruction by swords and flames." At a conference on the day after the pogrom, Hermann Göring said: "The Jewish problem will reach its solution if, in any time soon, we'll be drawn into war beyond our border—then it's obvious that we'll have to manage a final account with the Jews." The prefix Reichs- (imperial) was later added (Reichskristallnacht) as a pun on the Nazis' propensity to add this prefix to various terms and titles like Reichsführer-SS (Himmler) or Reichsmarschall (Göring). This was also done in other contexts to ridicule and criticize aspects of the Nazi dictatorship (for example Reichswasserleiche - "National Drowned Body" for actress Kristina Söderbaum, who frequently played tragic heroines in her husband Veit Harlan's anti-Semitic melodramas, two of whom committed suicide by drowning.)
Other names

Reichskristallnacht, meaning Imperial crystal night
Pogromnacht (Russian:погромhо́чь), meaning night of havoc and destruction
Reichspogromnacht (Russian:Рейхпогромhо́чь), meaning Imperial night of havoc and destruction
Novemberpogrome, (Russian:Ноябрьhо́чь), meaning November night of havoc and destruction
Crystal Night, literal English translation
Night of [broken] glass, the meaning of the phrase

Modern response
Many decades later, association with the Kristallnacht anniversary was cited as the main reason against choosing November 9 ("Schicksalstag"), the day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, as the new German national holiday; a different day was chosen (October 3, 1990, German reunification). Avant-garde guitarist Gary Lucas's 1988 composition "Verklärte Kristallnacht", which juxtaposes the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah," with phrases from "Deutschland Über Alles" amid wild electronic shrieks and noise, is intended to be a sonic representation of the horrors of Kristallnacht. It was premiered at the 1988 Berlin Jazz Festival and received rave reviews. (The title is a reference to Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 work "Verklärte Nacht" that presaged his pioneering work on atonal music; Schoenberg was an Austrian Jew exiled by the Nazis).
   The German power metal band Masterplan's debut album, Masterplan (2003), features an anti-Nazism song entitled "Crystal Night" as the fourth track.
   The popular German band BAP published a song titled Kristallnaach in their Cologne dialect, dealing with the emotions of the Kristalnacht.

Further Information
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