On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazi SA stormtroopers and thousands of German and Austrian citizens took to the streets of Berlin, Vienna, and other major cities to attack their Jewish neighbors, destroy their businesses and homes, and burn synagogues and hospitals. The excuse for the attack on a German diplomat in Paris and the tremendous propaganda campaign that unleashed the violence
“The Jewish people of Germany, as punishment for their abominable crimes, have to face a fine of one billion marks. By the way, I must admit that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany,” he said with brutal sincerity. Hermann Goering Two days later, when trucks were already transporting thousands of Jews to the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. The side of Adolf Hitler He was referring to the events of the night of 9 to 10 November 1938 when Nazi stormtroopers, the fearsome SA, supported by thousands of citizens fanaticised by Third Reich propaganda, took to the streets of major German and Austrian cities to literally “hunt” Jews, destroy their homes and businesses, and loot their belongings. And not only that: as Göring clearly stated, they should also pay for the damage.
That operation planned from the highest level of the Nazi regime went down in history as “the night of broken glass” (Kristallnacht, in German) and marked one of the highest and bloodiest points of Hitler's escalation against German citizens of Jewish origin before the start of World War II. The result of the violent day was 96 dead, 30.000 arrested and then deported en masse, more than a thousand synagogues burned and more than 7000 Jewish-owned shops were destroyed or seriously damaged, whose shattered stained glass windows – its windows broken by the fury of the mob – gave rise to the name given to the racist attack.
In testimony given to a British newspaper, an Englishman who occasionally visited Berlin described what he saw that night: “As we reached the synagogue, flames began to rise from one end of the building. The crowd rushed forward, tearing out the seats and woodwork of the building to feed the flames. At a nearby Jewish shop, men and women, howling deliriously, threw blocks through the windows and doors until they gave way and the mob, shouting and fighting, broke inside to loot and steal.”
To unleash the barbarity of that night, the Nazi regime needed an excuse and found it in an isolated incident that had occurred two days earlier, more than a thousand kilometers from Berlin. On November 7, in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew whose family lived in Germany, attacked the German diplomat Ernst von Rath, to protest against the mass deportations of Jews of Polish origin ordered by Hitler. With five bullet wounds in his body, von Rath died on the morning of November 9 in a hospital. The consternation caused by the attack was skillfully used by the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to light the fuse that sparked violence against citizens of Jewish origin in Germany and Austria that same night.
“This was the excuse given to Goebbels for a provocative speech intended to arouse spontaneous anger among the people against the Jews,” explains Wolfgang Benz in his book “The Third Reich: 101 Fundamental Questions.” It was the assassination of von Rath, but it could have been anything else, because the mass destruction of the Jewish population of Germany was part of the plan to assassinate the Jews. Nazi agenda even long before Adolf Hitler came to power.
The enemy within
The intention to strip Jews of German citizenship was one of the 25 points of the founding programme of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) published in February 1920. “A citizen can only be someone who possesses the quality of a member of the national community. A citizen can only be someone who has the right to be a member of the national community. German blood, whatever his confession. No Jew, consequently, can be a member of the national community," he said. Hitler made a similar point explicitly in "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle), where he expresses in several passages his intention to build a Germany free of Jews.
Thus, the little more than Half a million Jews in Germany – less than one percent of the population – were singled out from the start as a internal enemy by the Nazi propaganda machine. They were accused of Germany's defeat in World War I, of conducting shady business dealings and of being responsible for the country's economic difficulties, such as the hyperinflation of the early 20s and the impact of the Great Depression caused by the financial crash of 1929.
The Scheunenviertel pogrom in Berlin in 1923 and the new wave of attacks in 1931, known as the Kurfürstendamm pogroms, had the Nazis – who were still at the forefront of German politics – in the forefront of action. One of the organisers of these latter attacks was Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff, the leader of the SA and later chief of the Berlin police.
Anti-Semitic policies
In january 1933, with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor, the living conditions of German Jews deteriorated dramatically and accelerated even further when the dictator seized power after the Reichstag fire. The Nazi leader himself publicly called for a Boycott of Jewish businesses, which was organized by Julius Streicher and carried out by the SA. Following this call, on April 1, 1933, the main German cities were awash with posters reading: “Germans, defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!”
