Kristallnacht

On the night of 9 November 1938 and through the following day, Jews across Nazi Germany were attacked in a nationwide pogrom later known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass". The violence reached Austria and the Sudetenland, which Germany had taken from Czechoslovakia weeks earlier under the Munich Agreement. Nazi stormtroopers and SS men, joined by Hitler Youth members and ordinary civilians, burned synagogues, wrecked Jewish shops and homes, and arrested tens of thousands of Jewish men while the authorities looked on. Historians see it as a turning point from legal and economic persecution to open physical violence, and as a step on the road to the Holocaust.

In late October 1938 the German authorities rounded up more than 12,000 Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany and drove them to the Polish border, where many were left stranded in miserable conditions. Among them were the parents of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old living in Paris. After receiving a postcard from his family describing their expulsion, Grynszpan bought a revolver on 7 November, went to the German embassy and shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. He told French police that he had acted to protest against the treatment of the Jews.

Vom Rath died on 9 November. The news reached Adolf Hitler that evening at a dinner where party leaders had gathered to mark the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler left without speaking, and the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels told the gathering that the Führer did not want the party to organise demonstrations, but would not stop any that broke out spontaneously. Party leaders understood this as an order to launch a pogrom. Early on 10 November, Reinhard Heydrich telegraphed police and SA units with instructions for the operation.

Through the night and the following day, gangs smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops and buildings, leaving the streets glittering with glass, which gave the event its name. More than 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were destroyed or damaged, many of them set on fire, and Jewish cemeteries, schools, hospitals and homes were ransacked. More than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were wrecked or damaged. Some 30,000 Jewish men were seized and taken to the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Foreign reporters described the scenes in detail, and the violence was reported around the world as it happened.

Early reports counted 91 Jews killed. Later research, including deaths from maltreatment after arrest and suicides, puts the total far higher; the historian Richard J. Evans estimated that between one and two thousand people died.

At a meeting on 12 November, Hermann Göring, who complained that valuable property had been destroyed, set out measures to drive Jews from the German economy. Jews were made to pay a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks, collected by taking a fifth of all Jewish property, and to repair the damage themselves, while insurance payments owed to them were seized by the state. In the ten months that followed, more than 115,000 Jews left the Reich, at least 14,000 of them for Shanghai.

The pogrom caused outrage abroad and sharply reduced support for pro-Nazi groups in Europe and North America. Washington called home its ambassador, Hugh Wilson, though it kept diplomatic relations, and Britain approved the Kindertransport scheme to take in Jewish refugee children. Within Germany, some people were ashamed and helped their Jewish neighbours at personal risk, while others joined in or watched.

Kristallnacht marked the moment when Nazi persecution of Jews became openly violent on a national scale, and it is often described as the beginning of the Holocaust. Historians regard it as a forerunner of the Final Solution, in which six million Jews were murdered. The memory of the pogrom is one reason why 9 November, the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, did not become Germany's national holiday; 3 October, the date of reunification, was chosen instead.

Our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany in the year of the pogrom.