Remembering Kristallnacht, or "The Night of Broken Glass"

In life an incident may confront individuals, families, tribes or even nations that subsequently may trigger catastrophic events with far reaching consequences even for the unborn generations. Most of the time there are deep seated smouldering hatred which sudden comes to the surface to ignite passions after the start of the conflict by the initial relatively innocuous incident.

In Ghana one may site the example of the “guinea fowl incident” which was said to have ignited the Konkomba-Nanumba war some years ago. I believe that that was not the first time two adults fought over a guinea fowl. The fact that this particular fight lead to the conflict that resulted in the death of dozens of precious lives is an indication that there was deep seated animosity between the tribes represented by the two individuals who fought over the guinea fowl.

The Kristallnacht or the night of broken glass is a sad example of a relatively small conflict igniting the worst atrocity against a particular race in history.

The Night of Broken Glass is the notorious name for the up to then worst persecution against the German Jews that took place throughout the German Reich on 9-10 November 1938. This year marks the 70th anniversary of that tragedy.
Many Jews were murdered, thousands of Jewish shops were vandalized or looted, and yet thousands of windows were broken – thus the name ‘Night of Broken Glass’.

Ironically, in traditional Judaism the sound of breaking glass is more commonly associated the finalization of the Jewish wedding ceremony. This sound is greeted with joyous shouts of mazel tov by family and friends as the happy couple proceed to their reception.

Officially, the persecution was an expression of the German people’s revenge for the murder of a German diplomat at the hands of a young Jew, but in reality the events were centrally directed offensive against the Jewish population.

Course of events

In the 1930s, many Jews of Polish origin lived in Germany. Most of them had been there all their lives and some were decorated German veterans of the First World War. On Friday, 28 October 1938, 17,000 of them, including over 2000 children had been gathered without warning in the middle of the night and deported from Germany to the Polish border as unwanted persons with just a suitcase per person to store their belongings on orders of Reinhard Heydrich, second-in-command of the Schutzstaffel, (Protective Squadron), SS for short. The SS was responsible for the vast majority of war crimes perpetrated under the Nazi regime, including the Holocaust.

Among the deportees was Zindel Grynszpan, who was born in western Poland but had moved to Hanover in Lower Saxony in 1911 where he established a small store. Polish authorities denied them permission to enter. The Jews thus ended up in a kind of no-man's-land in the village of Zbaszyn between the German and Polish borders.

The Grynszpan family had not taken along their 17-year-old son Herschel. He had gone to Paris at the age of 15 to stay with his uncle who worked there as a tailor. Young Herschel was a sensitive, devoutly orthodox Jew who attended Synagogue regularly and strictly observed the various rules of the Jewish faith.

Throughout his stay in Paris Herschel Grynszpan took a keen interest in the plight of his family and the half-million Jews still living in Greater Germany. During his years in Paris he regularly read the Yiddish newspapers his uncle brought home which chronicled the suppression of "his people" under Nazi control in Germany, Austria and the newly acquired Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. The papers also reported the mass expulsion of the Polish Jews from Germany.

Just before that expulsion, Herschel suffered a major setback of his own. His request for permanent residency in France was rejected by local French officials, followed by a decree of expulsion to take effect on August 15, 1938. Herschel ignored the expulsion decree and remained in Paris illegally for the time being until he could figure out where to go.

He had become, like his family, a man without a country, unwanted anywhere because of his Jewish ancestry. Making matters worse, he then received a letter on the 3rd of November 1938 from his 22-year old sister Esther Grynszpan describing the ordeal of their expulsion from Germany.

Driven half-mad with sorrow and anger over all that was happening, Herschel decided to commit a radical act of violence to draw the world's attention to the plight of the Jews.

