On the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, the Nazi regime conducted a coordinated, nationwide attack on Germany’s Jewish population. Across Germany, Austria and the recently annexed Sudetenland, around 1,400 synagogues were burned or wrecked, around 7,500 Jewish-owned shops had their windows smashed and contents looted, and Jewish homes, schools and cemeteries were attacked. At least 91 Jews were killed during the night itself. In the days that followed, around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Several hundred died there, of beatings, of exposure, of being shot for trying to escape.
The regime presented the operation to the world as a spontaneous outburst of popular German fury. It was nothing of the kind.
The pretext
On 7 November 1938, a 17-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot a junior diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan’s parents had been expelled from Germany along with around 12,000 other Polish Jews ten days earlier, dumped over the Polish border with no money and nowhere to go. He had received a postcard from his sister describing what had happened to the family. He had bought a pistol that morning. He confessed at once and was held in French custody.
Vom Rath died on 9 November. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, was at a Nazi Party reunion in Munich that evening when the news arrived. He used it as the occasion to announce that the Reich would not stand in the way of any popular German response. The senior Nazi officials present understood this as the cue to issue orders to local SA and Party formations across the country. By midnight the operation had begun.
What happened that night
The attacks followed a consistent pattern across the country, which by itself shows they had been organised centrally. Squads of SA men in plain clothes, often joined by Hitler Youth and party members, gathered at the local synagogue and set fire to it. Fire brigades were ordered to attend only to protect adjacent non-Jewish buildings, and otherwise to let the fire burn. The mobs then moved on to Jewish-owned shops, smashing the windows with hammers and crowbars. The streets of Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt, Hamburg and a hundred smaller towns were carpeted with broken glass by morning. The name Kristallnacht, the night of crystal, was invented by ordinary Germans afterwards to describe what they had seen on their way to work.
Jewish homes were broken into. Furniture was thrown out of upper-storey windows into the street. Family valuables were looted. Men were dragged out of bed and beaten. Women were sometimes spared and sometimes not. The decision rested with whichever local SA leader had charge of the operation in that street.
Many ordinary Germans took no part. Some watched. Some quietly took things home. A few, very few, intervened. There are documented cases of non-Jewish neighbours sheltering Jewish friends through the night and of police officers refusing to participate. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. The great majority of Germans who saw the attacks happening either approved, did nothing, or rationalised what they were seeing afterwards.
The arrests and the camps
The mass arrests of Jewish men were a separate operation, planned in advance and executed in the following days. The Gestapo had drawn up lists. Around 30,000 men, mostly aged between 16 and 60 and selected for being middle-class or wealthy, were rounded up and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The aim was financial as well as punitive. Releases were generally arranged on condition that the prisoner’s family pay an Aryanisation price for whatever business they still owned, sign over their property at confiscatory rates, and produce evidence of an emigration visa. Several hundred men did not survive the camps long enough to be released.
The treatment in the camps was deliberately brutal. Men were beaten, made to stand for hours in the cold, denied medical attention. The point was to break them and to make sure that they would, on release, do anything possible to leave Germany. The point was achieved. Among the survivors of those few weeks at Dachau and Buchenwald are some of the bitterest passages in the literature of German Jewish memoir.
The aftermath
On 12 November, the regime imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmarks on the German Jewish community as collective punishment for the death of vom Rath. The fine was about 20 per cent of the total assets of German Jewry. It was paid by the Jewish community itself, since there was no other source. The community was also required to pay for the cleanup of the broken glass.
Within weeks, further decrees barred Jews from operating any business of their own, attending any state school, owning a motor vehicle, going to the cinema or theatre, owning a radio, or using public transport in some cities. Jewish children who had still been attending state schools alongside non-Jewish classmates were now formally segregated. Jewish businesses that had survived the previous five years of Aryanisation were now forcibly liquidated.
What it meant
Kristallnacht is sometimes described as the moment the regime stopped pretending. That is right as far as it goes. Until November 1938 it was still possible for a self-deceiving German Jew to hope that the worst of the persecution might be over, that the Nuremberg Laws were a settled position rather than a starting point, that emigration could be deferred. After Kristallnacht no such hope was credible. The emigration figures shot up. Around 100,000 German Jews left in the next nine months, most of those who had any chance of leaving. Britain agreed to take 10,000 children on the Kindertransport. The United States declined to relax its quota. The doors that were going to be open had now been opened, and most of them were not going to open further.
Kristallnacht is also the moment after which it was no longer possible for any honest observer abroad to claim that they did not know what the German regime was. The British, French and American press carried the story in detail. Photographs of broken Jewish shop windows in Berlin and burned synagogues in Munich appeared in newspapers around the world. The world knew. What it did with that knowledge is the subject of the next pages.
See also
Sources
- Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, HarperCollins, 2006
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1, HarperCollins, 1997
- Alan Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938, Belknap Press, 2009
- USHMM: Kristallnacht