Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938
Seventy years ago tomorrow, the worst pogrom of the Third Reich took place. Alleged at the time to be a “spontaneous” demonstration against the assassination of a Paris embassy official by a teenage Jewish refugee, Kristallnacht was in fact orchestrated by the Nazi govenment.
Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues across German territory—and particularly in Vienna—were targeted for vandalism and destruction. Over 200 synagogues were torched; almost 100 Jews murdered and over 25,000 arrested and deported to concentration camps.
At right is a photo of a synagogue burning on Kristallnacht.
Thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a harbinger of the destruction to come.
The dazzling era of Jewish Vienna, that brought the world the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the writer Arthur Schnitzler and the composer Gusztav Mahler, soon evaporated in the crematoria of the Nazi concentration camps. Of the city’s 185,000 Jews, one third perished in the Holocaust and the remainder emigrated.
Pogroms erupted across the Third Reich that night but the onslaught against Vienna’s Jews was especially ferocious. Annexed by Nazi Germany in March 1938, Hitler’s homeland was his most devoted disciple. Vienna was a “laboratory for anti-Jewish violence”, writes the historian Mark Mazower, in Hitler’s Empire.
Although Jews in the Third Reich had been subject to official persecution and discrimination since 1933, Kristallnacht marked the first time that Jews became targets of widespread, state-sanctioned violence. It was the beginning of the Holocaust.
See also the companion piece by The Times of London religion editor Ruth Gledhill, “The Story behind Kristallnacht”.
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