The Other Shoe

On November 9, 1938 organized gangs of plainclothes German police and Nazi SA and SS men attacked Jews and Jewish-owned homes and businesses all across Germany. The pogrom was conducted in such a manner so that the involvement of both the German government and the Nazi Party was concealed.

The attacks were claimed to be a spontaneous uprising of the German people in reaction to the murder of Ernst vom Rath, a official working in the German Embassy in Paris, by a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan.

In the pseudo-spontaneous pogrom 200 synagogues were burned. Synagogues in the cities indicated on the map below were destroyed:

In addition to the destruction of Germany's synagogues, Jewish businesses across the Reich were vandalized. Shop windows were smashed, giving the crime a name; Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass.

Thousands of innocent German Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. 

Others, the lucky ones, had already emigrated, or did so as a result of Kristallnacht. Some of Germany's Jews went to France, some to Poland, some to the Netherlands. 

The truly fortunate left Europe entirely. The girl pictured above, Ann Frank, stayed in Europe...and died.

November 9 is an important date in history for another reason. It is the day the Berlin Wall fell.

I hope that Germans, while commemorating the latter occasion pause to remember what happened in 1938.

I hope they do.

But I wouldn't bet on it.

-posted by Charlie Eklund 

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