Rating: Not rated
Tags: History, Lang:en
Summary
Includes pictures Includes accounts of Kristallnacht
written by eyewitnesses
Includes footnotes and a bibliography for further
reading Includes a table of contents “It did not
take long before the first heavy grey stones came tumbling
down, and the children of the village amused themselves as they
flung stones into the many coloured windows. When the first
rays of a cold and pale November sun penetrated the heavy dark
clouds, the little synagogue was but a heap of stone, broken
glass and smashed-up woodwork.” – Eric Lucas’
description of the destruction of a synagogue during
Kristallnacht On the 40th anniversary of Kristallnacht,
Germany’s night of broken glass, then chancellor of
Germany Helmut Schmidt spoke of its legacy, “The German
night, whose observance after the passage of forty years has
brought us together today, remains a cause of bitterness and
shame. In those places where the houses of God stood in flames,
where a signal from those in power set of a train of
destruction and robbery, of humiliation, abduction and
incarceration- there was an end to peace, to justice, to
humanity. The night of 9 November 1938 marked one of the stages
along the path leading down to hell.” The hell that
Schmidt spoke of was the persecution and attempted elimination
of the Jewish people from Europe itself as envisioned by Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi leadership he brought to power in Germany
during the 1930s. On the night of November 9, 1938, an
organized show of force against Jewish businesses and private
homes occurred throughout German cities and recently annexed
territories in Austria and the Sudetenland. This night would
mark a turning point in the lives of not only Jews but all
people of the time, marking a clear new path of violence,
destruction, and persecution for Jews throughout Europe in the
years to follow. Though German Jews had been discriminated
against in many forms for as long as the German nation existed,
Kristallnacht is widely viewed as the key point in the
chronology of Jewish persecution, and many historians consider
it to be the beginning of the Holocaust itself. With the
condoned and even coordinated violence of Kristallnacht, a new
and unprecedented era of anti-Jewish sentiment and action
began. The name Kristallnacht is in itself controversial. The
origin of the term, which translates as the night of crystal or
the night of broken glass, is unknown. There has been
conjecture that the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels
himself, coined the term, but there is now considerable concern
in Germany over anything that might seem to make light of or
minimize the events of the Holocaust, so the name Kristallnacht
is not favored. Instead, the November Pogrom or Reich Pogrom is
the preferred term amongst German historians. As Walter Pehle,
German professor of Nazi history, warns, “It is clear
that the term Crystal Night serves to foster a vicious
minimalizing of its memory, a discounting of grave reality:
such cynical appellations function to reinterpret manslaughter
and murder arson and robbery, plunder, and massive property
damage, transforming these into a glistening event marked by
sparkle and gleam.” Rabbi Benjamin Blech sees the
acceptance of the term as a way to “verbally embrace the
very heresy that abetted the Holocaust” and likens it to
“murder by euphemism.” In fact, the Nazis
themselves referred to the attacks as the "Jew Action". Though
they would describe the event as a spontaneous response of good
Germans who could no longer stand the intrigues of the Jews in
their midst, Reichskristallnacht, or the November pogrom, was
not only allowed but fueled and encouraged by Nazi leaders in
an effort to remove the Jews politically, economically,
socially, and even physically from German life and culture.
Kristallnacht: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany’s
Most Notorious Pogrom analyzes one of the most controversial
events in pre-war Germany. **