Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Reichspogromnacht,
Crystal Night and the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom that occurred
throughout Nazi Germany on November 9–November 10, 1938.
The Nazis coordinated an attack on Jewish people and their
property in Germany and German-controlled lands as part of Hitler's
antisemitic policy, causing massive disruption to German ghettos.
On November 7, 1938 a young German Jew, by the name of Herschel
Grynszpan, enraged by his family's expulsion from Germany, walked into
the German Embassy in Paris and fired five shots at a junior diplomat.
Two days later, the diplomat was dead and Germany was in the grip of
skillfully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence. In the early hours of 10
November, an orgy of co-ordinated destruction broke out in cities, towns
and villages throughout the Third Reich. A total of 91 Jews was killed
in the incident.
The consequences of this violence were disastrous for the Jews of
the Third Reich.
Kristallnacht saw the destruction in a single night of more than
a thousand Synagogues, the ransacking of tens of thousands of Jewish
businesses and homes, and more than 200,000 Jewish people were rounded
up and taken to concentration camps. It marked the beginning of the
systematic eradication of a people who could trace their ancestry in
Germany to Roman times, and served as a prelude for the Holocaust that
was to follow. |
