Triggered by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, Nazi officials orchestrated a night of coordinated violence. Storm troopers and ordinary citizens burned over 1,400 synagogues, destroyed thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, and arrested some 30,000 Jewish men, sending many to concentration camps. The pogrom took its name from the shattered glass littering city streets the next morning.
Joseph Goebbels used the murder of a minor German embassy official in Paris, shot by a Polish-Jewish teenager, as the pretext. Within hours, a state-sanctioned pogrom swept through Germany and recently annexed Austria. Fire brigades stood by synagogues only to protect neighboring Aryan-owned property, letting Jewish houses of worship burn to the ground.
By morning, glass from thousands of shattered shop windows covered sidewalks in cities from Berlin to Vienna, giving the pogrom its bitter nickname, the 'Night of Broken Glass.' Ordinary Germans watched, some cheering, most simply passing by. The regime followed the violence with a collective fine on the Jewish community, forcing victims to pay for the damage inflicted upon them.
Historians mark Kristallnacht as the hinge between years of discriminatory laws and the machinery of mass murder that followed. Foreign governments expressed outrage but few opened their doors to refugees, a failure that would haunt the following decade.
Key people: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels