Definition of Night of Broken Glass

The antisemitism (I hate Jews) is not an invention of the Nazis, which has existed for millennia and has been demonstrated more or less crudely throughout history.

Among the episodes of terror against the Jews (and that we could qualify as one more “pogrom” in the long list of these practices against said community) most significant perpetrated by the Nazis before the beginning of the war, is the so-called "Night of the Broken Glass" or, in German, Kristallnacht.

The Night of Broken Glass consisted of a series of acts of vandalism perpetrated by the Nazis against Jewish people and their property, on the night of November 9-10, 1938.

These acts consisted of both lynchings and destruction and theft of citizens' property. considered by Nazi racial laws as Jews (let's not forget that, after all, these citizens were Germans) perpetrated in appearance supporters of the regime spontaneously, but after which the hand of the NSDAP and the government of the Reich as organizers.

In all these events, the forces of safety of the state (both policeman as army and firefighters) remained at the margin, giving way to the more or less organized mob that committed the vandalism.

The excuse for the pogrom was the murder, two days earlier, of a German diplomat in Paris at the hands of a young Jew.

The family of the latter had been dispossessed of his property and expelled from Germany, having to suffer for weeks an ordeal in the border German-Polish, since the authorities of the latter country they did not admit all the refugees.

Faced with the situation, desperate, the young Herschel Grynszpan appeared on November 7, 1938 at the German embassy in Paris and fired several shots at one of his officials, which he died.

The Reich government, hostile to the Jewish community, took advantage of this fact to further fan the flame of anti-Semitism, causing it to lead to this violent action.

Synagogues were burned across the country (Germany and Austria, which had also been incorporated into the Reich), cemeteries were destroyed, looted shops, private homes were raided and an uncertain number of people were murdered, a figure that historians put around a hundred victims.

For added humiliation, after the Kristallnacht the German government blamed the Jews for what happened, carrying out numerous arrests and forcing the Jewish community to bear the costs of reparation.

Internationally, the news of the events in the Reich was met with bitter criticism in most parts of the world, prompting several countries to withdraw their ambassadors but, at the same time, practice, the international community did little or nothing to improve the conditions of the Jews under the Nazi yoke, nor did it increase the number of emigrants from Germany and the territories it controlled in other parts of the world.

Photos: Fotolia - Mulder / Zdenek