Has the world forgotten the terrible lesson of Kristallnacht?
The horrific persecution of Jews awakened the public to the evils of Nazi Germany; 78 years later a US president has been elected after exploiting racial and religious conflicts
On this day, November 11, in the year 1938, more than 30,000 Jewish men in Germany were rounded up in concentration camps, for the crime of one Polish Jew. The hot-headed young man shot dead a German diplomat in Paris, in revenge for the deportation of his family from Germany.
As soon as news of the murder reached Germany on November 9, two nights of anti-Jewish riots, killings, lootings and massive destruction of Jewish property followed. They had been instigated by top level Nazi officials, with organised operations led by plain-clothed members of the SA and SS, the notorious Nazi paramilitary units.
The horrifying incident was termed Kristallnacht, literally meaning crystal night or the night of broken glass, because of the enormous number of smashed glass windows of Jewish shops, about 7,000 in total. In addition, nearly all synagogues in the country were either burned down or destroyed. Close to a hundred Jews were killed in the two days of organised terror.
The writing was already on the wall for harsher anti-Semitism policies to come ... Most of Europe chose to look sideways
From 1933 when the Nazi Party took power in Germany, more than 400 decrees and regulations had been issued to restrict various aspects of their Jews’ public and private lives. Just a month before Kristallnacht, all German Jews’ passports had to be revalidated by stamping the letter “J” on them, to differentiate them from the rest of the population. The writing was already on the wall for harsher anti-Semitism policies to come, though few had expected it would be to the scale of the holocaust.
Most of Europe chose to look sideways. They failed or refused to see that it was the beginning of Nazi Germany’s plot to cleanse the nation of its Jewish population, in preparation for another all-out war.