The "Crystal Night"

After five years of National Socialism, the leaders of the regime found that, despite threats and bullying, three-quarters of the Jewish population of the Reich chose to stay. The situation is all the more worrying since almost 200,000 Jews living in Austria fell under the authority of the Reich after the Anschluss. 1938 will be the year of a radicalization and an acceleration of anti-Semitic measures aimed at eliminating any Jewish presence, especially in the economy, and to encourage mass emigration. These legislative measures are accompanied by acts of violence, which will culminate in
the "Crystal Night".

The assassination of Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan

On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew of German origin who lives in Paris and wants to protest against the recent expulsion of Polish Jews living in Germany across the Polish border, presents himself at the German embassy and mortally wounds Ernst vom Rath, embassy secretary.
In France, Grynszpan is indicted by Judge Tesnière for attempted murder and premeditated murder.
Transferred to Berlin, Grynszpan was interrogated and then incarcerated in Sachsenhausen on 18 January 1941 and spent several stays at the Gestapo prison. No one has ever known with certainty what happened to Grynszpan. If, in February 1936, the murder of Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of a Swiss branch of the Nazi Party, by David Frankfurter, a Jewish student of Yugoslavian origin had gone unnoticed due to the Berlin Olympics that of vom Rath is, for the Nazis, the pretext for the triggering of the "Crystal Night".

The anti-Jewish pogrom

With the announcement of the attack against vom Rath, the German press develops at will the theme of the world Jewish conspiracy and threatens severe reprisals. It is the ideal pretext for hunting down Jews and forcing them to leave Germany en masse. On the evening of November 9 in Munich, Goebbels delivers a violent speech inciting reprisals before the Nazi leaders gathered at the former Munich City Hall for the commemoration of the 1923 putsch and announces that anti-Jewish pogroms have broken out in the districts of Kurhessen (Hesse-Kassel) and Magdeburg-Anhalt. He adds that, at his suggestion, Hitler decided to do nothing to prevent a movement that would spontaneously extend to the entire Reich.
Upon the announcement of the death of vom Rath, the riot spread with lightning speed. The SA orders its troops to systematically set fire to all synagogues in the country. Informed of the events during the night, Himmler had a relatively moderate reaction, ordering his troops to take action to prevent widespread looting and interning twenty thousand Jews in concentration camps. The aggressors rush to attack the symbols of Jewish life.
Nearly a hundred Jews are murdered, several are seriously injured, women are raped. In Austria the pogrom is even more violent: 42 synagogues are destroyed, 27 Jews killed, a hundred seriously wounded. 6,500 people were arrested and transferred mainly to the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.
The vast majority of German and Austrian Jewish internees during "Kristallnacht", is gradually released between 18 November 1938 and the spring of 1939 if they undertake to emigrate without delay and to abandon most of their assets. Among them, the old, the very sick, those who can prove that they are going to emigrate or agree to cede their companies to an Aryan for a derisory price, are the first liberated. The cold, ill-treatment and disease cause the death of several hundred "November Jews". The Jewish community is ordered to pay a fine of one billion marks for having caused this damage "by provoking the just wrath of the German people". It will be levied on the 7 billion Jewish assets blocked since April 1938.
The unleashing of violence wrongly gives the impression of a spontaneous riot. In fact, with the exception of a minority, the population remained spectators. Few voices are raised to protest officially. The churches remain silent.

On the day of the 10th, the violence stopped. The toll is very heavy: destruction of 267 synagogues in Germany, many community houses, thousands of private places (houses, apartments and shops). To this material destruction were added the murder of 91 Jews, and the arrest and deportation of 30,000 men to Dachau and Buchenwald. In the weeks that followed, the Jewish community was shaken by an unprecedented wave of suicides (680 in the city of Vienna alone), and the wave of emigration to Western Europe and Palestine accelerated.

Aware of the national and international repercussions of this event (condemnation of public opinion and politics in the United Kingdom and the United States, boycott of companies in France, Canada, the Netherlands), the Nazi regime decides not to repeat similar actions in broad daylight.

Herschel Grynszpan around policemen coming out of his first interrogation in the premises of the Judicial Police. Paris, France, November 7, 1938.
Cr says photographic: M morial de la Shoah/CDJC.

Nazi soldiers raiding furniture belonging to Jews, after the 'Crystal Night'. Germany, November 1938.
Cr says photographic: M morial de la Shoah/CDJC.

L o Schlesinger’s shoe store saccag during the 'Crystal Night'. Vienna, Austria, 10 November 1938.
Cr says photographic: M morial de la Shoah/CDJC.

Crowd in front of a synagogue during the 'Crystal Night'. Vienna, Austria, November 10, 1938.
Cr says photographic: M morial de la Shoah/CDJC.