HOLOCAUST survivors and Jews are remembering the anniversary of Kristallnacht when some 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were targeted in two horrific nights of violence.
The hate-fuelled attacks signalled the beginning of Adolf Hitler‘s so-called “Final Solution” to what he infamously referred to as the “Jewish problem”.
What is Kristallnacht?
On November 9 to November 10, 1938, Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalised Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews.
The year 2018 marks the 80th anniversary since Kristallnacht.
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, also called the Night of Broken Glass, after all the windows were smashed, some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.
German Jews had been subjected to repressive policies since 1933, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
However, prior to Kristallnacht, these Nazi policies had been primarily non-violent.
After Kristallnacht, conditions for German Jews grew increasingly worse.
During World War II, Hitler and the Nazis implemented their so-called Final Solution to what they referred to as the ‘Jewish problem’, and carried out the systematic murder of some six million European Jews in what came to be known as the Holocaust.
What sparked the shocking violence?
Days earlier, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew who had been living in France, learned the Nazis had exiled his parents to Poland from Hanover, Germany.
In retaliation, the agitated teenager shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris.
Rath died two days later from his wounds, and Hitler attended his funeral.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, immediately seized on the assassination to rile Hitler’s supporters into an anti-Semitic frenzy.
Kristallnacht was the result of that rage.
Prior to that, German Jews had become more isolated and subject to persecution after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933.
Among other things, Hitler’s Nazi Party, which espoused extreme German nationalism and anti-Semitism, commanded all Jewish businesses be boycotted and all Jews be dismissed from civil service posts.
In May 1933, the writings of Jewish and other “un-German” authors were burned in a communal ceremony at Berlin’s Opera House.
Within two years, German businesses were publicly announcing that they no longer serviced Jews.
The Nuremberg Laws, passed in September 1935, decreed that only Aryans could be full German citizens.
Furthermore, it became illegal for Aryans and Jews to marry or have extramarital intercourse.
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How is Kristallnacht remembered now?
Now Jewish people mark the dark days of Kristallnacht with sombre remembrance services.
They are determined to make sure the world never forgets the horrific persecution they and their ancestors suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
In 2018, on the 80th anniversary, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a speech at a Berlin synagogue that “Germany has a moral duty to fight rising anti-Semitism”.
In London, worshippers from synagogues joined Christians for a service of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey.