Jewish Literacy Revised Ed by Joseph Telushkin

Author:Joseph Telushkin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2010-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

SOURCE AND FUTHER READING: Hedva Ben-Israel, “Munich Conference,” in Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3, pp. 1081–1086.

188

KRISTALLNACHT (NOVEMBER 9–10, 1938)

DURING HITLER’S FIRST FIVE YEARS IN POWER, THE NAZIS DID A great deal to make the lives of Jews miserable. They revoked their citizenship, ejected Jewish students from German schools, boycotted Jewish stores, and banned Jews from a large number of professions. On occasion, individual Jews were sent to *concentration camps; the Nazis, however, had not yet created death camps and, remarkably enough, people were sometimes released from concentration camps and allowed to go home.

On the night of November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis’ discriminatory policy toward the Jews changed to wholesale violence as they carried out the largest *pogrom in the history of the world. The official pretext for this action was the killing in Paris of a low-level Nazi diplomat by a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy, Herschel Grynspan. The boy’s Polish-born parents had been deported several weeks earlier from Germany back to Poland. The Poles, however, refused to accept Grynspan’s parents, along with seventeen thousand other Polish-born Jews deported by the Nazis. These unfortunate Jewish refugees were left to rot, penniless, in the no-man’s-land separating Germany and Poland. Cut off from contact with his parents, Grynspan shot the German official in retaliation. When the man died, the Nazis decided to punish all of German Jewry for Grynspan’s deed.

The pogrom that ensued became known as Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass. On that night, the glass windows in almost every German synagogue, and in most Jewish-owned businesses, were shattered. Shattered, too, were the lives of almost all German Jews. Ninety-one Jews were murdered during Kristallnacht; thirty thousand more were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them died.

World leaders denounced the Nazi pogrom, and American Jewry reacted by forming the *United Jewish Appeal, which soon became the greatest fund-raising organization in Jewish history. The Nazis scoffed at the protests. They announced that Kristallnacht had been carried out in honor of the birthday of Martin *Luther, the sixteenth-century antisemitic religious reformer whom Hitler greatly admired. The Nazis also announced the imposition of a one-billion-mark fine against the Jews; they would be forced to pay for the damage the Germans had inflicted on their synagogues and property.

German Jewry now knew that their situation was hopeless. While large numbers of them had left Germany during the first five years of Nazi rule, half of the community of 600,000 had remained, hoping that Nazi anti-semitism would moderate. After Kristallnacht, they recognized that such thinking was illusory; between that event and the outbreak of World War II, less than ten months later, virtually every Jew in Germany tried to emigrate. Few countries, however, were willing to accept them. The British imposed a *White Paper in Palestine to ensure that it not become a haven for Jews fleeing Hitler. Some of the Jews who tried to emigrate to the United States succeeded; most did not. In Canada a high government official was asked how many Jewish immigrants the country could accommodate.

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