On Monday morning, November 7, he walked into a Paris gun shop and purchased a 6.35-caliber revolver along with a box of 25 bullets. Thereafter Herschel loaded his revolver in the rest room of a nearby café then put the gun in his left coat pocket. He took the subway and arrived at the German embassy at 9:35 a.m. intending to assassinate the German Ambassador to France. Upon discovering that the Ambassador was not in the embassy, he settled for a lesser official, the 29-year old Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Herschel managed to enter vom Rath’s office ostensibly to deliver an important document. There Herschel Grysnzpan reached into his coat pocket, took out the gun and gave five shots wildly, striking vom Rath twice as he stood up. The first bullet lodged in vom Rath's left shoulder and did little damage. The second bullet struck him in the lower left side, causing severe internal damage.

Herschel dropped the empty gun to the floor. The wounded vom Rath gave Herschel a quick smack with his fist, then dashed toward the door, clutching his abdomen and calling out for help. Herschel never left the office but just waited to be arrested. He was taken into custody by embassy officials and later handed over to the French police.

Vom Rath was rushed to the hospital where he underwent emergency surgery to remove his ruptured spleen, and to repair damage to his stomach and pancreas. His condition deteriorated and he died two days later on Wednesday 9th November 1938 at 4:25 p.m.

While this was occurring, Adolf Hitler and most of the highest ranking Nazis old cronies were about to have a festive dinner at Old City Hall in Munich, following a long day of self-congratulations, pomp and Nazi pageantry. This was part of the annual re-enactment of the Beer Hall Putsch. Every year on November 9, veterans of the 1923 Putsch gathered to retrace the same steps they had taken in their failed attempt to overthrow Germany's democratic government. The day was also a national holiday known as the Day of the Movement and Germans enjoyed a day off from work and children stayed home from school.

At the dinner Hitler took Goebbels aside and conferred privately for several minutes. After dinner Hitler left the hall without uttering a word.

The Nazis interpreted the assassination of Ernst vom Rath as a conspiratorial attack by "International Jewry" against the Reich and, symbolically, against Hitler, the Fuehrer, himself. Their life-long, deep-seated hatred for Jews instantly and instinctively, ignited in them the desire to incite the German people to "rise in bloody vengeance against the Jews."

Goebbels then launched into an anti-Semitic diatribe, prompting the SA and Nazi Party leaders to incite a popular uprising against Jews throughout Greater Germany without making it look like the Nazi Party was the actual instigator.

All over Germany, Poland and Austria that evening Jews were dragged from their beds, and abused in the streets, often with taped mouths to muffle screams and crying. Men whose beards had never been cut for religious reasons were shaved publicly by taunting Nazi soldiers. Jewish shops and department stores had their windows smashed and contents wrecked or looted. Community centers, elderly homes and Jewish hospitals and children's homes were not spared. Synagogues, including the famous one on the Fasanen Street in Berlin were especially targeted for vandalism. These sacred places of worship were set on fire and burned; while sacred items such as Torah Scrolls and furnishings were ruined, burned and desecrated. Hundreds of synagogues went up in flames while fire fighters stood by watching or simply hosed down surrounding buildings to prevent the fire from spreading.

Some isolated cases of inhumanity were chilling. A typical case occurred in Elberstadt in Württemberg. Adolf Heinrich Frey, Chief of the Sturmabteilung, SA (Storm Battalion) entered the home of Susanne Stern an 81 year old widow and ordered her to get up and follow him. The old lady refused and Adolf Heinrich Frey cold bloodedly shot her twice in the chest killing her instantly.

Another tragic event was reported from Innsbruck in Austria. Nazi commando units invaded Gaensbacher Street Nr 4-5, where several influential Jewish families in the city lived. The regional head of the SS gave orders to his commandos to kill the Jews living there “quietly”. Richard Graubart, an engineer and one of the most prominent Jews in the community lived in house Nr. 4. He was stabbed in front of his wife and daughter. On the second floor of the same building, Karl Bauer, another eminent person, was dragged on the floor, stabbed and beaten with the butt of a pistol; he died on the way to hospital.

