Kristallnacht's pretext was one shooting in Paris; its roots ran far deeper
On 9 and 10 November 1938, Nazi paramilitaries attacked Jewish communities across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland while the authorities stood by. Over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were wrecked and 30,000 Jewish men sent to camps. Historians see that night as a turning point on the road to the Holocaust.
In the 1920s most German Jews were integrated citizens who had served in the armed forces and contributed across business, science and culture. After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, anti-Jewish laws steadily pushed them out of public life. Hundreds of thousands tried to emigrate, but doors abroad were narrowing; Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936 that the world had split into places where Jews could not live and places they could not enter. The Évian Conference of July 1938 did little to help, while regional Nazi officials, starved of funds by the party treasurer, eyed Jewish property as a source of money.
The immediate chain of events began in late October 1938, when more than 12,000 Polish Jews living in Germany were expelled overnight with a single suitcase each. Poland, having moved to strip citizenship from its Jews abroad, refused most of them entry, and thousands were left stranded at the border. Among the deported was the Grynszpan family from Hanover. Their seventeen-year-old son Herschel, living in Paris, received a postcard describing their plight, and on 7 November he shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath at the embassy. He confessed at once, saying he wanted the world to hear his protest.
Using the shooting as a pretext, the SA and SS, joined by some Hitler Youth members and civilians, smashed windows of Jewish shops, homes and synagogues; the glass-strewn streets gave the pogrom its euphemistic name, crystal night. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed. Early reports counted 91 murders, but modern research, including deaths after arrest and suicides, puts the toll in the hundreds, and Richard J. Evans estimates between one and two thousand.
The historian Martin Gilbert argued that nothing else suffered by German Jews in the Nazi era received such extensive coverage in real time, and foreign journalists' accounts drew condemnation worldwide. By then more than 250,000 Jews had already fled Germany and Austria, and the pogrom foreshadowed the murder of six million in the Holocaust.
Source: Kristallnacht
