EDITOR’S NOTE: On Nov. 7, 1938, Ernst vom Rath, a diplomat from Nazi Germany stationed in Paris, was shot by a 17-year-old boy, Polish-German Jew Herschel Grynszpan. While the full details of the shooter’s motive and his possible personal connections to vom Roth were never sorted out, none of that mattered to fascist officials back in Berlin.
After vom Rath died on Nov. 9, his murder became the excuse for the Nazis to launch an all-out assault on German Jews. In an hours-long orgy of violence that became known as Kristallnacht, “Crystal Night,” or “Night of the Broken Glass,” SA stormtroopers, SS men, Hitler Youth, and German civilians destroyed over 1,400 synagogues in Germany, Austria, and the German-occupied area of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and at least 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
The number of dead remains unknown for certain. At least 91 Jews were reported murdered that night, but there were also hundreds of suicides. Uncounted numbers of Jewish women and girls were reportedly raped.
The victims of Kristallnacht had no connection to vom Rath’s shooter and shared no complicity in his action. Of course, for Nazi officials, the facts were irrelevant. Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, declared that “the Jews fired the first shot” in a war on Germany and painted an entire people with the brush of guilt.
Historians came to see Kristallnacht as the prelude to the Nazis’ “Final Solution” and the industrialized murder of six million Jewish people during the Holocaust.
Below, People’s World presents some of the original reporting on Kristallnacht—a name not yet in use in those early days—from the pages of our predecessor, the Daily Worker newspaper. In these articles, you will find some of the outrageous details of events then unfolding in Germany. These are in-the-moment dispatches, and later information revealed the destruction and violence to be even worse than reported in those first hours.
You will also see some of the early responses and calls to action against a fascist government that was using an assassination as cover to go after a vulnerable population, to further silence its enemies, and to cynically use violence and division to distract from its economic mismanagement and schemes for further aggression.
The editors of the Daily Worker, along with others, warned in those days of the bigger war and genocide still to come. They pinpointed the global nature of fascism, pleaded for unity against it, and advocated an early form of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions strategy to be employed against the criminal government in Berlin.
These articles from our archives take on fresh relevance in today’s political landscape and offer lessons on how to respond in similar moments of crisis.
Nazi Mobs Destroy Jewish Temples and Loot Stores
Orgies sweep Germany, Austria: Jews Are Beaten in Streets
Daily Worker – Nov. 11, 1938
BERLIN (Nov. 10)—Mobs of savage Nazis tonight continued a wild orgy of looting and destruction throughout Germany in the worst wave of antisemitic terror since the Nazi regime took power.
In its wake, the Nazi terror left:
– Between 25 and 20 charred and gutted synagogues, fired by torches and dynamite.
– Suicides of Jews everywhere. Fifty persons attempted suicide in Vienna alone. (Many of these reported “suicides” were actually murders by Nazi thugs.)
– Whole blocks strewn with debris in the finest shopping districts of Berlin, Vienna, Munich, and other cities.
– An estimated 10,000 Jewish stores in ruins.
– Badly-battered “non-Aryans” beaten and kicked in the streets by jeering Nazis while police looked on passively.
– An order to all Jews in Munich to leave the country.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels promised the mobs that Nazi Germany’s “further answer to Jewry” will be in the form of laws and decrees. There are indications that Hitler is ready to expel all foreign Jews and confiscate all Jewish property.
The outbreak of the terror was well organized, and Goebbels called it “justifiable.” There was not an undamaged Jewish shop in the center of Berling, along the Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden.
Crowds, including stormtroopers wearing their badges, still surged in the thoroughfares near midnight and continued to break into and wreck Jewish-owned businesses that had escaped during the day because of iron-grilled windows and barred doors.
The looting in some places reached the “grab-bag” stage. In a large arcade connecting Unter den Linden with the Behrenstrasse, men and women clambered through shattered windows into shops, passing out toys and jewelry.
Bonfires made from Jewish stocks and prayer books from synagogues cast flickering light on the roving mobs.
As a Jewish basement shop door caved in under the blows of hatchets, a woman and her small daughter fled, to the jeers of several hundred Nazis. Nearby, a youth, recognized as a Jew, was beaten almost insensible. A cruising police car moved on, uninterested.
Thousands of Jews had already been arrested after the fatal shooting of Ernst von Rath, third secretary of the Nazi Embassy in Paris…which was the pretext for the outrages. Police and Nazi stormtroopers stood calmly by as the mobs carried out their attacks.
…
Two American women walking in a side street off Berlin’s Kurferstendam saw a middle-aged Jew dragged from a building and kicked by a milling crowd that pulled him to his feet after he fell to the ground with each rain of blows.
One German was arrested because, it was charged, he remarked that the anti-Jewish riots were “shameful.” In the Friedrichstrasse, a man was badly beaten when he remarked: “Let’s leave the poor people alone; we have done enough now.” One well-dressed woman was barely able to escape a crowd that pummeled here and spat upon her because she remarked that what was going on was “a shame.”
In Berlin, police forces were reduced rather than strengthened in districts where the destruction was the worst, and patrolmen, knowing in advance of the terrorism that was to come, were instructed not to interfere.
The extent of damage to Jewish property was so widespread it could not be estimated.
