On the night of November 9-10, 1938, an organized pogrom of the Jewish population took place in the Third Reich. Hundreds of people were killed, over a thousand synagogues were burned and destroyed, several thousand Jewish shops were vandalized, and about 30,000 men were sent to concentration camps. These events, known as “Kristallnacht,” became a turning point in the Third Reich's anti-Jewish policy – a harbinger of the Holocaust.
The “healthy instincts” of the German people
German Nazi propaganda portrayed the pogrom as a spontaneous outburst of public anger. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote that “the German people are anti-Semitic” and will not allow themselves to be “provoked by the parasites of the Jewish race.”
In reality, it was a state-organized act of violence intended to intimidate, humiliate, and ultimately push Jews out of public life in the Third Reich. Herschel Grynszpan's assassination attempt on a German diplomat in Paris served as a propaganda pretext for the NSDAP apparatus to launch an organized pogrom against Jews.
From persecution to extermination
After the pogrom, the Nazi regime imposed a financial penalty of one billion marks on the Jewish community and accelerated the introduction of new racial laws. As historians emphasize, Kristallnacht changed the nature of persecution from economic and social to physical – beatings, imprisonment, and murder. It became a key stage in the process that led to the Holocaust three years later: mass executions, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, and deportations to death camps.
Symbol and warning
The term “Kristallnacht” (“Night of Broken Glass”) comes from the shards of glass that covered the streets after the destruction of Jewish shop windows. Four years later, as the Auschwitz Museum reminds us, on November 9, 1942, a transport of 1,000 Jews from Białystok arrived at the camp—706 of them were murdered in the gas chambers.
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