On November 8, 1938, Nazi leaders assembled in Munich for the annual commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch anniversary. That evening, word reached Joseph Goebbels that Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official shot in Paris by 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, had died of his wounds. Goebbels used the death as pretext to incite the pogrom against Jewish communities across Germany and Austria that erupted the following night, known as Kristallnacht.
The chain of events had begun days earlier when the Nazi regime expelled roughly 12,000 Polish-Jewish residents from Germany, dumping many at the Polish border in freezing conditions with almost nothing. Among the families caught in this expulsion were the parents of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old living in Paris. On November 7, in anguish over his family's plight, Grynszpan walked into the German embassy and shot diplomat Ernst vom Rath.
Vom Rath lingered for a day before dying on the afternoon of November 9, but the machinery of retaliation was already being assembled on November 8, as Nazi officials, gathered in Munich for the putsch anniversary, watched the situation and calculated its propaganda value. Goebbels seized on the death to whip the assembled Nazi faithful into a fury, and by that night, orders went out to party organizations to organize what would be framed as spontaneous "popular outrage."
What followed within hours was Kristallnacht: over 7,000 Jewish businesses vandalized, more than 1,000 synagogues burned, roughly 100 Jews killed, and 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps. The November 8 gathering in Munich, historically a celebration of Nazi mythology, became the staging ground for a pivot from discriminatory policy to open, organized violence, a threshold historians mark as the opening act of the Holocaust.
Key people: Joseph Goebbels, Herschel Grynszpan, Ernst vom Rath