Kristallnacht
On the ninth night of November in the year five thousand six hundred and ninety-nine, in every city of Germany and Austria and the Sudetenland that had been swallowed in the same year, the SA brownshirts and the SS…
Biblical Narrative
On the ninth night of November in the year five thousand six hundred and ninety-nine, in every city of Germany and Austria and the Sudetenland that had been swallowed in the same year, the SA brownshirts and the SS and the Hitler Youth went out into the streets with axes and torches and lists in their hands. The lists held the addresses of the synagogues. The lists held the addresses of the Jewish shops. The lists held the addresses of the Jewish homes. And the cry went up from city to city: smash, burn, beat — and so they did, from the night until the morning of the tenth.
Two hundred and sixty-seven synagogues were torched. Seven thousand Jewish-owned shops were smashed, their plate glass spilling onto the sidewalks until Germany was carpeted in glass — and the regime, with the dark wit of bureaucracy, named the night for the broken crystal: Kristallnacht. Ninety-one Jews were murdered outright, and tens more died of beatings and of exposure in the days that followed. Thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to the camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. The synagogues burned through the night and the firemen of Germany stood beside them with their hoses and watered only the gentile houses next door.
And the German Jews, who had served in the Kaiser's army in the Great War and who had won iron crosses, who had taught at the universities and conducted the orchestras and won Nobel prizes for chemistry and medicine, who had believed themselves Germans of the Mosaic faith — they understood at last, on the morning of the tenth of November, that there was no place for them in the country of Goethe and Bach. They went home from the wreckage of their shops and they began, those who could, to apply for visas. And the world had still no port that wanted them.
And the regime, having broken the windows, fined the victims for the broken windows. One billion Reichsmark, the Atonement Fine, was levied upon the Jews of the Reich for the damage that had been done to their own property; and any insurance payment they received from German companies was confiscated to the state. The economic destruction of German Jewry, begun with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, was now complete. After Kristallnacht, the question was no longer whether the Jews of Germany could remain — it was whether they could escape in time. Most could not.
I would not wish to be a Jew in Germany. The night belongs to us; tomorrow morning we shall settle accounts.Joseph Goebbels, diary entry of 9 November 1938 (translated)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Kristallnacht — the Reich Pogromnacht of 9-10 November 1938 — is the subject of Alan Steinweis's Kristallnacht 1938 (Belknap/Harvard, 2009), Martin Gilbert's Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (HarperCollins, 2006), and the document collection in Volume 1 of Saul Friedlander's Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (HarperCollins, 1997). The pretext was the assassination by 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan of Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath at the German Embassy in Paris on 7 November 1938; vom Rath died on the afternoon of 9 November.
At an evening reception in the Munich Old Town Hall on 9 November, Goebbels delivered an inflammatory speech to assembled SA and Nazi Party leaders. Telegram orders were dispatched at 1:20 a.m. on 10 November from SS chief Reinhard Heydrich to all police and SD headquarters, instructing them to facilitate but not formally lead the destruction. SS units in plain clothes, SA brownshirts, Hitler Youth, and incited civilians attacked Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes throughout Germany, Austria, and the recently annexed Sudetenland. Steinweis estimates approximately 267 synagogues destroyed or damaged, 7,500 businesses looted, 91 Jews killed during the pogrom itself, and an additional several hundred deaths in custody at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where 30,000 Jewish men were sent.
The economic aftermath was codified in three regulations of 12 November 1938 issued by Hermann Goring as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan: the Decree on the Atonement Fine, imposing 1 billion Reichsmark collective penalty on German Jewry; the Decree on the Restoration of Street Scene, requiring Jewish shopkeepers to repair damage at their own expense and confiscating any insurance compensation; and the Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life, completing the so-called Aryanization. The Frankfurter Zeitung reported on 13 November 1938 that an estimated 25 million Reichsmark in plate glass alone had been broken, much of it imported from Belgium and requiring foreign exchange to replace.
International reaction was widespread but limited in practical effect. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled the U.S. ambassador to Berlin in protest but did not raise immigration quotas; the Evian Conference of July 1938 had already demonstrated the unwillingness of Western states to absorb large numbers of Jewish refugees. The Kindertransport, launched in late November 1938 in Britain, eventually rescued 9,354 mostly Jewish children. Within Germany, the regime took Kristallnacht as the signal that further radicalization would not provoke serious foreign intervention; it accelerated the bureaucratic preparation of mass emigration through Eichmann's Vienna office and, ultimately, the planning that would lead to the Wannsee Conference.
Kristallnacht was the moment the regime crossed from legal persecution to street violence and discovered that neither the German population nor the world would stop it.Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1 (1997)