Kristallnacht (1938): The Night of Broken Glass in Nazi Germany

Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”, was a wave of violent attacks on Jews organised by the Nazi regime across Germany, annexed Austria and the newly occupied Sudetenland on 9–10 November 1938. Synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish shops and homes were wrecked, at least 91 people were killed and about 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. It marked the moment when Nazi persecution turned from discriminatory laws into open, nationwide violence, and is widely seen as a turning point on the road to the Holocaust.

Background: five years of persecution

When Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933 (see Hitler becomes chancellor), about 500,000 Jews lived in Germany, less than one per cent of the population. The new regime moved against them quickly. A national boycott of Jewish businesses was staged on 1 April 1933, and laws soon pushed Jews out of the civil service, the professions and cultural life.

The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped Jews of full citizenship and banned marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. Jewish-owned businesses were increasingly forced into sale at low prices, a process the Nazis called “Aryanisation”.

The year 1938 brought a sharp escalation. After Germany annexed Austria in March, Viennese Jews were publicly humiliated, beaten and robbed. In July the Évian Conference, called to discuss Jewish refugees, ended with most participating countries unwilling to accept many more. In April Jews in Germany were required to register their assets, and an August decree ordered them to add the “Jewish” first names Israel or Sara.

The trigger: the Polish expulsion and a shooting in Paris

In late October 1938 the German government expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship, many of whom had lived in Germany for decades. Between about 12,000 and 17,000 people were rounded up on 27–28 October and taken to the Polish border. Poland at first refused to admit many of them, and thousands were stranded in grim conditions near the town of Zbąszyń.

Among the deportees were the parents and siblings of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris. On 7 November 1938, after receiving a postcard from his family, Grynszpan went to the German embassy in Paris and shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath died of his wounds on the afternoon of 9 November. Nazi propaganda immediately portrayed the shooting as an attack by “world Jewry” on Germany, and scattered anti-Jewish riots broke out in parts of Hesse even before his death. The regime now had the pretext it needed for a far larger action.

What happened on 9–10 November

The news reached Nazi leaders gathered in Munich to commemorate the anniversary of Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. After a conversation with Hitler, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gave an inflammatory speech to party leaders that evening. He suggested that the party should not organise “demonstrations” itself but should not hinder them if they arose. His audience understood this as an instruction to act.

Orders went out by telephone from Munich to regional party offices and SA units. In the early hours of 10 November, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police, sent a telegram to police and SD offices. It instructed them not to interfere with the destruction of Jewish property, to protect non-Jewish property and lives, to secure synagogue archives, and to arrest as many Jews, especially wealthy ones, as the jails could hold.

Across the country, SA stormtroopers, SS men, Hitler Youth members and party officials, often in civilian clothes, set fire to synagogues and broke into Jewish shops and homes. Fire brigades were told to let synagogues burn and to act only if neighbouring buildings were in danger. Torah scrolls and prayer books were thrown into the streets and burned. Jewish cemeteries, schools and hospitals were also attacked.

In many towns, local people joined in looting or watched; others were shocked by the destruction, though few protested openly. Violence continued into the day of 10 November and in some places for several days.

In Vienna, where anti-Jewish violence had already been severe since March, almost all of the city’s synagogues and prayer houses were destroyed or badly damaged. In Berlin, the large synagogue on Fasanenstrasse was gutted by fire, while a police officer, Wilhelm Krützfeld, is credited with helping to save the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse from the flames.

Victims and damage

The Nazi authorities reported that 91 Jews had been killed. The true death toll was higher. Hundreds more died by suicide or as a result of mistreatment in the camps in the weeks that followed, and historians commonly give total estimates in the hundreds, with some suggesting more than 1,000.

About 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to the Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. There they were beaten, drilled and humiliated. Most were released over the following weeks and months, usually after their families had arranged for them to emigrate or to hand over property.

Key people

• Joseph Goebbels – Propaganda Minister, whose speech in Munich launched the pogrom.
• Adolf Hitler – approved the action in discussion with Goebbels, while keeping a public distance from it.
• Reinhard Heydrich – head of the Security Police and SD, who issued instructions to the police and reported the damage.
• Hermann Göring – chaired the meeting of 12 November that decided the economic measures against Jews.
• Herschel Grynszpan – the young assassin of Ernst vom Rath; he was later handed over to Germany and his fate after about 1942 is unknown.

The aftermath: punishing the victims

On 12 November 1938 Hermann Göring chaired a meeting of senior officials at the Air Ministry in Berlin. The government blamed the Jews for the damage. German Jews were ordered to pay a collective fine of 1 billion Reichsmarks, and insurance payments due to Jewish owners were confiscated by the state. Jews also had to pay to repair their own property.

A decree issued the same day excluded Jews from almost all economic activity from 1 January 1939. In the following weeks Jewish children were expelled from German schools, and Jews were barred from cinemas, theatres, concerts and many public places. Driving licences were withdrawn and curfews imposed.

The pogrom triggered a desperate rush to emigrate. Many countries still restricted entry, but the number of Jews leaving Germany and Austria rose sharply in 1938–39. By the outbreak of war in September 1939, more than half of Germany’s 1933 Jewish population had left.

International reaction

Kristallnacht was widely reported abroad and caused outrage in Western public opinion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled the American ambassador from Berlin for consultations and publicly condemned the violence. Neither the United States nor Britain, however, greatly relaxed its immigration limits.

Britain did agree to admit unaccompanied Jewish children. The first of these Kindertransport trains and boats arrived in early December 1938, and by September 1939 about 10,000 children, most of them from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, had reached Britain. Most never saw their parents again.

Myths and facts

Myth: Kristallnacht was a spontaneous popular uprising. The regime claimed that ordinary Germans had acted out of anger at vom Rath’s murder. Contemporary documents show it was directed by the party and the police.

Myth: Only property was attacked. Although the name stresses broken glass, Jews were beaten, killed and imprisoned in large numbers.

Myth: Kristallnacht was the start of the Holocaust. It was a major escalation, but systematic mass murder began only after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and was coordinated at meetings such as the Wannsee Conference of 1942.

Legacy

The date 9 November is a day of remembrance in Germany, where the event is now usually called the November pogrom. Memorials stand on the sites of many destroyed synagogues, and some rebuilt synagogues have become symbols of Jewish life returning to Germany after the war.

Historians see Kristallnacht as the point at which the Nazi state showed that it would use open terror against Jews and that the German public would largely accept it. Of the Jews who remained in Germany and Austria, most were later deported and murdered in the Holocaust, including at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Timeline

• 1935, 15 September: The Nuremberg Laws are announced.
• 1938, 12–13 March: Germany annexes Austria; anti-Jewish violence follows in Vienna.
• 1938, 27–28 October: Germany expels thousands of Polish Jews to the Polish border.
• 1938, 7 November: Herschel Grynszpan shoots Ernst vom Rath in Paris.
• 1938, 9 November: Vom Rath dies; Goebbels incites party leaders in Munich and the pogrom begins.
• 1938, 10 November: Heydrich’s instructions go out; synagogues burn and about 30,000 men are arrested.
• 1938, 12 November: Göring’s meeting imposes a 1 billion Reichsmark fine and excludes Jews from economic life.
• 1938, 2 December: The first Kindertransport arrives in Britain.

Why it matters

Kristallnacht exposed the violence at the heart of Nazi antisemitism and ended any hope among German Jews that persecution would stay within legal limits. It is remembered as a warning of how quickly state-organised hatred can turn into mass violence when officials direct it and bystanders stay silent.