Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, marked a turning point in Fascist antisemitism, when Berlin officially sanctioned the deportations and massacres of Jews. Petty bourgeois gentiles and their accomplices all across the Third Reich literally smashed their Jewish competitors’ businesses, massacred at least 91 Jews, and even carnally abused some.
Soon afterwards, Berlin further subtracted Jews’ liberties by disallowing them from operating their businesses, prohibiting them from gentiles’ schools, and forcing twenty or thirty thousand into concentration camps. To add insult to injury, Berlin blamed this tragedy on the victims and forced them to pay for the damages.
Quoting Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, chapter 7:
In October 1938 the [Fascists] discovered that the Poles were about to revoke the citizenship of thousands of their Jewish citizens resident in Germany. They therefore decided to deport the Jews to Poland immediately so that they would not be stuck with thousands of stateless Jews. It was this cold pogrom that led to the massive violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938.
The story was told, many years later, on 25 April 1961, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The witness, Zindel Grynszpan, then an old man, was the father of Herszl Grynszpan who, in despair at the deportation of his father back to Poland, had assassinated a German diplomat in Paris and provided the [Fascists] with the pretext for their terrible night of broken glass. Old Zindel told them of his deportation from his home in Hanover on the night of 27 October 1938: “Then they took us in police trucks, in prisoners’ lorries, about 20 men in each truck, and they took us to the railway station. The streets were full of people shouting: ’Juden raus! Auf nach Palästina!’” [26]
The significance of Zindel’s testimony was utterly lost in the welter of detail in the Eichmann trial. But those Jews were not being sent to Palestine, as the [Fascist] mob cried; the prosecutor in that courtroom in Jerusalem never thought to ask the elderly Grynszpan a question that we would think to ask: “What did you think, what did the other Jews think, when they heard that strange cry coming up from the savage mob?”
Zindel Grynszpan is long dead, as are most if not all the others who suffered there that hellish night; we have no answer to our query. But what really matters was what was shouted, rather than what was thought about it in that police van. However, we can reasonably suggest that if the ZVfD had resisted [Fascism’s] rise, if the WZO had mobilised Jewry against the New Order, if Palestine had been a bastion of Jewish resistance to [Fascism], the [Fascists] would never have told the Jews, and that mob, that the place for a Jew was in Palestine.
Perhaps, then, that Friday night in Hanover the cry would have been “Jews to Poland”, even a straight “kill the Jews”. The sombre fact is that the mob screamed what had been screamed at them by Hitler’s minions: “Jews to Palestine!”
(Emphasis added.)
Click here for a lengthier description of the night.
William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pages 430–2 & 434:
In the autumn of 1938 another turning point for [the Third Reich] was reached. It took place during what was later called in party circles the “Week of the Broken Glass.”
On November 7, a seventeen‐year‐old German Jewish refugee by the name of Herschel Grynszpan shot and mortally wounded the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. The youth’s father had been among ten thousand Jews deported to Poland in boxcars shortly before, and it was to revenge this and the general persecution of Jews in [the Third Reich] that he went to the German Embassy intending to kill the ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck. But the young third secretary was sent out to see what he wanted, and was shot. There was irony in Rath’s death, because he had been shadowed by the Gestapo as a result of his anti‐Nazi attitude; for one thing, he had never shared the anti‐Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country.
On the night of November 9–10, shortly after the party bosses, led by Hitler and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in the Third Reich occurred. According to Dr. Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a “spontaneous” demonstration of the German people in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris. But after the war, documents came to light which show how “spontaneous” it was.5 They are among the most illuminating—and gruesome—secret papers of the prewar [Fascist] era.
On the evening of November 9, according to a secret report made by the chief party judge, Major Walther Buch, Dr. Goebbels issued instructions that “spontaneous demonstrations” were to be “organized and executed” during the night. But the real organizer was Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister thirty‐four‐year‐old Number Two man, after Himmler, in the S.S., who ran the Security Service (S.D.) and the Gestapo. His teletyped orders during the evening are among the captured German documents.
At 1:20 a.m. on November 10 he flashed an urgent teletype message to all headquarters and stations of the state police and the S.D. instructing them to get together with party and S.S. leaders “to discuss the organization of the demonstrations.”
a. Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to German life or property. (For instance synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)
b. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted. […]
d. […] 2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police […]
- As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons […] Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible.
It was a night of horror throughout Germany. Synagogues, Jewish homes and shops went up in flames and several Jews, men, women and children, were shot or otherwise slain while trying to escape burning to death. A preliminary confidential report was made by Heydrich to Goering on the following day, November 11.
