The "Night of Broken Glass"

After five years of National Socialism, the leaders of the regime note that, despite threats and bullying, three-quarters of the Jewish population of the Reich have chosen to stay. The situation is all the more worrying as almost 200,000 Jews residing in Austria fall 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 all Jewish presence, particularly in the economy, and to encourage mass emigration. These legislative measures are accompanied by acts of violence whose culmination will be
the 'Crystal Night'.

The assassination of Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan

November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, 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 charged by Judge Tesnière with attempted murder and premeditated murder.
Transferred to Berlin, Grynszpan is interrogated and then incarcerated in Sachsenhausen, on January 18, 1941, and makes 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, head of a Swiss branch of the Nazi party, by David Frankfurter, a Jewish student of Yugoslav origin had gone unnoticed due to the Berlin Olympic Games; that of vom Rath est, for the Nazis, the pretext for triggering the 'Night of Broken Glass'.

The anti-Jewish pogrom

At the announcement of the attack against vom Rath, the German press expands at will on the theme of the global Jewish conspiracy and threatens severe reprisals. It is the ideal pretext to hunt down the Jews and force them to leave Germany en masse. On the evening of November 9 in Munich, Goebbels delivers a violent speech inciting reprisals in front of 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 from 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.
At the announcement of the death of vom Rath, the riot spreads with lightning speed. The SA gives orders to its troops to systematically set fire to all the synagogues in the country. Informed of events during the night, Himmler has a relatively moderate reaction, ordering his troops to take action to prevent widespread looting and to intern some twenty thousand Jews in the concentration camps. The aggressors rush to assault 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 are seriously wounded. 6,500 people are arrested and transferred mainly to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald.
The vast majority of internees, German Jews and Austrian Jews, during the "Kristallnacht", is gradually released between November 18, 1938 and the spring of 1939 if they commit to emigrate without delay and abandon most of their assets. Among them, the old, the seriously ill, those who can prove that they are going to emigrate or agree to transfer their companies to an Aryan for a derisory price, are the first released. The cold, ill-treatment, and diseases cause the death of several hundred "November Jews". The Jewish community is sentenced to pay a fine of one billion marks for having caused this damage "by provoking the just anger of the German people". It will be deducted from 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 rise to protest officially. The Churches remain silent.

On the day of the 10th, the violence stops. 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 was added the murder of 91 Jews, the arrest and deportation of 30,000 men at 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 towards Western Europe and Palestine accelerated.

Aware of the impact on a national and international scale of this event (condemnation of public and political opinion in the United Kingdom and the United States, boycott by companies in France, Canada, the Netherlands), the Nazi regime decides not to renew similar actions in broad daylight.

Herschel Grynszpan around police officers coming out of his first interrogation in the premises of the Judicial Police. Paris, France, November 7, 1938.
Cr said photographic: Shoah Memorial/CDJC.

Nazi soldiers requisitioning furniture belonging to the Jews, after the 'Kristallnacht'. Germany, November 1938.
Cr said photographic: Shoah Memorial/CDJC.

L o Schlesinger shoe store during the 'Night of Broken Glass'. Vienna, Austria, November 10, 1938.
Cr said photographic: Shoah Memorial/CDJC.

Crowd in front of a synagogue rushed, during the 'Kristallnacht'. Vienna, Austria, November 10, 1938.
Cr said photographic: Shoah Memorial/CDJC.