Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht, ”Night of Broken Glass”, name given to an incident that took place in Nazi Germany, on the night of November 9-10, 1938, in which a coordinated attack was made on Jews and their property, it refers to the shattered glass that was left after that night of savage violence. The pretext for this first mass outburst of anti-Semitic hysteria in Germany was the assassination in Paris of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, by a young German Jew, Hirsch Grynszpan, who was enraged by the eviction of his parents into Poland by the SS. The assassination took place on November 6; as soon as Hitler, in Munich, heard the news of vom Rath's death, he unleashed the Hitler Youth and the SS on Germany's last 300,000 Jews. There followed 24 hours of unprecedented violence, in which 91 Jews were killed, hundreds injured, and more than 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps. Before their release three months later, over a thousand of these had been murdered. But the night of November 9 was remembered not so much for the murders and arrests as for the destruction of tens of thousands of Jewish shops, businesses, and synagogues, which were systematically smashed and burned. After Kristallnacht the Jews of Germany (who were debarred by law from claiming insurance indemnities) were made to pay a fine of a thousand million marks for the damage. The fine was raised by confiscating 20 per cent of the property of each Jew. A decree to this effect was promulgated on November 12, and on November 15 Jewish children were formally forbidden to attend German schools. In retrospect, it is clear that Kristallnacht was the beginning of the Third Reich's deliberate policy of exterminating the Jewish race in Europe—which it called the “Final Solution”.