What was Kristallnacht? The Night of Broken Glass, November 9 and 10, 1938

Each of these has a fuller answer below.

Kristallnacht was a pogrom against the Jews of Germany and annexed Austria on the night of November 9 and 10, 1938. Nazi Party organizations set it going on Goebbels' instructions and ordinary Germans joined in, with the police ordered to pull back and let it run. Synagogues burned in front of crowds through the night and into the next day. More than 1,400 synagogues, prayer houses and smaller places of worship were destroyed, thousands of Jewish businesses were wrecked, hundreds of Jews were killed, and about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested.

It was not a riot that got away from anyone. The order to arrest Jewish men was written before most of the burning started, and the police instructions that followed it told forces across the country not to interfere. Three months later the Nazi Party's own Supreme Court reported to Goering that the party leaders who had been in the room in Munich had probably all understood Goebbels the same way. The party was to organize the violence and carry it out, and was not to be seen publicly as its author.

Vandalism and assault were not new in 1938. The Holocaust Memorial Museum locates the significance somewhere else: assault, robbery, arson and looting happened all at once, in a short span of time, across a whole country and its annexed territories, in the open. Each strand of it took away a different protection. Wrecked shops pushed Jews further out of the economy. What burned with the synagogues was the most visible form of Jewish life on a German street. And the arrests were the first time the regime jailed Jews on that scale for nothing but being Jewish, with the men often marched to the police station through streets full of their neighbors.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum singles out one shock in particular. Until then most anti-Jewish measures had been public and had touched work and business. This one came through the front door of the house.

Kristallnacht did not fall on a quiet year. Germany annexed Austria on March 11 through 13, 1938, and anti-Jewish violence began the same night, worst of all in Vienna. The annexation brought about 185,000 more Jews under Nazi rule at a moment when roughly 150,000 German Jews, one in four, had already gone. In June the Criminal Police arrested around 12,000 men labeled asocial or professional criminals, and Heydrich told them to take in Jewish men with even minor records; the Holocaust Memorial Museum calls that the first mass arrest of Jews in Nazi Germany. On August 20 Adolf Eichmann opened a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna to move people out faster. The policy was already expulsion. What it lacked was anywhere to expel them to.

Delegates from thirty-two countries met at Evian-les-Bains in France from July 6 to 15, 1938 to talk about the refugees. Roosevelt had called the meeting and sent a businessman, Myron C. Taylor, rather than a senior official. Speaker after speaker expressed sympathy. Only the Dominican Republic said it would take significant numbers. The conference closed having created a committee and no quotas. Australia's delegate, T. W. White, told the room, "As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one..." The Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the German government responded with satisfaction, remarking that foreign countries criticized Germany over the Jews and would not open their own doors when the chance came.

The paperwork closed in the same months. A decree of August 17 required every Jew without an approved Jewish first name to add Israel or Sara by January 1, 1939, and to use it in business. On October 5 German Jews' passports were invalidated, and became valid again only when stamped with a red J. Yad Vashem records that the stamp was introduced at Switzerland's request, so that Swiss officials could turn German Jews back at the border.

The last push before Paris came from two governments at once. Poland had passed a law on March 31, 1938 allowing it to strip citizenship from Poles who had lived abroad continuously for at least five years and had lost their ties to the Polish state, and in early October it ordered that passports held abroad be endorsed at a consulate, with a deadline at the end of the month. Germany delivered an ultimatum on October 26, and when nothing changed a circular went out to every State Police office ordering every Polish Jew holding a valid passport taken into custody and moved to the border at once.

Between October 27 and 29 more than 17,000 people were arrested in their homes, allowed a few possessions and put on guarded trains. Most were long-term legal residents of Germany and many had been born there, which conferred nothing, because German citizenship passed through parents rather than birthplace. Poland would not let them in and Germany would not take them back. More than 8,000 were left at Zbaszyn, a town of about 5,400 people, in old military stables, a school, a mill and a shooting range, and some stayed for months. In the town a Jewish hospital, a school, kitchens, a post office and a choir were set up. Emanuel Ringelblum came from Warsaw and spent five weeks organizing relief. Two years later he founded the clandestine archive of the Warsaw ghetto.

Among the deported were Zyndel and Ryfka Grynszpan, who had come to Germany in 1911 and were put across the border from Hanover with two of their children. They got word to their seventeen-year-old son Herschel, who was living in Paris. On the morning of November 7, 1938 he walked into the German Embassy there and shot Ernst vom Rath, a junior diplomat, wounding him mortally. Grynszpan was handed over to the Germans by the Vichy government in 1940, and the date and place of his death have never been established.

The answer has two parts and most short accounts fuse them. A seventeen-year-old shot a German diplomat in Paris, and the regime used it. That is the pretext. The cause was a policy of forced expulsion that had been running at speed all year.

What is established about Herschel Grynszpan's motive is narrow. The Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that he likely acted out of anger over the deportation of his parents, his siblings and other Jews with Polish citizenship, and the word likely is the museum's own. He gave more than one account of himself in custody, first to the French and then to the Germans, and the accounts do not agree. The later account came from a young man in German hands, facing a show trial, with an obvious reason to say whatever might prevent it. That account reaches us through a university's write-up of the historian Alan Steinweis's work rather than through an archival record, and the write-up says most historians do not subscribe to it.

The riot was organized, and the men who organized it expected to be disbelieved. From November 7, two days before vom Rath died, Goebbels was directing the German press response and Nazi papers were blaming all Jews for the shooting. Goebbels wrote in his own diary that Hitler had ruled the demonstrations should be allowed to run on and the police pulled back. The party's own supreme court said as much to Goering three months later.

The people doing it were not only men in uniform. The Holocaust Memorial Museum names party officials and members of party organizations, especially the SA storm troopers, the SS and the Hitler Youth, and German civilians who belonged to none of those organizations. Many took the chance to steal from Jewish homes and shops and to humiliate their Jewish neighbors in public. Alan Steinweis, working through the records of more than a thousand postwar trials, found the participation far wider than the standard account allowed. Counting looters, spectators at synagogue fires and people who egged the SA on, he puts the total in the tens of thousands, and argues that the tidy top-down version of the night has served as an excuse for ordinary Germans.

The night of November 9 into November 10, 1938. That is the answer to the question as people ask it, and it is not the whole answer. The Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that the riot lasted about twenty-four hours. Yad Vashem writes that the attacks peaked on the night of November 9 and 10 and continued in some places into November 12 and even 13. In annexed Austria they did not begin until November 10. The German state settled the point in its own statute book: the decree of November 12, 1938 on restoring the streetscape dates the damage to the eighth, ninth and tenth of November. Three days, on the perpetrators' own paperwork.

Nazi Party leaders were in Munich on November 9 for the annual commemoration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler's failed attempt to seize power, which is why the party's leadership from across Germany was in one city on the night the pogrom began. That evening they learned that vom Rath had died in Paris. Between about 9:30 and 10, Goebbels gave the gathering an antisemitic speech about the shooting. The officials in the room then went to the telephones and passed his instructions down to their home districts.

Two orders went out that night, and the sequence is the thing to hold on to. At 11:55, before most of the violence, Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller sent an internal notice ordering the arrest of 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish men and telling police to concentrate on the wealthy. At 1:20 the following morning Heydrich sent longer instructions to police forces across the country: do not interfere with what he called the demonstrations, remove the synagogue archives and hand them to the Security Service, arrest young, healthy, well-off Jewish men. So the arrest order came first, and the instructions that followed it did not start the fires. They set the terms the fires were allowed to burn under.

The method was written down too. An SA report from Darmstadt, quoted by the National WWII Museum, records the order its men were given: all the Jewish synagogues in their area, which the editor of the published document puts at about 700 square miles south of Frankfurt am Main, were to be "blown up or set on fire." It added that "Neighboring houses occupied by Aryan population may not be damaged," that the action was "to be carried out in civilian clothes," and that "Rioting and plundering are to be prevented."

