The Significance Of Kristallnacht And The Night Of Broken Glass

At the end of WWI in 1918, Germany’s economy was in ruins. There were very few jobs, and bitterness began to take over the country. According to the text, “Hitler, a rising politician, offered Germany a scapegoat: Jewish people. Hitler said that Jewish people were to blame for Germany’s problems. He believed that Jews did not deserve to live.” (7) This was the birth of Antisemitism--prejudice against Jewish people. Europe’s Jewish people have always been persecuted due to their “different customs and beliefs that many viewed with suspicion.”(7) Hitler simply reignited the flames, and a violent hatred was born.

By blaming the Jews for the economic crisis that Germany was suffering through as well as their defeat in WW1, Hitler targeted the Jews as the country’s main enemy. According to him, the Jewish were directly responsible for Germany’s problems. Hitler hated the Jews leading up to the Holocaust because he believed that the Jewish financiers were responsible for sending the world into its first World War, causing the deaths over 100,000 Germans. According to the Nazis the “Aryan race” was the best and strongest race. Jews were of another inferior race. In fact so inferior that they were not considered to be “people” by the

The Night of Broken Glass, or the Krystal Naught, is a prime example of how dire the situation grew for Jews as their homes, businesses, and churches were

On the night of November 9th, 1938, chaos struck the German Reich and forever changed the lives of Jewish people living in Europe. This terror, known as Kristallnacht, ended late on November 10th. As a result, nearly 8,000 Jewish business and homes were destroyed, 200 synagogues were burned to the ground, and 76 were demolished. Innocent Jews were beaten, raped, and terrorized by Nazi officers in their own homes (Fitzgerald 72). As a result of this historic pogrom, over 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps; most never to be set free (Fitzgerald 13). Earlier in the day on November 9th, newspapers and radio stations, controlled by Nazi propaganda, had reported that the Secretary of Legislation at the German Embassy in Paris had been shot and seriously

The Holocaust was a great tragedy, but it didn't happen overnight. It was a long process of demeaning Jews as subhuman. This started as early as 1933 when Hitler first came to power. However, Kristallnacht, or The Night of the Broken Glass, was like the dam bursting. It was when the government of Germany encouraged its people to loot and burn Jewish shops, synagogues, and schools. In addition, many Jews were pulled out of their houses in the middle of the night and sent to concentration camps. In some towns so many of the men were sent to the camps that the women and children were forced to clean up the broken glass that littered the streets. Kristallnacht was a very significant point in the Holocaust,

The event leading up to Kristallnacht was involving a shooting. A young Polish man named Herschel Grynszpan found out his parents were exiled to where he was born in Hanover , Germany. For retaliation on November 7 , 1938 he shot Ernst Vom Rath. Rath lived 2 days after and died due to wounds; Hitler attended his funeral and that day of continuing the next day . During Kristallnacht many destructive things were done to the Jews. Over 250 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish business were burned. Any business owned by a Jew wasn’t allowed to reopen. 91 were dead and over 30,000 men were arrested and sent to camps. The German people made Jews life a living hell and things became harder and harder on the Jews causing them to be prohibited from certain areas of the city and school.

The view Adolf Hitler had on the Jewish peoples was that everything was their faults and he hated them. Before Hitler became a Dictator he was a soldier just like everyone else in World War 1 and when the German Empire lost he was in disbelief and just couldn’t believe it. Many nationalist and conservatives believed that Germany had not lost the war on the battlefield but due to betrayal from within, by a ‘stab in the back’. Socialists, communists and particularly Jews were blamed, even though more than 100,000 German and Austrian Jews had served in the war and 12,000 had been killed.

When Hitler was in charge of Germany, he hated the Jewish. He never really had a reason to hate the Jewish he just did. Hitler wanted all people to be like him. He wanted to create the “perfect race” that he thought was blonde hair, blue eyes. Hitler killed all people, except for blacks.

This statement depicts a glimpse of what the Jewish people had to endure during the holocaust. The holocaust was an extreme form of massacre. It is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. The duration of the holocaust was from January 30th, 1933 to May 8th, 1945. The holocaust began in the year of 1933 when the Nazi party came to power, the leader Adolf Hitler believed that the Jewish people belonged to a 'low' and 'evil' race, and they were affecting the lives of the Germans pessimistically. Hitler's motto was to punish, alienate, and torture anyone who differed from him, with religion being a main factor. The Nazi’s blamed the Jews for all the social and economic problems

The holocaust began in 1933 and was when millions of Jewish people were being tortured and killed in concentration and death camps. Hitler, who was the leader of Germany at the time, was an anti-semitic and thought of the Jews as lesser than the Aryans. The Nuremberg Laws, which were enforced in 1935, stated that if someone had a Jewish grandparent, they were considered a Jew and stripped of their civil liberties. In 1938, anything owned by or in relation to the Jewish people was destroyed-this was known as Kristallnacht, and the brutality towards them only got worse. During 1939, Germany invaded Poland and set up ghettoes, where Jews were forced to stay in terrible living conditions. During this time, thousands of mentally and physically disabled

The Nazi’s destroyed many Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. Many Jews killed or taken to concentration camps. If you were a part of the non-Jewish community, you were not allowed to help the Jews out. A fireman during this time claims, “We were ordered not to use any water till the synagogue was burned down.” People whose job was to help when there was danger, couldn’t even help. The Nazis were so powerful, and intimidated the public so much they could manipulate whoever they wanted. Because of this, many Jewish families were torn apart, businesses and house vandalized, and thousands of lives

Kristallnacht is also known for The night of broken glass. On the night of Kristallnacht jewish homes,schools,businesses, and anything relating to jews were vandalized. Nazis killed close to 100 jews. All because they were jewish they starved,died, and got harassed. ”For the dead and the living, we must all bear witness.

Another slap in the face was Kristallnacht or the “The Night of the Broken Glass”. This was an organized Nazi raid upon Synagogues, Jewish homes, and even Jews themselves. Many synagogues were burned to the ground, and fire departments did nothing, or they made sure the fires did not spread to nearby non-Jewish homes. Any insurance claims that were made, the state of Germany confiscated, and the Jews were ordered to actually pay one billion marks for that night.

Hitler had an insane hatred for the Jews. He felt that the whining Jewish population was what prevented the country of Germany to rising to its former glory. Before coming into power, Hitler wrote a book explaining his hatred and why others should hate as well. The book was not very popular at the time but would later be held as the nazi “bible”.

One of the most well known attacks on the Jews was known as Night of Broken Glass. On the November 9, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across Germany. The Germanys tried to make it appeared like the violence was an unplanned attack, set off by the assassination of a German official in Paris at the hands of a Jewish teenager. In two days, over 1,000 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by. http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/kristall.htm