The Kristallnacht was certainly not the popular uprising the Nazis hoped to ignite. Many ordinary Germans resented the round-up of the Jews. Some even went as far as to help Jews but they were helpless. Some cried while watching from behind their curtains. The majority stayed indoors watching in horror, feeling helpless to do anything. Others stood silently on the sidewalk along with the regular German police and watched as storm troopers, SS men and Hitler Youth, accompanied by miscellaneous street punks, visited the atrocities on the Jews.

There were, however, isolated cases of support from civilians including clergymen. Bishop Martin Sasse, a protestant Bishop applauded the burning of the Synagogues and drew the attention of Germans to the significance of the 10th of November, the day of the persecution, which incidentally was the birthday of Martin Luther, the great protestant reformer and the greatest anti-Semite of his time.

In spite of the isolated support from civilians it will be most unfair to blame Germans as a whole for the events of Kristallnacht and even the Holocaust. All the same it is no consolation for the pain and anguish that was visited on the Jews on the 9th and 10th of November 1938.

In all, it is estimated that up to 2,500 Jews perished from beatings on the street, incarceration in the camps, and from the numerous suicides that occurred, including entire families; 7 500 shops were destroyed, 267 synagogues burned. Officially the figure for the dead was 91.About 30,000 Jews were hauled off to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps where they were brutalized by SS guards and in some cases randomly chosen to be beaten to death, among them Abraham Dreifuss, a prominent businessman from Eichstetten who was beaten to death in the presence of his son Max in Dachau on November 22 1938.

As for Herschel Grynszpan, he was interrogated by the French police and eventually wound up in the clutches of the Gestapo and spent time in various Nazi prisons and concentration camps, and vanished without a trace.

The morning after Kristallnacht more Jews, now called “November Jews”, were rounded up in great numbers and deported to the Killing Centers especially of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Three days later, on November 12, Hermann Goering {Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe (German Air force), President of the Reichstag (Parliament), Prime Minister of Prussia and Hitler's designated successor and therefore the second man in the Third Reich}, called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. To add insult to injury the Nazis assessed the cost of sweeping away the shattered glass remains and other debris of Kristallnacht as one billion marks and the Jews were asked to pay this amount to the State. To pay this debt, every Jewish family was forced to relinquish twenty percent of its personal property to the state.

A few days after Kristallnacht, on November 15, the Ministry of Education barred all Jewish children from state schools. On November 28, curfews were imposed on the Jews. That December, Jews were barred from retail stores, from calling independent craftsmen, from selling goods and services, and from serving in the management of any business. All Jews were required to publicly display a yellow Star of David as an identifying insignia.

Antecedent Events

Although Kristallnacht turned out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of what is now called the Holocaust, the hatred of Nazi-Germany for Jews predated the events that erupted after the unjustified killing of a junior embassy official in Paris. Anti-Semitism had been a German tradition for centuries. Martin Luther, whose birthday falls on 10th November, the same day as the Kristallnacht wrote that “next to the devil, thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew.” German history thus reveals a clear and unremitting line of anti-Semitic attitudes from Luther straight through to Adolph Hitler. In Hitler’s mind, the Jews were the ultimate evil. He considered them the source of every political, social, and economic misfortune. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “No one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the Devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jews.” This statement does not seem to be any different from that of Martin Luther.

Probably Kristallnacht became possible because anti-Semitism had always been present in the Gentile-German culture and so most Jews had no appreciation of either the seriousness or the immediacy of their present danger until it was too late.

From its inception almost six years before Kristallnacht the Hitler's regime left no stone unturned to introduce anti-Jewish policy. The Jews in Germany in the 1930s numbered just about 500,000, accounting for only 0.76% of the overall population but they were singled out by the Nazi propaganda machine as the enemy within who were responsible for Germany's defeat in the First World War of 1914-1918 and her subsequent economic difficulties. The prominence of the Jewish people in the scientific and professional life made them the objects of jealousy which the Nazis skillfully exploited.

