80 Years: Kristallnacht

80 years ago today (November 9, 1938) began a well-planned pogrom across Nazi Germany, German-annexed Austria and German-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) and targeted the Jews. The Germans used the murder of the 29 year old German diplomat, Ernest Vom Rath, in Paris by 17 year old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan (believed to be his lover) as the reason of the “spontaneous” riots – that were later proved to have been planned long before.

In October 1938 the Nazis began the “Polenaktion” (or “Poland Action) in which it expelled 17,000 Jews with ties to Poland. Despite being born in Germany, Herschel Grynszpan and his family did not have German citizenship under German law (even before the Nazis came to power) and were still considered Poles (his parents moved from Poland to Germany in 1911) and were being deported to Poland, but under a recently passed 1938 Polish law anyone who lived outside of Poland for 5 straight years lost their Polish citizenship so these 17,000 Jews were now made stateless. Grynszpan made it to Paris, but the rest of his family were kept in a dirty camp in no-man’s land between Germany and Poland from October 1938 until the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 where they either died during the invasion or the Holocaust.  Grynszapan attacked Vom Rath to bring world attention to his family’s plight. 

 By November 10, 1938, 90 people were killed and around 400 committed suicide. 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. Jewish homes, hospitals, cemeteries and schools were ransacked. 1,400 synagogues were damaged with 267 of those synagogues completely destroyed and over 7,000 Jewish businesses burnt to the ground – including 29 department stores. German firefighters were present only to prevent the fires from spreading to non-Jewish property and German police arrested anyone who tried to enter a Jewish building to save anything.  Kristallnacht resulted in 1 billion Reichsmarks' property damage (US $6.7 billion in 2015 dollars.) After the pogrom the Nazis fined every Jewish person to receive the insurance money that the Jews would get for their destroyed property. The fine totaled 1 billion Reichsmarks (the exact amount of the damage.) The story of Kristallnacht was reported to the US, the UK and every other country by radio as it happened and the New York Times published a front-page article with pictures about the pogrom on November 11, 1938.  The US recalled its ambassador to Germany, but kept its embassy in Berlin open. After Kristallnacht the Jews in Nazi Germany and German-occupied countries tried to flee to the US, the UK, British-controlled Palestine, etc. but restrictive immigration quotas caused by Anti-Semitism in those countries kept the majority of Jews on years-long waiting lists until the Germans stopped all legal emigration in 1942 and turned to murdering rather than allowing the Jews to flee.