To night is 83 years ago the Jewish people were attacked at night which would known as “Kristallnacht”. This was carried out by Nazi Germans. 30 000 Jewish men were arrested and over 7000 proprieties destroyed. Estimates put the deaths in the hundreds. This was a prelude to the Holocaust.

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  3. if nazis were so bad 83 years ago why did you not punish them after ww2? stalin did, so could you. if nazis were so bad why do you, and in this case sadly turkey too, fund them in ukraine? if ethnic cleansing is so terrible why fund it when it is done against palestinians?

    people lament what had happened before they were born while enabling same now will never be not funny.

  4. It’s a lot easier to fund a war campaign if you steal 10% of the population’s wealth including the shoes on their feet. Awful stuff.

  5. I can only encourage people to read on these events. It is highly interesting, as it is not just a terrible tragedy, but also an incredibly complicated event with many other aspects.

    Some highlights:

    The excuse used for the event was the death after two days of agony of an official from the German embassy in Paris. He had been shot in the abdomen by a jewish youth, family of polish jews who had been expelled just a few weeks before from Germany. On one hand there seems to be a political motivation, but some historians claim that there might be other motives, as the victim and the shooter knew each other from a gay night club. The official that died was also ironically under investigation by the GeStaPo for being opposed to the nazis for their anti-semitic views.

    No terms used to describe the event are ideal, as none manages to capture the scope or to designate the events correctly in its entirety. There was and is a big and interesting discussion around any term referring to it.

    The nazis wanted to depict the whole thing as a sudden outburst of the German population against jews (= a pogrom, like many had happened before in the 19th and early 20th century). The event was planned, though not necessarily meticulously or well, but absolutely guided (ie ordered), but it was meant to look as spontaneous. There were mass arrests, murders and rapes, and the damage against property was not exclusively against businesses, but also against apartments, cemeteries and synagogues, with a lot of texts of great value being burned. There was as much looting as there was destructin. To this end police was selectively ordered to enforce law or to not enforce it. Firemen were standing by next to targeted buildings to put down fire in case it spread, but not acting against the intended arson.

    It was also not on one night alone, but carried out on several days (this is why a post WW2 name is “November pogroms”).

    As a propagandistic act, it worked as intented in foreign media (to portray the german people, not just its government as anti-semitic), but was a propaganda disaster in Germany: the German population (even nazi party members) did not take well to it: many considering the “random” violence as unorderly and senseless, temporarily setting the (intended) view of violence against jews as something positive back. One could also consider it as a blunder internationally; although the intended effects of portraying the germans as inherently antisemitic (and therefore creating a legitimation for anti-semitic regulations) was achieved, it also portrayed Germany and the nazi regime as violent towards its minorities. Something which can ultimately best be described as evil. It was a defining moment for the image of Nazi Germany abroad, and it certainly did not reflect well. Though signed off by him, Hitler did not mention it in public, at least not initially, as he did not wish to be seen as connected to the events. The nazis even tried to play it down in the press. It is pretty clear the nazis themselves were not happy with how it played out.

    It definitely was a point of no return in the worsening of the conditions of the jews living in Germany and a step towards the holocaust, a prelude, if not one of the inaugurational act of the holocaust. Although the systematic murder of jews does not begin until 1941, it was the first big act of systematic violence against jews. Many jews were arrested on these nights and although concentration camps existed already (mostly for political dissidents), it was now that the jews were being put into these concentration camps en masse. It is a turning point for the situation for jews in Germant in so far that before the Kristallnacht, jews were being targeted economically and politically. The Kristallnacht was the beginning of violence trageted against jews. Göring foreshadowed the “final solution” by actually stating that if Germany were to be involved in a war, it would have to give a solution to the “jewish problem” just a day after the the first night of the events. Nonetheless, historians still consider it part of a policiy intended to make jews leave Germany rather than to kill them.

  6. Just as an information:

    It’s usually not called Reichskristallnacht anymore. Reichsprogromnacht is the commonly used term.

    Edit: This regards Germany. And maybe commonly should have been preferred, as Reichskristallnacht is seen as glamorising the atrocityY

  8. And on the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms, Austrian government inaugurated The Shoah Name Wall Memorial in Vienna with 64,440 names of Holocaust victims. In such a way, Austria tries to send a visible sign of its responsibility for the murder of about 65,000 Austrian Jews, the vast majority of the country’s Jewish population in 1938.

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