The synagogues burned in public. The Holocaust Memorial Museum records crowds of onlookers, Jews in some places made to clear the debris afterward, and schoolchildren in several towns brought to watch and to join in. Inside the buildings the destruction was aimed at what made them holy. Torah scrolls were thrown to the ground, torn, burned and thrown into rivers, and in some places the rabbi and members of the congregation were made to watch or to take part.

At half past nine on the morning of November 10, about fifty men arrived at the Jewish orphanage in Dinslaken. Thirty-two children and fifteen staff were inside. Yitzhak Herz, the teacher in charge, went to the local police and asked for protection.

It was called off at four in the afternoon on November 10. Goebbels issued a statement over the radio ordering the whole population to stop, and saying that the answer to the shooting in Paris would now be delivered by way of legislation and edicts. Mob violence went on at least into the next day. He meant the second half of that literally.

Project Witness filmed these interviews and holds them. Each one opens in full in the film library, with no account and no charge.

Nothing below has been cut down to a usable quotation. A survivor talks for as long as she talked, and the passages that wander away from November 1938 and come back to it are still there, because that is what a testimony is.

Three people are heard on this page. Two were in Germany when it happened: a nine year old in a village about five kilometers from Wurzburg, and a girl in Mainz who says she was five going on six. The third, Moshe Teitelbaum, tells what happened to his family in Vienna.

One more testimony is linked elsewhere on this page rather than a second time here.

A German shul in 1938 was several rooms in one building. It was where the kehillah, the organized Jewish community of the town, prayed, learned, gathered and decided things, and the Hebrew names say so: beis hakneses, the house of assembly, beis tefillah, the house of prayer, beis medrash, the house of study.

Under Nazi rule it also became close to the only place where Jews in Germany were allowed to meet, and the evidence is not rhetorical. It sits in a she'elah, a question put to a rabbi for a ruling. Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, who ran the Hildesheimer seminary in Berlin, was asked whether a concert could be held inside a shul, because the authorities would not let Jews assemble anywhere else. He answered it as a question in halachah, in Jewish law.

Observant life had been narrowing for years before anything was set on fire. A law of April 21, 1933 required animals to be stunned by electric shock before slaughter. It never mentioned Jews and never mentioned shechitah, and it outlawed shechitah in Germany five and a half years before the pogrom. Butchers went on doing it in secret.

What burned inside was not furniture. The Holocaust Memorial Museum records that across Germany and the annexed territories Nazis destroyed Torah scrolls deliberately, throwing them down, tearing them, burning them, throwing them into rivers, and that in places the local rabbi and members of his community were forced to watch or take part.

In Wurzburg a student at the Jewish teachers seminary walked over and found the library out on the playing field.

Jewish law has a category for what was done in those rooms, and it is not property damage.

Moed Katan 26a lists the tears a person makes in his garment and never afterward mends properly: for a father, a mother, a teacher who taught him Torah, the Nasi, the head of the court; evil tidings; hearing G-d's name blessed, which is the euphemism the Gemara uses rather than say what it means; a burned sefer Torah; and the sight of the cities of Judea, the Temple or Jerusalem in ruins. It is a list of tears and not a list of mourners, and the tear stays in the garment.

For a sefer Torah the tear is doubled, one for the parchment and one for the writing, and the Shulchan Aruch widens it to tefillin and to a single scroll of the Prophets. It holds only where the scroll was destroyed by force. An accident does not trigger it. Somebody who meant to do it does.

The Talmud's picture of this is Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon, wrapped by the Romans in the Torah scroll he had been teaching from, telling his students that he saw the parchment burning and the letters flying up.

A shul does not stop being one when the roof comes off. The Mishnah rules that one fallen into ruin may not be put to ordinary use, and reads it out of a verse in Leviticus, I will bring desolation to your sanctuaries: sanctuaries stands after desolation, so the holiness stays on them while they are desolate. If grass comes up on its own in a ruined shul, the same passage adds, nobody should pull it out, because of the anguish it will cause those who see it.

People got things out.

In Ansbach, shortly before the pogrom, the police chief called in a friend named Ludwig Dietenhofer and told him what was coming. Dietenhofer went to the shul and took out the sefer Torah his family had donated, still bound with a wimpel given in 1840. A wimpel is the cloth a baby boy is swaddled in at his bris; in many German kehillos the family gave it to the shul when the boy turned three, to bind a Torah scroll, embroidered with his name and his father's. Many arks in Germany held a shelf of named children.