The Berlin radio broadcast a running account of the burning of a synagogue…which the announcer said was a “signal.” After describing the blaze, the announcer interviewed a Nazi who said: “This is all too mild; we need sharper measures.”
For entire blocks in the Jewish districts, the streets were littered with destroyed stocks from “non-Aryan” shelves. A canvass of other cities—Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich, Breslau, Wittau, Stuttgart—brough the same story.
It was one of mass arrests, the burning of synagogues, complete destruction of shop windows and stores, violent outbursts against anyone in the crowds who dared to sympathize with the Jews, the manhandling of Jewish men and youths, and general police refusal to interfere.
Throughout the night and day, the crowds, swelling in size and anger, had been allowed to wreak their vengeance unchecked.
…
___
Union Asks FDR to Protest Nazi Terror
Daily Worker – Nov. 12, 1938
WASHINGTON—President Roosevelt today was asked to protest the persecution of Jews in Germany in unmistakable terms so that the “perpetrators of these atrocities will realize that they have placed themselves by their barbarities beyond the pale of civilization.”
The appeal was made by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in a telegram signed by its president, David Dubinsky.
It declared that America “has broken off relations and failed to recognize governments for much lesser crimes against humanity than the systematic and cold-blooded destruction of the already broken down Jewish communities in Germany.”
_____
Pogroms are prelude to more aggressions
Daily Worker – Nov. 12, 1938
VIENNA (Nov. 11)—Between 850 and 1,000 Jews were placed aboard a train which left the West Station at 8 o’clock last tonight, apparently en route to a Nazi concentration camp.
The train was believed to be bound either for Dachau or a special Jewish camp at Buchenwalde, near Weimar.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joesph Goebbels, meanwhile, defended the anti-Jewish riots throughout the Reich and warned democracies abroad not to criticize Nazi Germany.
New laws against the Jews may be announced this weekend, it was reported, which would restrict Jewish business and residences to specified ghettoes in cities and towns.
_____
In the Name of Humanity, Act to Halt Nazi Savagery
By the Editorial Board – Daily Worker – Nov. 12, 1938
What fascism holds in store for all peoples was hideously revealed by the savage antisemitic orgy against the entire Jewish population of Germany on Thursday.
The sadistic ferocity heaped on the innocent and helpless Jewish people is only a preview of what the barbarian fiends of the fascist triple war-alliance [Germany, Italy, and Japan] are plotting against democracies everywhere.
The malignant perversity that inspired the organized pogrom against the German Jews is the same spirit that is responsible for butchering innocent and peaceful men, women, and children in China. It is the same guiding force that bombs the civilian populace of Barcelona and Madrid. It is the same criminal direction which murders Catholic priests and oppresses the great majority of the German people themselves.
Let the world not forget for a moment that the unprecedented, monstrous fascist rampage followed soon after the Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia. It came on the heels of the greater war threat to all democracy.
The Hitler who is waging cowardly war against 500,000 defenseless Jews in Germany is the same Nazi dictator who was embraced and “appeased” by the Chamberlains of Great Britain and the Daladiers of France.
Let not the American people forget for a second that the Herbert Hoovers and other foes of American democracy not many days ago “advised” the people of this country to grasp the blood-stained claws of Hitler in a cooperative gesture.
The very safety of America demands that we never forget that the Nazi beasts who are beating, hounding, and murdering Jews in Germany are the same vicious plotters who are penetrating Latin America, spying against the democratic institutions of this country, and plotting with Japanese militarism to encircle our own country with raging fascist war.
The cry of “revenge” against a people innocent of all save five years of the most awful suffering under the heel of a heartless fascism is the most repellant “excuse” of all.
Because a grief-crazed Jewish youth in his blind fury shot a Nazi official in Paris, the fascist dictatorship, the monster enemy of all humanity, organized. Lynch drive against a whole innocent people
But by these disgusting deeds, what Hitler is really striving to accomplish is to distract the attention of the German people from the terrible war plans of German fascism and from the back-breaking economic misery brought about and yet to be intensified by fascism’s war preparations.
Above the savage howlings of the fascist brutes, the voice of the German people could still be heard against the barbarian brutalities. Vast and uncounted sections of the German people were themselves horrified by the Nazi degeneracies.
Scores, at the risk of their lives, spoke out in protest. But many more stood painfully mute and mortified. “Generally, the crowds were silent, and the majority seemed greatly disturbed by the proceedings,” reported the New York Times correspondent in Berlin.
The arrogant threat of the Nazi dictators to the entire world—that they better stand by without letting out a murmur or making a single move to stop the slaughter of innocent people—must be answered immediately by every decent human being.
The Jews in Germany are today groaning under the brunt of a Nazi savagery that is also aimed at the democratic nations which fascism is pledged to destroy.
In the name of humanity, in the name of all the word “civilization” implies, in the name of morality, right and justice, every American must speak out in indignant protest.
…
Today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under existing laws, can take action against the fascist fiends. He can immediately declare an embargo against all goods from Nazi Germany. For the Nazi monsters have violated the commercial laws of this country as well as every tenet of human decency.
While calling upon the American government to exercise its authority against the perpetrators of these inhuman crimes, the people of this country can immediately act themselves. An airtight boycott should be clamped down on all goods “Made in Germany.”
The American people should not let a single opportunity go by to express their indignation and horror at the fathomless degeneracy of the Hitler regime.
Fascism is a menace to all mankind.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
