Kristallnacht: Night of the broken glass
On the night of the 9-10 November 1938 the Nazis organised 'Kristallnacht', the night of the broken glass. This mother and child pass the remains of a Jewish owned shop the morning after Kristallnacht.
© 2011 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority
In Hitler's manifesto of 1920 he had promised to expel Polish-born Jews living in Germany. Beginning in August 1938 the Nazis rounded up 60,000 Jews and expelled them over the Polish border.
The son of one of the expelled families was studying in Paris. On 7 November 1938 he went to the German Embassy and shot a diplomat, Ernst Von Rath. Back in Germany, the Nazi leadership used this as an excuse to begin a national press campaign against the Jews. On 8 November Nazi thugs attacked Jews, smashed up Jewish-owned buildings and daubed the Star of David on them.
On 9 November the diplomat died. That afternoon Joseph Goebbels gave a speech attacking the Jews and calling for an organised pogrom, or attack against the Jews. The SA were used to organise further attacks against Jews and their shops, homes and synagogues. The night became known as 'Kristallnacht' or 'The night of the broken glass' due to the number of windows broken during the attacks.
The police were instructed not to intervene to stop the attacks. The fire brigade were called out to protect non-Jewish businesses and homes, but not to put out the fires in Jewish-owned buildings.
During the night of 9 November, 91 Jews were killed and hundreds more injured. Many hundreds of Jewish males over the age of 14 were taken away to prisons or concentration camps. Over the days, weeks and months that followed, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken away to concentration camps.
More and more laws were enacted that effectively banished Jews from most areas of public life. Hard-line antisemitism was now being followed through into ruthless legislation, expelling Jews from Germany's social and political life.
Germany was now an extremely dangerous place for Jews to live in and many sought to leave the country by any means possible. Reacting to public opinion, some countries allowed limited immigration of Jews, but in the main a tight quota system was enforced.
Explaining the Holocaust
2 comments:
It is so difficult to process: why few Germans reacted against those laws. People Jewish people had adapted it is the birthplace of Reform Judaism and where the first female rabbi was ordained, she died in a Concentration Camp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_Jonas
Mary Wigman a German dancer who spoke of the finite the infinite life and death of women, expresses this in Totentanz death dance She had gone through WWI and knew another war was going to happen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyNkEm-cFVk She used the von Laban technique and the only instruments were percussion. She choreographed and influenced modern dance. She had in her troupe Jewish dancers and percussionists who died in Concentration Camps. She refused to talk about the war years hence we do not know what she did or did not do, only speculations. Her performances stopped because of Goebel who wanted only fun music and cabaret style girls, she did not fit the profile as the was to somber and di dance totenmahl at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It warned Germans of an upcoming war.
Celine Leduc
These dark forces are always at the edges, and they relentlessly pushed back. Yesterday, it was "Stalin-Hitler"; today: Putin-Khamenei. They're they engines of evil, and those who manipulate others apart from them (e.g., look up David Palumbo-Liu at Stanford), may be considered the "agent provocateur" that deliver the legal, linguistic, and political confusion that would liken Ferguson to Gaza and promote anti-Semitism as a tool in the compromising and destruction of the democratic and open society state.
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