Kristallnacht

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“	Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the 'fun'.	„
	~ The Daily Telegraph correspondent Hugh Greene's first-hand account of Kristallnacht.

Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom enacted against the Jews of Germany and Austria by the Nazi Party from November 9 to 10 in 1938, principally carried out by both the Schutzstaffel and the Sturmabteilung with some participation by the Hitler Youth and also the German civilians and was overseen by Joseph Goebbels. It is considered to be the official beginning of the Holocaust.

The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.

Overview

The pretext for Kristallnacht was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. When Adolf Hitler was notified, he instructed Goebbels to organize a pogrom in retaliation. Gestapo leaders Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller played important roles in the planning of the pogrom, instructing the Ordnungspolizei to not interfere in the riots.

Estimates of the number of fatalities caused by the pogrom have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews were murdered during the attacks. Modern analysis of German scholarly sources by historians such as Sir Richard Evans puts the number much higher. When deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll climbs into the hundreds. Additionally, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Rape was also widespread.

Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, looted, and vandalized as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were either destroyed or damaged. The British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world. The British newspaper The Times wrote at the time: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."

The synagogues, some centuries old, were also victims of considerable violence and vandalism, with the tactics the Stormtroopers practiced on these and other sacred sites described as "approaching the ghoulish" by the United States Consul in Leipzig and "thuggish" by others. Tombstones were uprooted and graves violated. Fires were lit, and prayer books, scrolls, artwork and philosophy texts were thrown upon them, and precious buildings were either burned or smashed until unrecognizable.

Many Berliners were deeply ashamed of the pogrom, and some took great personal risks to offer help to their beleaguered Jewish neighbors. The son of a US consular official heard the janitor of his block cry: "They must have emptied the insane asylums and penitentiaries to find people who'd do things like that!"

When former German Kaiser Wilhelm II heard about this pogrom he recalled: "For the first time in history, I am ashamed to be a German."