In Bad Ems the kehillah left all its scrolls with Rabbi Eliyahu Laupheimer's family, and when they fled at night after the pogrom the rav carried a small one on his person. In Leipzig, hours before it started, an anonymous caller from Stuttgart warned Chaim Israel that every synagogue in Germany was to be attacked. His congregation moved about a dozen scrolls out of the Broder synagogue into a building held by the Jewish National Fund, legally British property, and left one in the ark so people could still daven. That account reaches Yad Vashem at second hand. Sixty years on, renovators at the University of Leipzig library found Torah scrolls between the roof beams. Yad Vashem thinks it likely they are the scrolls Chaim Israel's congregation saved, and says it is still unclear how they reached the roof. One went to Yad Vashem; the rest were buried in the Leipzig Jewish cemetery, as holy books that can no longer be used are buried.

Two brothers in Mannheim pulled the cantor's choir book out of the debris of the Klaus Synagogue and returned it to his family fifty years later. Two scrolls desecrated that night are in Washington, retrieved by Germans who kept them safe until the war was over.

Three of the central institutions of German Orthodox education ended in 1938: the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin; the Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt in Wurzburg, which since 1864 had trained teachers for Jewish elementary schools and, at the same time, chazzanim; and the Torah Lehranstalt in Frankfurt, founded in 1893 by Rabbi Solomon Breuer for the seceded kehillah there, the Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft built in the tradition of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. The Frankfurt kehillah's own building on the Friedberger Anlage was destroyed in November 1938.

SA men came into the Wurzburg dormitory that night, pulled the students out of their beds and beat them, then gutted the building while local people cheered. A student telephoned the police. The police came and arrested the older students, and the crowd cheered that too. Rabbi Jacob G. Wiener, then a student there, was woken at half past two and marched five abreast through the cobbled streets past burning synagogues while people spat at the boys. About fifty were arrested. He was held seven days. His mother was murdered in Bremen the same night.

Weinberg left in 1939 without his library and without his manuscripts, and called his collected responsa Seridei Esh, remnants of the fire, meaning himself.

Two last things. The first is from the Wurzburg town prison during the Polenaktion, six men to a cell. Friday came anyway.

Shammai Zahn was eighteen in both of those places, on the Sandbergerstrasse in front of the fire and in the cell hearing the whistling. He helped found the Sunderland Yeshiva in England in 1946 and led it as rosh yeshiva from about 1949 until his death in 2001.

The second was written eighteen years after the fire. Weinberg was asked a question in halachah about seforim saved from the library of the Berlin seminary. He answered it, and near the end of the answer he stopped to say this.

It was not the first thing he wrote. He had opened the same teshuvah with the verse he said was fulfilled in him, Tehillim 118:18, G-d afflicted me but He did not give me over to death, and with the line from Eichah 3:39, why should a living man complain. It is enough, he wrote, that he is alive.

The rest of her family's story is the story of the year that followed. Her father came out of Buchenwald with an ultimatum: be out of Germany by the end of the year, or report with the whole family on January 1. Getting out had stopped being a decision anybody was making. It was a race against a document.

The figures for that race are easy to find and they teach almost nothing on their own. The Holocaust Memorial Museum counts about 36,000 Jews leaving Germany and Austria in 1938 and 77,000 in 1939. The Anne Frank House puts the two years together at roughly 120,000. Yad Vashem takes the longer view: of the half million Jews in Germany when Hitler took power, about 300,000 got out before the murder began. The Holocaust Memorial Museum counts some 202,000 Jews still in Germany at the end of 1939 and 57,000 in Austria, many of them elderly.

The number that teaches something is the queue. In late 1938 there were 125,000 people waiting outside American consulates for 27,000 places under the existing quota. By June 1939 the waiting list had passed 300,000.

