The Night the World Changed Forever - Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass

The Beginning of the End

Beginning on the night of November ninthand through the tenth of 1938, the lives of Jews all over Europe were changed forever. Shards of glass flew in the air as a fury of devastation and destruction shattered the windows of Jewish shops, Synagogues, schools, including any business and home owned or occupied by Jews were targeted. The reason given for the beginning of the largest single genocide in world history was the assassination of German Diplomat Ernst Vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan. Grynszpan, being a German-born Polish Jew became a red herring for the mayhem that ensued in those two nights. Not only were personal and professional possessions occupied and destroyed, but many Jewish persons were slaughtered in the streets and up to thirty thousand were rounded up for the transportation to newly established concentration and labor camps in Germany and Poland.

These two nights set the tone for the next five years of legal Anti-Semitism and segregation, relocation of Jews and the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, invalids, homosexuals, political criminals, etc. The Holocaust had officially begun, although pograms for the elimination of such undesirables were well on their way.

While Anti-Semitism in Europe was wide spread before Kristallchnight, and had been for centuries; it was the building up of hatred against the Jews in the 1930's after the hardships of the German depression and large land loss from World War I that brought about the launch of the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" which removed one by one the duties, services and rights of German Jews in German society. The largest segregation pogrom began removing German Jewish citizens from every day life: shops, stores, bakeries, government agencies and occupations, public areas of congregation, etc were no longer to be occupied by Jewish residents and their descendants.