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November 9, 1938
Kristallnacht, Germany

On the night of November 9, 1938, violent anti-Jewish dem­onstrations broke out across Ger­many, Austria, and the Sude­ten­land region of Czech­oslo­vakia. Nazi offi­cials depicted the riots as iusti­fied reac­tions to the assas­sination of German foreign official Ernst vom Rath, who had been shot two days earlier by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year old Polish Jew distraught over the deportation of his family from Germany.

Over the next 48 hours, violent mobs, spurred by antisemitic exhortations from Nazi offi­cials, destroyed hundreds of synagogues, burning or desecrating Jewish religious artifacts along the way. Acting on orders from Gestapo head­quarters, police officers and firefighters did nothing to prevent the destruction. All told, approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were plundered, and 91 Jews were murdered. An additional 30.000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Nazi officials immediately claimed that the Jews themselves were to blame for the riots, and a fine of one billion reichsmarks (about $400 million at 1938 rates) was imposed on the German Jewish community.

The Nazis came to call the event Kris­tall­nacht ("Crystal Night," or, "The Night of Broken Glass"), refer­ring to the thou­sands of shat­tered win­dows that littered the streets after­wards, but the euphe­mism does not con­vey the full brutality of the event Kris­tall­nacht was a turning point in the history of the Third Reich marking the shift from antisemitic rhetoric and legislation to the violent, aggressive anti-Jewish measures that would culminate with the Holocaust.