Kristallnacht, 1938

What happened

On the night of November 9 into November 10, 1938, Nazi Party formations across Germany, Austria, and the annexed Sudetenland burned synagogues, wrecked Jewish shops and homes, and beat and killed Jews in the street. ¹ The German government presented this as the public losing its temper. It was organized. Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi officials planned the pogrom, and regional Party leaders passed instructions down to their local offices. ⁶

The pretext was a shooting in Paris. On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jewish refugee, walked into the German embassy and shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. ⁴ Grynszpan's parents were among roughly 17,000 Polish Jews the German government had expelled across the Polish border on October 28, 1938, ten days earlier. ⁴ Vom Rath died at 5:30 p.m. on November 9. ¹

What followed that evening is documented almost to the minute. Between about 9:30 and 10 p.m., Goebbels gave an antisemitic speech to assembled Nazi dignitaries. ¹ He told them demonstrations should not be prepared or organized, which the room correctly understood as permission. ⁴ At 11:55 p.m., Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller issued arrest orders. ¹ At 1:20 a.m. on November 10, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police, sent detailed instructions from Munich to police and Security Service offices across the country. ^{1 3}

Heydrich's order is the clearest evidence that the spontaneity was manufactured. Police were told that demonstrations in progress "should not be prevented by the police but only supervised for compliance with the guidelines." ³ Synagogues could be burned "only when there is no threat of fire to the surroundings." ³ "Stores and residences of Jews may only be destroyed but not looted," with police instructed to arrest looters. ³ On commercial streets, "special care is to be taken" that non-Jewish businesses were secured against damage. ³ And on arrests: "as many Jews, particularly affluent Jews, are to be arrested in all districts as can be accomodated in existing detention facilities," restricted at first to healthy men not too advanced in age. ³ Fire brigades and police were under orders not to protect Jews or Jewish property. ² The regime called the violence off at 4 p.m. on November 10. ¹

By then more than 1,400 synagogues had been burned or destroyed, thousands of businesses vandalized, and Jewish cemeteries desecrated. ^{1 2} The historian Gerhard Weinberg puts it more bluntly: practically every Jewish house of worship in the country was destroyed. ⁵ Hundreds of Jews died during the riot and in its aftermath. ^{1 5} German police imprisoned Jewish men in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen for no reason but being Jewish. ¹ The USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia gives that figure as about 26,000; the Claims Conference and Weinberg both put it near 30,000. ^{1 4 5} From that point on, Weinberg notes, the concentration camps held a majority of Jewish inmates. ⁵ Some men were released when their families could show proof of emigration plans. ²

The name comes from the glass. Shattered store windows littered the streets during and after the riot, which is how the night got called Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." ²

Then came the bill. On November 12, 1938, the regime imposed a punitive fine of one billion Reichsmarks on the German Jewish community, roughly 400 million dollars at 1938 exchange rates. ^{4 6} Insurance payouts owed to Jewish property owners were confiscated by the state, and Jews were held liable for the cost of repairing the damage done to them. ¹ In the weeks that followed, dozens of laws and decrees stripped Jews of property and livelihood: no operating retail stores, no firearms, no public welfare, no public school, and restrictions on where they could go. ^{1 6}

Why it still matters

Kristallnacht is usually described as the hinge between persecution and destruction, and that is roughly right, though the mechanism is worth stating precisely rather than assuming. The strongest case for the hinge reading is what the night produced downstream: mass emigration by Jews who concluded there was no future for them in Germany, and a legal apparatus built in a matter of weeks to take everything they owned. ^{1 2 6} Americans could see it happening. Between October 28 and November 30, 1938, more than 5,000 articles in over 600 American newspapers covered the pogrom and its lead-up. ⁶

Weinberg's account complicates the tidy version in a way worth holding onto. He argues the November pogrom was the most spectacular of the regime's escalating anti-Jewish measures in late 1938 but not the only one, and that it cannot be read in isolation from two other things Hitler was deciding that same winter: that he would have his war in 1939, and that the killing of the handicapped could begin under cover of it. ⁵ What the regime learned in November, Weinberg writes, was not that violence worked but that open rioting drew complaints while quiet procedure did not. There was no concerted domestic criticism, and not the slightest reaction from the Christian churches to the wholesale destruction of houses of worship. ⁵ As long as things went quietly and according to rules, he concludes, almost all Germans were prepared to see anything happen to their Jewish neighbors. ⁵

Two months later the language changed. On January 21, 1939, Hitler told the visiting Czechoslovak foreign minister that the Jews in Germany would be destroyed. ⁵ Nine days after that, in his January 30 Reichstag speech, he said publicly that a new war would mean the end of the Jews of Europe. ⁵ The numbers that followed are their own subject, and we cover them separately.

The practical lesson sitting in the file is the one about the fine. A state that has decided to rob you will also arrange for you to be the guilty party. The insurance money was seized, the repair costs were assigned to the victims, and the whole transaction was written down in ordinary bureaucratic German. ¹

The words you'll hear

Kristallnacht. "Night of Broken Glass," named for the shattered shop windows that covered German streets after the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938. ² Historians often use "the November pogrom" instead, as Weinberg does throughout his account. ⁵

Pogrom. An organized riot against Jews. The USHMM applies the word to Kristallnacht specifically because the violence was state-sponsored vandalism and arson rather than an unplanned outburst. ^{1 2}

Judenvermögensabgabe / "atonement payment." The one billion Reichsmark fine levied on the German Jewish community on November 12, 1938, for the damage done to them. ^{4 6}

Heydrich's order. The 1:20 a.m. telegram of November 10, 1938, from the head of the Security Police, instructing police to supervise rather than stop the violence, to protect non-Jewish property, and to arrest as many affluent Jewish men as the jails could hold. ³

The camps in 1938. Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where the men arrested that week were sent, and which from then on held a majority of Jewish prisoners. ^{1 5}