GERMANY

November 9-10, 1938

​

The Holocaust Begins

KRISTALLNACHT

“The Night of Broken Glass”

The Holocaust

• “The state-sponsored systematic persecution of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims– six million were murdered; Gypsies [Roma], the handicapped, and Poles also targeted for destruction...

..homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.” U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Holocaust Timeline

• 1933
• January – Hitler appointed chancellor
• February / March – Reichstag fire (terrorism) followed by emergency powers suspending civil rights, Dachau for political dissidents, Enabling Act giving Hitler path to dictatorship
• April – Official boycott of Jewish businesses and exclusion of Jews from professions

​

Boycott of Jews �April 1933

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Reichminister Joseph Goebbels delivers a speech to a crowd in Berlin urging Germans to boycott Jewish-owned businesses. He defends the boycott as a legitimate response to the anti-German "atrocity propaganda" being spread abroad by "international Jewry." April 1, 1933. �Photo credit: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo ArchivesKpGo

Holocaust Timeline

• 1933
• May – book burnings organized by students
• July – “Eugenics” inspired, forced sterilizations of disabled, criminals, Roma, blacks

​

• 1934 – persecution of Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals
• 1935 – Nuremberg Laws make Jews second class citizens, criminalize inter-marriage

​

Definining the Jew

• Nuremberg Laws, 1935

The Nuremberg Laws, as they became known, did not define a "Jew" as someone with particular religious beliefs. Instead, anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was defined as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community.

​

Holocaust Timeline

• 1936
• Berlin Olympics

​

• 1938
• March – Germans invade seize Austria
• July – Evian Conference on Jewish refugees, immigration restrictions hold; Germans: evidence that nobody wants Jews
• August – Central Office for Jewish Emigration est. in Vienna, headed by Reinhard Heydrich
• September/October – Munich Pact forces Czechs to cede Sudetenland

​

Holocaust Timeline

• 1938
• October – Polish Jews living in Germany, (some born in Germany, others in residence since before WWI), 17,000, arrested, transported by train to Polish border, held in inhumane conditions on German side because the Poles would not allow them in.
• Two of those deported emigrated to Germany from Poland in 1911, settling in Hanover in 1914. They are the parents of a 17-year-old who had moved to Belgium and then Paris in 1936. They are Sendel and Riva Grynszpan, Ostjuden, Eastern Jews. Their son is named Herschel.

​

GERMANY

November 9-10, 1938

​

The Holocaust Begins

Kristallnacht

“The Night of Broken Glass”

Kristallnacht

• On the night of November 9, 1938, the sounds of breaking glass shattered the air in cities throughout Germany and parts of Austria while fires across the countries devoured synagogues and Jewish institutions. By the end of the rampage, gangs of Nazi storm troopers had destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses, set fire to more than 900 synagogues, killed 91 Jews and deported some 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps.

Kristallnacht

November 9-10, 1938

The Night � of Broken �Glass

• In a report back to the State Department a few days later, a U.S official in Leipzig described what he saw of the atrocities. "Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the moveable effects to the streets," he wrote, "the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the zoological park, commanding horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight.” (PBS, American Experience)

​

​

Kristallnacht Rationale

• An incident several days earlier had given the Nazi authorities an excuse to instigate the violence. On November 7th, a 17-year-old Polish Jewish student named Hershel Grynszpan had shot Ernst vom Rath, the Third Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris. Grynszpan, enraged by the deportation of his parents to Poland from Hanover, Germany, where they had lived since 1913, hoped that his dramatic action would alert the world to the ominous plight of Europe's Jews.

​

• When the French police arrested Grynszpan, he sobbed: "Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on earth. Wherever I have been I have been chased like an animal."

​

• The assassination attempt was successful; vom Rath died on November 9^th.

The Rationale:

• News of the Third Secretary's death reached the leading figures of the Nazi party later that day while they were attending a dinner in Munich. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered an inflammatory speech, urging the assembled crowd to take to the streets. The message was clear: The German Jews would have to pay for vom Rath's death. Later that night Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Security Service, sent a series of orders to all State Police offices:

​

• Business establishments and homes of Jews could be destroyed but not looted; German life and property should not be jeopardized; and as soon as the events of the night permitted, officers should arrest as many Jews, particularly wealthy ones, as the local jails would hold.

​

• The following day Goebbels announced, "We shed not a tear for them [the Jews.]" He went on to comment on the destruction of synagogues saying, "They stood in the way long enough.

