Kristallnacht
From Wikinfo
The Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass in English, involved a large-scale pogrom against Jewish citizens throughout Germany in the night from November 9 to November 10, 1938.
On November 7, 1938, Ernst vom Rath, secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, was shot dead by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish German who had fled to France. Herschel had taken this action after receiving a letter from his family who had been deported on October 28 to Poland together with 17,000 other Polish Jews living in Germany. Many of these people had spent most of their lives in Germany. Many were decorated German veterans of the first World War. The Nazis without warning had picked up these German-Polish families in the middle of the night and deported them to Poland where the Polish government refused entry.
This impasse resulted in trudging between the German frontier and the Polish frontier in the cold and at day and night until the Nazis finally prevailed upon the Polish government to grant entry. The letter to Herschel described the horrible conditions that the family endured in the first of what would ultimately become numerous forced deportation of Jews.
The Nazis took the attack on von Rath as an excuse for launching a pogrom against Jewish inhabitants throughout the country. The attack was intended to look like a spontaneous act of all Germans, but was indeed well orchestrated by the Nazi party NSDAP.
Almost all synagogues, many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops and 29 department stores were destroyed. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps. An unknown number of Jews were killed, as well as some Germans who looked Jewish to the Nazis.
The event was titled Kristallnacht (German for "crystal night") because of the many shop windows that were broken during the night. Today in Germany it is mostly called Pogromnacht ("pogrom night"), since the word "Kristallnacht" was a creation of the Nazis and is deemed too euphemistic.
The night ushered in a new phase in the antisemitic activities of the Nazi state apparatus, leading to the deportation and, finally, the [[Endl�sung|extermination]] of most of the Jewish people living in Germany.
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Kristallnacht" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht November 9, 2003
