page_title: The Holocaust
section_title: Kristallnacht
hierarchical_section_title: The Holocaust / Rise of Nazi Germany / Kristallnacht
caption_attribution_description: "A Berlin-Tieregarten, le 10 novembre 1938, dans la Potsdamer Strasse, les commercants juifs enlèvent les traces du pogrom de la nuit ." Photographie exposée au centre d'information du mémorial aux juifs assassinés d'Europe (Berlin) The Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin) Le champ des 2.711 stèles du mémorial, situé près de la Potsdamer Platz, a une superficie de 10.073 m2. Il a été ouvert au public le 12 mai 2005. Il comprend un centre d'information qui présente la politique d'extermination menée par les nazis de 1933 à 1945 www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/ Deutsch: Das Foto und Beschreibung in Christoph Kreutzmüller; Bjoern Weigel: Kristallnacht?&#160;: Bilder der Novemberpogrome 1938 in Berlin. Berlin&#160;: Kulturprojekte Berlin, 2013 ISBN&#160;978-3-940231-08-6, S. 44–45Potsdamer Straße 26. Links im Bild Martha Jacobowitz, ermordet 9. Mai 1942 im KZ Kulmhof
context_page_description: The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through work in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.
  Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.
context_section_description: On 7 November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German Embassy in Paris, in retaliation for the expulsion of his parents and siblings from Germany. When vom Rath died on 9 November, the government used his death as a pretext to instigate a pogrom against the Jews. The government claimed it was spontaneous, but in fact it had been ordered and planned by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, although with no clear goals, according to David Cesarani. The result, he writes, was "murder, rape, looting, destruction of property, and terror on an unprecedented scale".
  Known as Kristallnacht (or "Night of Broken Glass"), the attacks on 9–10 November 1938 were partly carried out by the SS and SA, but ordinary Germans joined in; in some areas, the violence began before the SS or SA arrived. Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) were looted and attacked, and over 1,000 synagogs damaged or destroyed. Groups of Jews were forced by the crowd to watch their synagogs burn; in Bensheim they were made to dance around it, and in Laupheim to kneel before it. At least 90 Jews died. The damage was estimated at 39 million Reichmarks. Cesarani writes that "[t]he extent of the desolation stunned the population and rocked the regime." It also shocked the rest of the world. The Times of London wrote on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults upon defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday. Either the German authorities were a party to this outbreak or their powers over public order and a hooligan minority are not what they are proudly claimed to be."
  Between 9 and 16 November, 30,000 Jews were sent to the Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Many were released within weeks; by early 1939, 2,000 remained in the camps. German Jewry was held collectively responsible for restitution of the damage; they also had to pay an "atonement tax" of over a billion Reichmarks. Insurance payments for damage to their property were confiscated by the government. A decree on 12 November 1938 barred Jews from most remaining occupations. Kristallnacht marked the end of any sort of public Jewish activity and culture, and Jews stepped up their efforts to leave the country.
caption: Potsdamer Straße 26, Berlin, the day after Kristallnacht, November 1938
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