During 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the German government enacted 42 laws restricting the rights of German Jews to earn a living, to enjoy full citizenship and to educate themselves. The law "for the reconstruction of the civil service", forbade Jews to work in any branch of the civil service. During 1934, a further 19 discriminatory laws were introduced. During 1935, the government enacted a further 29 anti-Jewish laws. The most draconian were the two Nuremberg Laws which were passed on September 15, 1935 and signed personally by Hitler. The first law, The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriages and extra-marital intercourse between Jews and Germans and also the employment of German females in Jewish households. By this law Jews were also forbidden to display the Reich and national flag or the national colors. On the other hand they were permitted to display the Jewish colors. The second law, The Reich Citizenship Law, stripped Jews of their German citizenship and introduced a new distinction between “Reich citizens” and “nationals”.

These laws made German Jews, already persecuted, stateless refugees in their own country. Consequently by 1938, some 150,000 out of the 500,000 German Jews had fled Germany, mostly to "Palestine-Eretz Israel", but British immigration quotas prevented many from emigrating. The politico-military Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Germany on 12th March 1938 effectively made the 200,000 Jews of Austria stateless refugees. On the day after the Anschluss, Jews were forced to wear evening dress and clean the streets of Vienna on their knees under the mocking and gleeful eyes of the Viennese. Members of Hitler Youth pulled the beards of orthodox Jews in the street.

In September 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, the French Premier and Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator met Adolf Hitler in the infamous Munich meeting and granted Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland, which had been part of Czechoslovakia after the First World War and mainly inhabited by Czech Germans. Following the meeting the Wehrmacht (German Army) troops stationed at the border area entered the Sudetenland on 1st October 1938 and in March 1939 Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia and after the usual pattern immediately made a further 200,000 Jews in that country stateless.

The annexation of Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland were in direct contravention of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye signed on 10 September 1919 by the victorious Allies of World War I on the one hand and by the new Republic of Austria on the other. This treaty effectively dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire and required that the new Austria which has lost land to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, and Italy could not enter into political or economic union with Germany without the agreement of the council of the League of Nations.

In 1939 the British closed Palestine to further Jewish migration, and Jewish refugees could no longer find countries willing to let them immigrate.

In an attempt to provide help to the Jews affected by these laws, an international conference, the Evian Conference, was convened at the initiative of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France on the shores of Lake Geneva. From July 6 to July 15 the conference hoped to address the issue of Jewish immigration to other countries. The conference sadly did not pass a resolution condemning the German treatment of Jews, a situation that was taken full advantage of by the Nazi propaganda machinery and further emboldened Hitler in his assault on European Jewry.

In the course of the conference, the delegates expressed sympathy for the refugees, but offered only excuses for not letting in more refugees. All the Evian conference achieved was the established the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICR) with the purpose to "approach the governments of the countries of refuge with a view to developing opportunities for permanent settlement." The ICR received little authority or support from its member nations and fell into inaction

Golda Meier, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, attended the conference in the capacity as Jewish observer from Palestine but was not seated with the delegates although the refugees under discussion were her own people. Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization and first president of the State of Israel, had this to say on the results of the Evian conference "The world seemed to be divided into two parts – those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter”.

The series of events enumerated above made the Kristallnacht possible. Kristallnacht changed the nature of Jewish persecution from economic, political, and social to the physical with beatings, incarceration, and mass murder. It was a prelude to the Holocaust which was to offer the Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem”.

One would have thought that the events of Kristallnacht would galvanize the world against Hitler but as events later unfolded the impotence of the international community to act decisively rather emboldened Hitler and the Nazis to launch the slaughter six million Jews in seven years from 1938 to 1945.

Unfortunately the world never learns. I believe there are smoldering Kristallnachts in many parts of the world, especially Africa. I am worried about Dafur, Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo. What about Ghana? Let not the coming elections trigger any war. Bawku, Tamale, Gushegu and recently Sankore are warnings to us. The forces of darkness want that. The good people of this country should watch out.

SHALOM.