That same year, the government enacted a series of laws that restricted the Jewish rights Germans to work, to have access to the rights of other German citizens and to educate themselves. The Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service also prohibited them from holding jobs in the public service.
By 1935, with the so-called Nuremberg Laws, As the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, German citizens of Jewish origin were reduced to the status of pariahs in their own country. This battery of “legal” norms defined the characteristics of a Jew, a half-Jew or a quarter-Jew, according to ancestry; prohibited sexual relations and marriage between citizens of German or related blood and Jews; deprived them of German citizenship and most of their political rights, including the right to vote, and prevented them from exercising various professions even if they had the qualifications to do so.
Meanwhile, Goebbels' propaganda strategy continued to hammer away day after day with messages and anti-Semitic contentOne of the most important was the film “The Wandering Jew,” a documentary made with archive materials edited to paint them in a sinister light in the eyes of the viewers.
The escalation continued in 1938, when their German passports were confiscated and they were forced to register all their assets, to facilitate their expropriation; the concept of “Jewish business” was also defined, where “Aryans” were not to buy, and the exercise of other professions was prohibited, such as medicine. In August, the Nazi regime announced that it was cancelling residence permits for foreigners, including Jews born in Germany but of foreign descent, and forcing them to renew them. This led to the almost immediate expulsion, at the end of October, of more than 17.000 Jews of Polish origin, who were only allowed to take one suitcase with their belongings, while the rest of their possessions – including homes and businesses – were Confiscated.
Among those expelled were the young man's parents and siblings. Herschel Grynszpan. “Nobody told us what was happening, but we knew that this was going to be the end… We don’t have a penny. Could you send us something?” wrote his sister Bertha in a postcard she sent him from the Polish border. Herschel reacted by attacking the diplomat Ernst von Rath in Paris, without imagining that his action would be used by Nazi propaganda to light the fuse for Kristallnacht.
A “fateful night”
The intention of the Nazi government was that the coordinated attack against Jewish people and businesses in Germany and Austria seemed to be a spontaneous reaction by German citizens outraged by the murder of von Rath. However, it was clear to the world from the very beginning that this was a violence encouraged from the highest levels of power. “On the fateful night of November 9, 1938, with the support of the SS, the public instigation of propaganda directed by Goebbels and the complicit silence of the police, a popular rebellion was organized that became The bloodiest persecution of Jews in times of peace", notes historian Ramón Espanyol Vall in “A Brief History of the Holocaust.”
Dozens of testimonies revealed the complicity of the police. For example, during the attack by a mob on a Jewish orphanage in Berlin: “About 50 men broke into the house and began their work of destruction, which was carried out with the utmost precision. When the children went out into the street in search of police protection, the police attacked them. Chief of Police Freihahn "He shouted at us: 'The Jews are not protected by us! ' Freihahn led us all out onto the wet grass in the orphanage's garden, where we watched as everything in the house was systematically destroyed under police supervision," one employee recounted.
The English citizen who witnessed the burning of a Berlin synagogue also witnessed the attack on a Jewish hospital. “The streets were a chaos of bloodthirsty people “The mob was screaming and yearning for Jewish bodies. The object of the mob’s hatred was a hospital for sick Jewish children, many of them crippled or consumptive. Within minutes they smashed the windows and forced open the doors. The mob leaders, most of whom were women, kicked and beat the nurses, doctors and orderlies,” she said.
The first light of November 10 revealed a devastating scene in Berlin that was almost exactly the same as in other German cities and also in Vienna: destroyed businesses, smoking synagogues and an endless amount of broken glass on the sidewalks. That same morning, the first transports departed, taking thousands of Jewish prisoners to the concentration camps.
It was then that Hermann Göring anticipated the Holocaust with one sentence: “By the way, I must admit that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.”
Today the Aryans would again commit these kinds of crimes, followed by killings, gassing and cremation. It was a source of pride for them to have undertaken this sinister enterprise of death.