KRISTALLNACHT
SEVENTY YEARS AFTER KRISTALLNACHT
THE WORLD REMAINS SILENT
Baruch Cohen
In loving memory of Malca z”l
“Comrades, we cannot allow this attack by international Jewry to go unchallenged!” This was said by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, on November 9, 1938, referring to the shooting of Ernst von Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat in
Paris
, by Herschel Grynszpan, a young German Jew.
November 9, 1938 was a defining moment for the Nazi regime, but in fact it was one day earlier in
Munich
that Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, was ordered. According to renowned historian Martin Gilbert, “at November 8, 1938, the first collective punitive measures were announced… All Jewish newspapers and magazines must cease publication forthwith. This ban cut off the Jews from their most accessible contact with their leadership.”
The official German view, that Kristallnacht represented a spontaneous response of angry Germans to a Jewish crime, was so fanciful that nobody believed it. Local authorities across the country had compiled lists of Jewish-owned stores months before, and the names and addresses of Jewish men were kept on record. If ever there was a thoroughly organized crime, it was Kristallnacht.
At one minute to midnight on November 9, 1938, the
Munich
city fire department received its first call. Demonstrators had smashed the display window of a textile business in the Augustenstrauss and set fire to the display. The fire department’s records note the cause of fire as “anti-Jewish demonstration.” Three minutes later came the first major alarm: the city’s first synagogue was ablaze. The pogrom had begun.
Businesses and residences of Jews may be destroyed. The police have been directed to supervise the execution of this order…. Immediately upon receipt of this telegram, the police are to seize all archives from all synagogues and offices of Jewish community organizations. The archives are to be handed over to the SD security service.—SS Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, who would later chair the 1943 Wannsee Conference at which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question would be decided, in Kristallnacht: The Unleashing of the Holocaust by Anthony Read and David Fisher (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1989).
A Jewish businessman in
Munich
, J. Littner, wrote in his diary:
The circle of non-Jewish friends will be smaller day by day, we shall soon be living in an invisible ghetto—the mood for November 9 grows worse, massive penalties. We Jews now fear November 9, the great feast of the Nazi party. On the evening of the 9th, the radio broadcast called for the murdering of Jews…—Kristallnacht: The Unleashing of the Holocaust.
For the German people, Kristallnacht—in which at least 90 Jews were killed, and 1,000 synagogues destroyed—proved that the Nazi regime was willing and able to use any kind of terror necessary to carry out its outrageous racial policy. As Gilbert explains, “[t]he Jewish community in
dated back 1000 years. Despite their enthusiastic patriotism, the Nazi regime portrayed them as disloyal parasites on the pure German national body.”
The story of the crime of Kristallnacht has since been told year after year. November 9, 1938 marked a tragic turning point for European Jewry. After that day, there was no safe place for Jews in
Europe
.
When I was 21, I survived the
Bucharest
Kristallnacht of January 21-23, 1941, an authentic copy of November 1938. In
Bucharest
alone 25 synagogues were vandalized, most razed to the ground. One hundred and thirty Jews were murdered, beaten, tortured or maimed. Jewish corpses were hung in the
Bucharest
slaughterhouse with tags reading “kosher meat.” I went there in search of my father.
The Romanian thugs had exceeded their German counterparts. And the world remained silent! In 1938, Joseph Goebbels was not stopped. The world was silent. Today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is free to call for the destruction of the State of Israel, and the world is silent!
November 9, 1938 and January 21-23, 1941 are a few of history’s darkest moments. The calamity that occurred on those days was a warning sign pointing to the Holocaust. The world refused to see it. We must remember Kristallnacht! The appalling resurgence of global antisemitism, the unopposed call—within the walls of the United Nations—to wipe out the State of Israel, must raise the entire world’s consciousness. History is repeating itself. The world must not remain silent again.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s unambiguous demand for the destruction of the State of Israel must not be ignored. If “Never Again” is to have any meaning, Ahmadinejad’s genocidal ambitions must be stopped. Sadly, the United Nations is silent.
Kristallnacht was the warning that should have been heeded by the civilized world. Nonetheless, the world remained silent!
I call upon all decent persons, all peace-loving nations, to raise their voices, to stand up strongly against the perilous threat of a new Kristallnacht, to oppose, now, Iranian, Hezbollah and Hamas-style terrorism.
It is our solemn and urgent duty to remind the world that a new Kristallnacht against the Jewish people must be taken off the agenda for ever and ever.
The world must NOT be silent!
DO NOT FORGET! ZACHOR!
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.
A version of this article appeared in the Canadian Jewish News, November 6, 2008.)
Kristallnacht Remembered
Abraham Foxman
Jerusalem
Post, November 5, 2008
I remember how a dozen years ago, a rash of arsons burned more than 30 Black churches, mostly in the Southern tier of the
. In response, the Anti-Defamation League urged investigations by the Justice Department and published full-page ads in many of America’s major newspapers deploring these acts, asking for letters of support that we passed on to the victimized congregations. We also established a Rebuild the Churches Fund. The response across
was heartening.
As Jews, we felt a special kinship with the victims of these arsons, because we lived with the memory of Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass -- when ordinary Germans committed a so-called “spontaneous” pogrom against synagogues, Jewish shops, homes, hospitals, cemeteries, and against their fellow Jewish citizens. In response, the world was essentially silent.
Now, as we commemorate the 70th anniversary of that horrible and tragic event, some will regard it as ancient history. For some of you who lived through it, saw it, survived it, it was only just yesterday.
I was born after the event, so I must rely on the historians. The numbers may vary some, but no one doubts the overall picture, which is well documented. Throughout Germany and the recently annexed Austria, over 90 Jews were killed, others beaten and humiliated, some 30,000 male Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, over 1,000 synagogues were torched along with their Torah scrolls, Bibles, and prayer books, and some 7,000 Jewish shops and business were looted and destroyed.…
There was now no doubt that the Nazis were no longer content to simply strip Jews of their legal rights, and in the immediate aftermath, German and Austrian Jews, and watchful Jews everywhere, would learn that while many newspapers and government officials around the world would decry the violence and barbarity of Kristallnacht, few governments were prepared to act.…
It would, of course, be some time more before the Final Solution was enacted throughout
Eastern Europe
and all of the Reich. But already on November 9th Hitler told Göring that if war broke out,
“will first of all make sure of settling accounts with the Jews.”
The Evian Conference that the
Roosevelt
administration had organized four months before, bringing together delegates from 32 countries to discuss the exploding Jewish refugee crisis, gave Hitler ample evidence that the world’s democracies would not act to quell his thuggish actions against the Jews, for the delegates at Evian merely confirmed that none would liberalize their immigration quotas.
As in the infamous phrase used by the Swiss when they turned back fleeing Jews at their borders, the free world essentially said the boat is full. There was no room for Jewish refugees. Kristallnacht barely changed that attitude. There was a brief outcry, and then there was silence. Let us remember and learn the lesson from that terrible silence.
