This Day in Germany History (Nazi Thuggery Unleashed in “Kristallnacht”)

November 9, 1938—Egged on by the government of Adolf Hitler, mobs rampaged throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland for two nights in shocking anti-Semitic fury. No sphere of public or private life was safe or sacred—the street, the home, the business, the synagogue.

The event came to be nicknamed Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass”—taking its cue image from the broken windows of Jewish storefronts. One’s tendency at first is to think of this an old-fashioned pogrom, except that now we know that it was a Nazi experiment in mob psychosis whose “success” (if you want to use the term ironically) warmed the heart of Nazi progaganda chief Dr. Josef Goebbels.

The damage looked like this when all was said and done:

* At least 96 Jews killed
* Hundreds more wounded
* Hundreds of synagogues put to the torch
* Almost 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed
* Approximately 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps

Let’s just mention briefly here two other forms of damage: to the Nazis’ crumbling international image and to ordinary Germans’ idea of what their regime was truly about.

Only about a month after the Munich treaty, no European government could be in any doubt that they had concluded peace with a thugocracy. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt had accepted it as an article of faith from the beginning of his administration that Hitler was mad, but the events of these nights shocked him in a way he never expected, leading him to recall the American ambassador to Germany. "I myself can scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization," he admitted at a press conference.

My post yesterday on Martha Gellhorn mentioned her dispatch on Dachau. Another of her articles, collected in Reporting World War II, poured scorn on the claim already being peddled by the average German that he or she didn’t have a clue what its government was doing. But even before the war, Kristallnacht was an unmistakable warning. As historian Ian Kershaw has noted: "The German public was confronted directly on a nationwide scale with the full savagery of the attack on the Jews."

One thing I’ve been much remiss in doing is highlighting the work of other bloggers with interesting posts about events that I’m covering for the day, too. This weekend—with anniversaries of two events that represented important signposts to the rise of the Nazi menace—provides an excellent opportunity to rectify this situation.

Yesterday was the 85th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s “Beer Hall “Putsch” in Munich—something that, to most observers at the time, seemed almost like a comic opera, but which looks in retrospect only slightly premature in signaling Hitler’s deeply anti-democratic tendencies. This Beer Hall Putsch site offers a chilling photographic study of a site that should send chills up and down the spine of any German alive today.

For Kristallnacht, I direct your attention to “Kristallnacht: Murder by Euphemism,” by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, on the “Yonkers Tribune” blog. For shorthand purposes, I referred to this sickening event by its traditional name. But Rabbi Blech details how continued acceptance of this name accomplishes what the Nazis intended: the short-pedaling of mass murder. We need to think of another name that will convey the magnitude of this event's horror.