Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was the Nazi dictatorship’s declaration of war against German and Austrian Jews and, implicitly, against Jews living anywhere in the world. Across Germany and German-annexed Austria on November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis staged spectacles of vengeance and degradation that shattered far more than glass. For Jewish communities, the extreme hatred unloosed on them made clear, for anyone with eyes to see, that this was a regime capable of anything.
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THE ASSASSINATION OF ERNST VOM RATH
The pretext for Kristallnacht did not take place, though, inside Greater Germany. It was the assassination in Paris of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, someone virtually all of the world knew nothing about before November 1938, that supplied the excuse for the devastation.
Neither was the assassin, Herschel Grynszpan, a person of stature. Only 17 years of age, Grynszpan was a young man and Polish Jew who had lived in the French capital apart from his family since 1936 and kept his head just above water financially. His decision to kill a German official had precious little to do with his tenuous circumstances in Paris. Rather, it was the despair that had built up over the situation of his family stranded on the border between Poland and Germany.
The Grynszpans, like thousands of other Polish Jews, suffered from a long-running conflict between the Nazi state and the government of Poland over the status of Polish Jews living in Germany. In late March 1938, following Hitler’s annexation of Austria, the Polish Parliament (it is often forgotten how antisemitic the Polish state became in the 1930s) ratified a law making it easier to strip citizenship from citizens of Poland living outside the country. Berlin recognized what this meant for its own efforts to pressure Jews to leave Germany. In October 1938, another Polish measure canceled the passports of citizens abroad who did not receive authorization to reenter the country. Those affected only had a few weeks to secure the requisite paperwork. In response, the Nazi leadership, with SS leader Heinrich Himmler at the forefront, first expelled male Polish Jews in Germany. This was rapidly followed by similar orders for women and children. Those deported had little time to gather valuables. To carry out the measure, the SS transported these individuals and families to the border with Poland and tried to force them across, but Poland’s border security refused to allow them. As Saul Friedländer describes it, “for days, in pouring rain and without food or shelter, the deportees wandered between the two lines; most of them ended up in a Polish concentration camp near Zbąszyń. The rest were allowed to return to Germany.”[1]
The Grynszpans had been inhabitants of the city Hannover in north-central Germany. Herschel’s sister Berta wrote to him that she had only been able to bring a small number of clothes from Hannover before the deportation and had no money when she and their mother and father arrived near Zbąszyń. Enraged, he dashed off a note to an uncle in Paris with these lines: “I have to protest in a way that the whole world hears my protest, and this I intend to do. I beg your forgiveness.”[2]
On November 7, Grynszpan went to the German Embassy in Paris. Once inside, he requested to speak with an official. Shown to the office of vom Rath, Third Secretary, he drew the revolver he recently purchased and shot him five times. The gunshots did not kill the 29-year-old vom Rath right away. French police arrested Grynszpan, and he would remain in French custody until the German invasion of France in 1940.
Once news of the shooting traveled back to Berlin, the Nazi regime exhibited restraint for a few days, something itself quite ominous. The quiet would not last long.
Vom Rath succumbed to his wounds around 5:30 p.m. on the 9th. His death was a signal for the Nazis to exact revenge. November 9–10 was already a crucial date in the history of the National Socialist movement, a time of commemoration of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Every place with a Jewish population was to feel their wrath.