What was kristallnacht the night of broken glass

This photograph shows a Jewish storefront that was vandalised during Kristallnacht. The name refers to the broken glass of Jewish stores and synagogues that were vandalised and burned during that night. Enrich your lessons about the Night of Broken Glass and other antisemitic pogroms by using survivor testimony. Your class can also study a photograph taken after Kristallnacht. Police forces did not protect Jews or their property.

Fire brigades did not put out fires in synagogues. Hundreds of Jews died during Kristallnacht and its aftermath. The next morning, the Nazi regime ordered the police to arrest about 30, German Jewish men. These men had not committed any crime. The police arrested them simply for being Jewish. They were sent to such concentration camps as Dachau and Buchenwald.

The arrests shocked and terrified Jewish families and communities. The Nazi authorities released many of these men if families could prove they had plans to leave Germany. Other men died in these camps.

Afterwards, many Jews concluded that there was no future for them in Nazi Germany. Grynszpan is a year-old Polish-German Jew living in Paris. Vom Rath is a minor German diplomat posted to the German embassy in Paris. Eyewitness of the events sent detailed report to JDC headquarters about the horrific event. On the evening of November 9, , a series of coordinated attacks were carried out against Jews in Nazi Germany, Austria and areas of German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

READ: Nov. While the Fuhrer went to his Munich apartment, the propaganda minister told the Nazi notables and old fighters present that there had already been acts of revenge on November 8 in Kurhessen and Magdeburg against State Enemy No. Synagogues and shops belonging to Jews had, he said, been destroyed. These intimations were immediately passed on by telephone to the headquarters of the various districts and were followed by telegrams from the Gestapo.

Once Goebbels had given the Nazi district leaders the impetus to unleash a massive pogrom, the further initiative lay in their hands. The execution of the pogrom, under direction of the highest Nazi party leaders, was entrusted to police and state agencies, to units of the SS, and in part to SA members.

By means of the latest communications technology — telephone, teleprinters, police transmitters, and radio — within a few hours the pogrom had reached almost every part of the Reich without meeting any resistance. During the night of November , Jewish shops, dwellings, schools, and above all synagogues and other religious establishments symbolic of Judaism were set alight. Tens of thousands of Jews were terrorized in their homes, sometimes beaten to death, and in a few cases raped.

In Cologne, a town with a rich Jewish tradition dating from the first century CE, four synagogues were desecrated and torched, shops were destroyed and looted, and male Jews were arrested and thrown into concentration camps. Brutal events were recorded in the hitherto peaceful townships of the Upper Palatinate, Lower Franconia, Swabia, and others.