The extent of the destruction of Jewish shops and houses cannot yet be verified by figures […] 815 shops destroyed, 171 dwelling houses set on fire or destroyed only indicate a fraction of the actual damage so far as arson is concerned […] 119 synagogues were set on fire, and another 76 completely destroyed […] 20,000 Jews were arrested. 36 deaths were reported and those seriously injured were also numbered at 36. Those killed and injured are Jews. […]
The ultimate number of murders of Jews that night is believed to have been several times the preliminary figure. Heydrich himself a day after his preliminary report gave the number of Jewish shops looted as 7,500. There were also some cases of rape, which Major Buch’s party court, judging by its own report, considered worse than murder, since they violated the Nuremberg racial laws which forbade sexual intercourse between Gentiles and Jews.
Such offenders were expelled from the party and turned over to the civil courts. Party members who simply murdered Jews “cannot be punished,” Major Buch argued, since they had merely carried out orders. On that point he was quite blunt. “The public, down to the last man,” he wrote, “realizes that political drives like those of November 9 were organized and directed by the party, whether this is admitted or not.”
Murder and arson and pillage were not the only tribulations suffered by innocent German Jews as the result of the murder of Rath in Paris. The Jews had to pay for the destruction of their own property. Insurance monies due them were confiscated by the State. Moreover, they were subjected, collectively, to a fine of one billion marks as punishment, as Goering put it, “for their abominable crimes, etc.” These additional penalties were assessed at a grotesque meeting of a dozen German cabinet ministers and ranking officials presided over by the corpulent Field Marshal on November 12, a partial stenographic record of which survives.
[…]
On the flaming, riotous night of November 9, 1938, the Third Reich had deliberately turned down a dark and savage road from which there was to be no return. A good many Jews had been murdered and tortured and robbed before, but these crimes, except for those which took place in the concentration camps, had been committed mostly by brown‐shirted rowdies acting out of their own sadism and greed while the State authorities looked on, or looked the other way.
Now the [Fascist] government itself had organized and carried out a vast pogrom. The killings, the looting, the burning of synagogues and houses and shops on the night of November 9 were its doing. So were the officials decrees duly published in the official gazette, the Reichsgesetzblatt—three of them on the day of Goering’s meeting—which fined the Jewish community a billion marks, eliminated them from the economy, robbed them of what was left of their property and drove them toward the ghetto—and worse.
If none of that looks familiar to you, this information concerning U.S. negligence certainly should:
At his press conference on November 15, 1938, one week after Kristallnacht, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced [the Third Reich’s] terror attack on Jews, saying, “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.” FDR made an exception to his practice of off-the-record press conferences by allowing newspapers to quote this statement from his meeting with reporters that day.
[…]
Despite the increasing threat faced by Jews living under [Fascism] in Germany and Austria, President Roosevelt knew that he would not be able to persuade Congress to reconsider immigration regulations. At the same November 15 press conference, a reporter asked the president if he would recommend relaxing the restrictions on immigration in order to admit the Jewish refugees from Europe. Roosevelt replied, “That is not in contemplation; we have the quota system.”
Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, whose department oversaw the Immigration and Naturalization Service, persuaded President Roosevelt to allow approximately 12,000 Germans, most of whom were Jews and already in the United States on visitor visas, to remain in the country indefinitely. Although he knew extending the visas could raise congressional objection, the president made his position clear. “I cannot,” he said, “in any decent humanity, throw them out.” Indeed, no Jew[ish citizens] were forced to leave the United States to return to [Axis]-occupied Europe for the duration of the war.
(Emphasis added. The unedited last line reads ‘no Jews were forced to leave the United States’, which is misleading. While Washington never deported European Jews who officially became U.S. citizens, many other Jews looking to get inside were not so fortunate.)
See also: Kristallnacht 1938
Click here for other events that happened today (November 9).
1877: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, existed.
1894: Dietrich Hugo Hermann von Choltitz, Axis general, blighted the earth.
1904: Viktor Hermann Brack, Axis war criminal and SS member, joined him.
1906: Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph, Axis rocket engineer, did as well.
1923: Ludendorff’s attempt to seize power in München ended ignominiously.
1937: To the Empire of Japan’s delight, the Chinese Army withdrew from the Battle of Shanghai.
1942: Around the same time that the Vichy régime broke off diplomatic relations with Imperial America, Yankee troops continued assaulting the French fort of Kasbah, Morocco, while the French garrison at Oran, Algeria surrendered in the face of overwhelming British naval power and Yankee airborne attack in its rear. (French Admiral Darlan signed an armistice with General Dwight Eisenhower, but fighting would continue for two more days.) This, in addition to the Axis losing Sidi Barrani, Egypt to the Allies, the Allied submarine facilities at Saint Nazaire, and Axis troops under Walter Nehring assaulting Vichy French positions (as Vichy French forces in North Africa were apparently switching to the Allies), probably explain why Berlin informed Rome, via Galeazzo Ciano, that it intended to occupy Vichy France soon.