The Old Synagogue in Aachen, Germany, after Kristallnacht (public domain)

"SS men armed with batons and whips attacked us. Amid wild shouts and curses, they beat us mercilessly, on the back, on the legs, on the head and face."

:We no longer believed that anyone could exist here who would want to provide us with a little joy. For a few moments we heard, in the hell of the concentration camp, the VOICE OF HUMANITY!”

Karl Rosenthal, survivor, rabbi in Berlin’s Reform community

 

"In the street alone where my wife’s friend’s husband was killed, three other men had been beaten to death. Everywhere, we heard of people who had committed suicide in despair."

"If I tried to describe the consequences of that night for my immediate circle of acquaintances, I would have to write a whole book about them."

Jewish attorney Rudolf Bing, Krystallnacht survivor 

Jews deported from Baden Baden after Kristallnacht in Germany, 1938 (public domain)

"Our non-Jewish neighbors] were all ashamed and deeply depressed, and one got the impression that they had a guilty conscience and feared the power of a higher justice, as certain individuals quite openly said. These people saved, as much as that was possible, the honor of the German people."

"By the end of 1938, there were few Jews left in Vienna who had not themselves been in a concentration camp or who had one or more relatives or friends who had been in one. [Rodeck called Kristallnacht the “illegal” pogrom and its aftermath the “legal” pogrom].

Vienna-born Jew Fritz Rodeck

November 9th and 10th, mark the grim 83rd anniversary of the orchestrated violent assault on Germany's Jewish community, a state-sanctioned and -inspired pogrom meant to spell out for Jews, if they hadn't entirely yet understood what the Third Reich thought of Jews in their midst, including Jewish veterans who fought with distinction on Germany's behalf during World War One, and including German Jews who distinguished themselves and Germany in the arts and sciences; German Jews proud of their ancestry and their nationality.

The propaganda campaign to dehumanize Europe's Jews, beginning with those in Germany, fed on latent anti-Semitism within the general population, portraying Jews stereotypically as money-grubbers, hangers-on, the dregs of society, their presence an assault on human dignity, their conspiratorial designs targeting racial conquest in superiority of culture, religion and a covert universal plot to control the news, banking, politics. A force to be denied, denigrated, put in their place. And their place was not within civilized society.

Jewish children, compulsory yellow badge

They were to be designated enemies of humanity who elevated themselves as paragons of virtue when they were in actuality carriers of filth and disease. All these claims, bolstered with Jewish caricatures of sinister-looking bearded rabbis rubbing their hands in glee at plans to destabilize society and gain control of all that makes a society prosperous and cultured were to be countered by denying Jews access to education, business, the professionals. Making outcasts of them, distinguishing themselves by the wearing of a yellow star, screaming "Jude!", beware.

They were berated and beaten on the streets; the elderly and the young and those between, passersby taking no notice. Humiliation haunted them. They lived in disbelief that their country would turn against them, many of whom thought of themselves as German primarily, Jewish secondarily. Established in Germany for a thousand years. And it was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, that delivered the message and the social/political strictures to follow.

German mobs drunk on anti-Semitism, backed by Nazi stormtroopers and police marched through the streets where Jews lived, where their shops were located, to shout threats, to sing national and racist songs, to ransack Jewish institutions, burn down synagogues, smash shop windows, maraudng, terrorizing, screaming taunts and insults at Jewish families cowering in their tenements, hiding their children, hoping the nightmare would pass. 

Jewish men were rounded up not to be seen again, taken to slave labour camps, dying of privation, overwork, starvation, disease, slaughter. Over 30,000 Jews were imprisoned during Kristallnacht,, hundreds killed during the storming of the streets. Heralding the much larger architecture of the finely tuned plan to extinguish the lives of men, women and children of Jewish heritage throughout Europe in the establishment of death camps in occupied Europe, the Holocaust years began to unfold.

Prisoners at the German concentration camp Buchenwald, where thousands of Jews were incarcerated after Kristallnacht in 1938 (public domain)

 

There was no reaction, after all, by the world community to Kristallnacht and all it so obviously portended, a year before war was declared. The Jews were left to cope, to make their plans or abandon them, to decide to remain in the hopes that this would be just a passing nightmare and the world would return to the sanity they were accustomed to, with underlying vestiges of anti-Semitism they had always coped with, and not a permanent stain on humanity targeting Jews for 'special treatment'.

Ultimately it was not a passing sentiment that would fade and bring relief to Europe's Jews, It was a fatal determination to murder them, every last one, and the plan succeeded to an astonishing degree, even when the world received first-hand smuggled information of what was unfolding and there was no great rescue, no universal condemnation, not from non-Jews globally, not from the great institutions of the world's religious powers, not from governments. Nowhere was there a constructive effort to rescue Europe's Jews.

Instead, desperate Jewish refugees seeking haven, sailing from Germany in the St.Louis were turned away at every port they visited in the free world. Ships sailing to Palestine under the British Mandate were turned away, ordered to return from whence they came. But that was then. Now, it is known that the cost in human life in the Jewish component of humanity was a dear six million lives. And now? Now that the world has had time to digest the meaning of genocide?

A resurgence in blatant anti-Semitism where once it was an undercurrent. Where once it was obligatory in polite society to submerge that Jew-hatred, the current culture accepts that free speech ennobles all statements and opinions and values, enabling the rabid Jew-haters to state openly and directly that the Holocaust was a manipulated event that never occurred, that Jews are still engaged in sinister plots to destabilize the world order in their inexorable march to destiny and control of the world.

How we have progressed as a human society... Is it mere sanctimony that the nations of the world that once denied haven to Jews facing obliteration now mount memorials to the Holocaust?

After the Kristallnacht pogrom in Linz, Austria, Jewish women are made to wear signs saying, 'I am not part of the national community,' while being humiliated on stage in public (public domain)