Why was kristallnacht a turning point

On that night - Kristallnacht, or crystal night, the Night of Broken Glass - more than two hundred synagogues in Germany and Austria burned, while non-Jewish neighbors and citizens, and even local firefighters and police, stood by and watched.

That night marked the first organized roundup of Jews on a mass scale. Kristallnacht became a turning point in Nazi ideology: persecution to annihilation. It set the stage in which, six years later, my then fourteen-year-old mother would be imprisoned in a Jewish ghetto, terrified and alone, her parents trucked off to labor camps; and my seventeen-year-old father forced on hellish death marches from one concentration camp to the next, starved and beaten, while Nazis deported his whole family, and nearly his entire village, to Auschwitz to be gassed and burned.

What saddens me, too, is how little this piece of history is taught and understood, so much so that kids and even many adults truly do not comprehend its enormity. The past is the past, people say.

Move on. We know what happens when people forget history: we are destined to repeat it. I think the flip side of using the wrong words is using no words. This anniversary of Kristallnacht, we woke up to new leadership of our country. This was the first time Nazi officials made massive arrests of Jews specifically because they were Jews, without any further cause for arrest.

This wave of violence took place throughout Germany, annexed Austria , and in areas of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops. Kristallnacht owes its name to the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom—broken glass from the windows of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses plundered and destroyed during the violence.

In its aftermath, German officials announced that Kristallnacht had erupted as a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment in response to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath was a German embassy official stationed in Paris.

Herschel Grynszpan , a year-old Polish Jew, had shot the diplomat on November 7, A few days earlier, German authorities had expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich; Grynszpan had received news that his parents, residents in Germany since , were among them. Grynszpan's parents and the other expelled Polish Jews were initially denied entry into their native Poland. They found themselves stranded in a refugee camp near the town of Zbaszyn in the border region between Poland and Germany.

Already living illegally in Paris himself, a desperate Grynszpan apparently sought revenge for his family's precarious circumstances by appearing at the German embassy and shooting the diplomatic official assigned to assist him. Vom Rath died on November 9, , two days after the shooting. The day happened to coincide with the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch , an important date in the National Socialist calendar.

The Nazi Party leadership, assembled in Munich for the commemoration, chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of antisemitic excesses. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a chief instigator of the Kristallnacht pogroms, suggested to the convened Nazi 'Old Guard' that 'World Jewry' had conspired to commit the assassination. Goebbels' words appear to have been taken as a command for unleashing the violence.

After his speech, the assembled regional Party leaders issued instructions to their local offices. Violence began to erupt in various parts of the Reich throughout the late evening and early morning hours of November 9— At a.

SA and Hitler Youth units throughout Germany and its annexed territories engaged in the destruction of Jewish-owned homes and businesses. Members of many units wore civilian clothes to support the fiction that the disturbances were expressions of 'outraged public reaction.

Despite the outward appearance of spontaneous violence, and the local cast which the pogrom took on in various regions throughout the Reich, the central orders Heydrich relayed gave specific instructions: the "spontaneous" rioters were to take no measures endangering non-Jewish German life or property; they were not to subject foreigners even Jewish foreigners to violence; and they were to remove all synagogue archives prior to vandalizing synagogues and other properties of the Jewish communities, and to transfer that archival material to the Security Service Sicherheitsdienst , or SD.

The orders also indicated that police officials should arrest as many Jews as local jails could hold, preferably young, healthy men. The rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and Jewish institutions throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Many synagogues burned throughout the night in full view of the public and of local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. SA and Hitler Youth members across the country shattered the shop windows of an estimated 7, Jewish-owned commercial establishments and looted their wares.

Jewish cemeteries became a particular object of desecration in many regions. The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna , home to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews in their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation.

Although murder did not figure in the central directives, Kristallnacht claimed many Jewish lives between 9 and 10 November. T he official figure for Jewish deaths, released by German officials in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, was 91, but recent scholarship suggests that there were hundreds of deaths, especially if one counts those who died of their injuries in the days and weeks that followed the pogrom. Police records of the period also document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence.

As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo Secret State Police , following Heydrich's instructions, arrested up to 30, Jewish males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau , Buchenwald , Sachsenhausen , and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity. Join us right now to watch a live interview with a survivor, followed by a question-and-answer session.

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