Britain loosened its rules after the pogrom and agreed to admit unaccompanied children under seventeen. The first transport reached Harwich on December 2, 1938, and about 10,000 children came in all. The cost fell on private guarantors. A private citizen or an organization had to guarantee each child's care, education and eventual emigration from Britain, and parents could not come. Inside the Reich, Jewish organizations planned the transports and generally gave priority to children whose parents were in concentration camps or could no longer support them, and to homeless children and orphans. Transports out of the Reich stopped when the war began in September 1939, and a few continued from the Netherlands into 1940.

In the United States, Roosevelt condemned the pogrom at a press conference on November 15, saying he could scarcely believe such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization, and he called the ambassador in Berlin home for consultation. Two days later he allowed between 12,000 and 15,000 people already in the country on visitor visas, most of them Jews from Germany and its annexed territories, to stay indefinitely, while confirming that the quotas themselves would not move.

On February 9, 1939, Senator Robert Wagner and Representative Edith Nourse Rogers introduced identical bills to admit 20,000 German refugee children under fourteen outside the quota, 10,000 in each of two years. A poll the month before had asked Americans whether 10,000 refugee children should be brought in and cared for in American homes. Twenty-six percent said yes, 67 percent said no. Eleanor Roosevelt broke six years of practice to let reporters quote her in support. The president said nothing about it in public. The Senate committee proposed counting the children inside the quota rather than outside it, and one senator offered to take them in exchange for ending all quota immigration for five years. Wagner refused both. Neither chamber ever held a vote.

The St. Louis left Hamburg on May 13, 1939 with 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jewish refugees. Cuba would not let them land. The United States and Canada would not take them. They were admitted instead by Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, and 254 of them were killed after Germany took the last three of those countries in 1940. Of the 288 Britain took, all but one lived.

The German government was ready to make use of refusals of exactly that kind. It had been pushing to speed up forced emigration since the pogrom, and the Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry hoped to exploit other countries' unwillingness to take Jewish refugees, to justify the regime's anti-Jewish policy at home and abroad. Men were being beaten out of a country for not having left it, by a state that had helped make leaving impossible.

For roughly two weeks after the pogrom, German Jewry had no legal way to speak to itself in print at all. Every Jewish paper had been closed, and the one that replaced them, the Juedisches Nachrichtenblatt, first appeared in Berlin on November 23, edited by Jews and controlled by the Propaganda Ministry, carrying what the authorities found acceptable and a great deal about emigration.

The answer came in other forms. On December 1 the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's emissary George Rooby reported back on what he had found in Berlin, Nuremberg, Fuerth and Frankfurt: burned synagogues, ransacked shops, desecrated Torah scrolls, and a Jewish leadership either forbidden to operate or already in the camps. He wrote that for the Jews of the Reich there existed no other solution but to emigrate. Community leaders assured him there was enough money for immediate relief; the organizations working to get people out were badly short of funds.

The printed prayer beside this paragraph is the older kind of answer. Somebody in the Netherlands sat down that same year, wrote a tefillah for the murdered, and had it set in Hebrew with a Dutch text beside it, to be said on Shabbos and yom tov.

Where institutions disagree, the answer says so rather than picking the tidier figure. Where a familiar number does not mean what it is usually taken to mean, the answer says what it does mean.

Most of what is known about November 1938 in detail comes from the people who did it. The orders survive because the Gestapo used a teleprinter and kept the tape. Heydrich put the first figures in writing for Goering inside thirty-six hours. A stenographer sat in the room at the aviation ministry while the insurance was settled, and typed what was said. Even the killings were counted, because the Nazi Party ran a disciplinary court of its own and kept its own docket. All of it was gathered as evidence at Nuremberg, and all of it is free to read now.

The rest comes from three other places. Foreign diplomats in Germany cabled their governments while it was happening, and those cables were published. Jews wrote it down: in letters within days, in testimony after the war, and on film, which is the part Project Witness holds. And German municipal and Jewish community archives kept photographs and correspondence that local historians spent forty years assembling into something that could be counted.

Where these sources disagree, this page prints the disagreement instead of choosing. That happens on the death toll, on the number of synagogues, on the number arrested, on the number of deaths at Buchenwald, and on how many days the violence lasted.