​

• We can use the space made free more usefully than as Jewish fortresses.”

a Foreshadowing

Frankfurt Germany

Burning of the Boemestrasse Synagogue on Kristallnacht, 11/10/1938 (YadVashem)

Berlin

A passer-by looks at the wreckage of a Jewish shop in Berlin on Nov. 10, 1938, after the Kristallnacht rampage, when rioters destroyed synagogues, looted Jewish-owned businesses and desecrated Jewish cemeteries in Germany and Austria.

widespread Kristallnacht scale (ushmm)

��Rostock, Germany �November 10, 1938���

As Friedrich Best, a non-Jewish teenager who lived nearby, ate his breakfast, he saw from the kitchen window that a crowd was gathering.

​

Suddenly, he recounted, flames leaped from the roof.

​

He grabbed a camera and took two pictures, which he later developed himself.

​

His parents told him to get rid of them but he kept them until in 1958 the city archive issued a call for war-time artifacts.

​

This was published in the Rostock, Germany newspaper. (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem)

Residents of the mid-size city of Rostock watch the burning of Augustenstrasse synagogue.

Rostock, Germany today

Zeven

The town of Zeven, Germany, had 2,500 inhabitants in 1938, 28 of them Jews.

On November 10, 1938, under Gestapo orders, the synagogue in Zeven was forcibly emptied and the

furnishings publicly burned at the town's main square.

Zeven

• The furnishings of the interior of the Zeven synagogue were dumped at the town square. The ten commandments are visible toward the top of the pile. The sign below the former ark and bimah reads: "Revenge for the murder of vom Rath! Death to the International Jews and Freemasons!” The sign calls for "Revenge for the murder of vom Rath!"

Vom Rath was a German diplomatic official in Paris who was shot by a Jewish teenager on November 7, 1938. By calling for "Death to the International. Jews and Freemasons!" the Nazis intended to use this incident as an excuse to terrorize the entire German Jewish community and to justify their actions to the German public.

The school director was ordered to bring the students of Zeven to observe the bonfire,

but was himself absent as were most of the adult inhabitants of Zeven. Adult male Jewish

residents of Zeven were arrested and deported to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen

​

Zeven, Germany today

Kristallnacht �Propaganda

Caricature on the front page of the

Nazi publication, Der Sturmer, depicting

Herschel Grynszpan as the crucifier of

Ernst vom Rath. The caption reads,

"Crucifixion/Will a world want to risk,

for the sake of Judas/The spilling of its

lifeblood/Whereby, once again, it will

lose its best blood/And Jewish sadism

will triumph?” (USHMM)

​

Jewish men taken into custody in Baden Baden, Germany, November 10, 1938

The rationale �for brutality: victimhood

• Der Strumer depiction of Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish assassin of Ernst vom Roth

Kristallnacht provided the Nazi government with an opportunity at last to totally remove Jews from German public life. It was the culminating event in a series of anti-Semitic policies set in place since Hitler took power in 1933. Within a week, the Nazis had circulated a letter declaring that Jewish businesses could not be reopened unless they were to be managed by non-Jews. On November 15th, Jewish children were barred from attending school, and shortly afterwards the Nazis issued the "Decree on Eliminating the Jews from German Economic Life," which prohibited Jews from selling goods or services anywhere, from engaging in crafts work, from serving as the managers of any firms, and from being members of cooperatives.

Kristallnacht

• Jews held accountable

Jews held accountable

• In addition, the Nazis determined that the Jews should be liable for the damages caused during "Kristallnacht." "The Decree on the Penalty Payment by Jews Who Are German Subjects" also imposed a one-billion mark fine on the Jewish community, supposedly an indemnity for the death of vom Rath. Although the atrocities perpetrated during the Night of Broken Glass did arouse outrage in Western Europe and the United States, little concrete action was taken to help the German Jews. At a press conference on November 15th, President Roosevelt said, "The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States... I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization." The president also instructed that the 12,000-15,000 refugees already in the U.S. on temporary visitor visas could remain in the country indefinitely.

​

​

Analysis

• Event shows German officials playing on citizen sentiments that said Germans are victims, a sentiment that Nazis used to gain and maintain power.

​

We are entitled to cruelty in response to injustice.

The response is in proportion to the threat.

​

1. A Jew killed a German diplomat and the response was “spontaneous”

​

2. Jews were held accountable for damages, businesses confiscated, rights revoked, males imprisoned

Analysis

• This popular German postcard depicts Social Democrat leader Phillip Scheidemann, Catholic Centre Party official Mattias Erzberger and “wealthy Jews” and revolutionary masses stabbing German soldiers in the back during World War One. .Ninety-six thousand Jews served in the German Army in WWI. This was created in 1923.

Germans are portrayed as victims, a sentiment that Nazis used to gain and maintain power. The greater the threat, the more drastic the response.

