
Polish Jews expelled from Germany in late October 1938
en.wikipedia.org
Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass – a prelude to the Holocaust
On the night of 9-10 November 1938, a series of violent anti-Jewish incidents took place in Germany, now known collectively as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). To understand the genesis of this event, we can go back to 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power, or even earlier, to the end of the First World War and the activity of the anti-Semitic movements that helped bring Hitler to power in the first place.
The consistent anti-Semitic campaign over the years and the stirring up of anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany created fertile ground for escalating tensions. The spark that lit the powder keg was the murder of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath at the German embassy in Paris by the Jew Hershel Grynszpan. Grynszpan came from a family that had been deported to Poland by the German authorities in 1938 and subsequently interned in a transit camp in Zbąszyń. He had emigrated to France two years earlier to avoid the fate of his relatives. When he learned of their situation, he felt the need to take revenge.
Although Grynszpan acted out of personal motives, German propaganda portrayed his act as a symbol of an attack by ‘international Jewry’ on the Third Reich. The public was persuaded that the Jewish minority in Germany was responsible for laying the groundwork for the persecution of German diplomats.
On the evening of 9 November 1938, Joseph Goebbels announced in a speech to Nazi Party officials that Ernst von Rath had been murdered. He did not officially call for pogroms in retaliation but instructed people not to disturb those who were organising ‘spontaneous rallies’ against Jews. Party activists read the subliminal message unequivocally – as a call to action.
The party and state authorities were responsible for the anti-Jewish rhetoric on the night of 9-10 November 1938, which went down in history as Kristallnacht. Nazi militants attacked shops, homes and public places associated with the Jewish community. Some places were vandalised, others demolished or burned. In the territory of the Third Reich, some 171 synagogues and as many homes and more than 7,000 Jewish shops were destroyed. The attackers also devastated Jewish cemeteries and destroyed many valuable works of art. During the attacks they stole, beat and raped. Their actions resulted in the deaths of some 90 people of Jewish origin. Nearly 30,000 were sent to so-called penal education camps, which were in fact concentration camps.
Night of Broken Glass/thechifleader.com
There is no doubt that the events of Kristallnacht were a nationwide and brutal anti-Semitic action of enormous proportions. It is remarkable that while in different regions of Germany buildings were burned and destroyed, property was looted, people were raped, beaten and even murdered, the police did not react. The fire brigade merely ensured that the fire did not spread to neighbouring buildings.
When it became clear that the vast majority of the Jewish community’s destroyed property was insured and that the German state would have to bear the cost of paying reparations, Hermann Göring issued a decree ordering the Jews to pay the German state one billion marks in compensation for their losses.
Kristallnacht remains an unaccounted-for crime to this day. The scale of the German state’s overall criminal activities during the Second World War was so overwhelming and destructive in so many areas of individual, social and even international life that even pogroms such as Kristallnacht were treated as part of a kind of ‘package’ of crimes rather than as separate acts of lawlessness requiring appropriate trials. At Nuremberg, for example, top German officials were tried for state crimes. The issue of Kristallnacht was not raised at the time.
Monika Krawczyk
Source: DlaPolonii.pl