Kristallnacht - Night of Terror

In October 1938, German authorities expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich. Herschel Grynszpan, who had moved to Paris in 1936, received news that his parents, residents in Germany since 1911, were among them. Grynszpan's parents and the other expelled Polish Jews were initially denied entry into their native Poland. They found themselves stranded in a refugee camp in the border region between Poland and Germany. They wrote a letter to their son, describing their dire situation.

Motivated by revenge, Herschel Grynszpan showed up at the German embassy and shot, point blank, the diplomatic official to whom he had been introduced. That victim was Ernst Vom Rath, a low level Nazi functionary. Vom Rath died on November 9, 1938, two days after the shooting. The Nazi Party leadership assembled in Munich to mark the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch as well as the funeral of Vom Rath. They used the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of looting, vandalism, violence and murder against the Jewish populations under their control. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels suggested at the funeral that 'World Jewry' had conspired to commit the assassination.

He and other Nazi officials then set the wheels in motion for Kristallnacht. Goebbels announced that "the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered."

The result was Kristallnacht. Thousands of synagogues, shops and homes were vandalized or destroyed.  Almost 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and forced into concentration camps. Local citizens did little to stand in the way of the violence.

In the aftermath, the German government placed the blame for the destruction on the Jewish community. They were fined one billion Reichsmark 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates). The government confiscated all insurance payouts to Jews whose businesses and homes were looted or destroyed.

Over the next weeks, new laws effectively removed Jews from German life, confiscating their property, removing them from public schools, forcing them out of their jobs and restricting access to public transportation and venues. Kristallnacht motivated Jews from Germany and Austria to emigrate, if they could find a place to take them in.

Many historians view those two days of mob violence as a turning point in the Holocaust, the attempt by Nazi Germany to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.