​

Holocaust Timeline

• 1939
• May – June Cuba and the U.S. refuse to accept more than 900 refugees, almost all of them Jewish, aboard the ocean liner St. Louis, forcing its return to Europe
• August – Germany and USSR sign non-aggression pact that divides eastern Europe between them
• September – Germany invades Poland, French and British response starts WWII
• October – Germans start euthanizing disabled by lethal injection and gas

​

Holocaust Timeline

• 1939
• October – Germany annexes parts of Poland, place other parts in “Generalgouvernment” civilian government adminstration
• November – Jews from Germany annexed areas deported into “Generalgourvernment” area, implement wearing of Star of David policy for Jews
• 1940 –
• German military success: Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, France

​

Holocaust Timeline

1940

May – Auschwitz I established for political and military prisoners

June – Lodz ghetto sealed: 160,000 Jews confined

November – Warsaw ghetto sealed: 350,000 Jews, 30 % of population, in 2.4% of total city area

​

1941

Germans invade Yugoslavia, Greece, USSR

​

​

Holocaust Timeline

1941

June – Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads assigned to murder Jews behind the lines, Jews flee eastward, squads murder one million by spring of ‘43

​

July – Goring appoints Reinhard Heydrich to implement “final solution” for disposal of Jews

​

September – Zyklon gassing begins at Auschwitz; German Jews get stars; Babi Yar 33,000 shot in two days at ravine near Kiev, Ukraine

​

​

Holocaust Timeline

1941

October – Aktion Reinhard prep begins for murder of all Jews in Generalgouvernment, includes construction of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka murder factories

November – Therezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto; Auschwitz II / Birkenau established as POW camp

December – U.S. enters WWII, Chelmno gas van operations begin murdering 152,000

​

​

​

Holocaust Timeline

1942

January - Lodz ghetto Jews deported to Chelmno for murder; Wannsee Conference coordinates implementation of Final Solution, 15 high ranking German government and Nazi party officials including Heydrich, who made plans for the murder of 11 million European Jews and Adolph Eichmann, organizer of deportations

March – gassing begins at Belzec, by December 600,000 mostly Jews, also Roma, murdered

​

​

Holocaust Timeline

1942

March – deportations of French Jews to Birkenau begins; Lublin Jews deported for murder to Belzec

May – gassings begin at Sobibor, 250,000 murdered by Nov. 1943; gassings begin at Birkenau, one million murdered by Jan. 1945, 90% Jewish

July – Dutch Jews deported from Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz, 100,000 by Sept. 1944 (Anne Frank); 300,000 Warsaw ghetto Jews deported, most to Treblinka for gassing where 750,000 are murdered by Nov. 1943

​

​

Holocaust Timeline

1942

August – Belgian Jews deported to Birkenau, 25,000

​

1943

January to May – Warsaw ghetto uprising first mass revolt in occupied territory

March – Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz, Birkenau, 50,000 murdered

June – SS leader Himmler orders Baltic states and Belorussia ghetto “liquidation”

​

Holocaust Timeline

1943

August – Treblinka prisoner revolt

October – Sobibor prisoner revolt

November – Treblinka dismantled; Operation Harvest Festival murders 42,000 as labor camps “liquidated”

1944

March – Germans occupy Hungary

May – Hungarian Jews deported, 430,000 by July, most murdered at Birkenau (Elie Wiesel)

​

​

Holocaust Timeline

1944

July – Soviets liberate Majdanek before Germans can destroy evidence, most in tact of all murder factories

October – Birkenau Sonderkommando revolt

November – Germans begin Birkenau destruction

​

1945

January – Germans start death marches out of camps; Soviets liberate 8,000 left at Auschwitz, Birkenau

​

​

Holocaust Timeline

1945

April /May – U.S. liberates 20,000 at Buchenwald, 32,000 at Dachau, 17,000 at Mauthausen, 20,000 at Gusen concentration camps

May – Germans surrender

November –trial begins of 21 major Nazi leaders begins at Nuremberg, 18 convicted, three acquitted, 11 sentenced to death in August ‘46

1948

State of Israel established

​

​

Sources

Botsch, Dierl, et al.The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of European Jews, House of the Wannsee Conference and Memorial Site, Berlin 2009.

“America and the Holocaust,” American Experience, PBS, pbs.org

Meinecke, Zapruder, et al. , Nazi Ideology and the Holocaust, USHMM, Wash. D.C. 2007.

Teaching about the Holocaust, A Resource for Educators, USHMM, Wash. D.C. 2001.

United States Memorial Holocaust Memorial Museum, ushmm.org

Yad Vashem, yadvashem.org

​