On this date, November 9, 1938, The Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath dies from the fatal gunshot wounds of Jewish resistance fighter Herschel Grynszpan, an act which the Nazis used as an excuse to instigate the 1938 national pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night). I will post information about this Holocaust antisemitic incident from Wikipedia and other links.
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Interior of Berlin's Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, opened in 1912, after it was set on fire during Kristallnachton November 9, 1938. It was destroyed entirely during an Allied air raid on Berlin in 1943, and a Jewish Community Center was opened in its place in 1959. |
Location | Nazi Germany and Austria (then part of Germany) |
Date | 9–10 November 1938 |
Target | Jewish population of Germany and Austria |
Attack type | Pogrom, looting, arson |
Deaths | 91+ |
Perpetrators | Sturmabteilung (SA) stormtroopers, German & Austrian civilians |
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation:[kʁɪsˈtalnaχt]; English: "Crystal Night"), also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, or Reichskristallnacht[ˌʁaɪçs.kʁɪsˈtalnaχt], Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom (a series of coordinated attacks) against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and Austria on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians. German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnachtcomes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues had their windows smashed.
At least 91 Jews were killed in the attacks, and 30,000 were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Over 1,000 synagogues were burned (95 in Vienna alone) and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged. Martin Gilbert writes that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world. The Times wrote at the time: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."
The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. Kristallnachtwas followed by additional economic and political persecution of Jews, and is viewed by historians as part of Nazi Germany's broader racial policy, and the beginning of the Final Solution and The Holocaust.
Etymology
Background
Early Nazi persecutions
Expulsion of Polish Jews in Germany
Shooting of vom Rath
Pogrom
Death of vom Rath
Riots
Concentration camps
Aftermath
Responses to Kristallnacht
From the Germans
From the global community
Kristallnacht as a turning point
Modern response
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