Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction

On November 7 1938, a 17 year old German Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, enraged by the suffering of his parents, who had been expelled from Germany together with 12 000 other Jews, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot junior German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, who died three days later. Vom Rath's assassination sparked what the Nazis had been planning for months, a nationwide pogrom and orgy of destruction against the Jews, across the Third Reich (Germany, Austria and Sudetenland). On on November 8 it had been announced that Jewish children could no longer attend "Aryan" state elementary schools, something that had hitherto been allowed where there were not sufficient Jewish elementary schools. At the same time all Jewish cultural activities were suspended "indefinitely. On the night of the 9-10 November Kristallnacht took place co-ordinated by the Nazi leadership. That night 91 Jews were murdered, and 25,000-30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. In the early hours of November 10, coordinated destruction broke out in cities, towns and villages throughout the Third Reich. More than 2 000 synagogues were destroyed and tens of thousands of Jewish businesses and homes ransacked. In this disturbing and heart wrenching work, Gilbert gathers together hundreds of eye witness accounts of the Kristallnacht atrocities. As one British newspaper reported:"Brownshirts smashed their way into Jewish houses, tore down their curtains, slashed carpets and upholstery with knives and broke up the furniture...Terrified children were turned sobbing out of their beds, which were then smashed to pieces. Extremely disturbing is the refusal of the nations of the world to take in refugees. Between January 1933 and March 1938 more than 35 000 German Jews were granted immigration certificates to Palestine. Following the 1936 Arab Revolt, the British restricted Jewish immigration the Holy Land to 3000 a year. On November 30 1939 the Jewish National Council for Palestine offered to take 10 000 German Jewish children into the Holy Land to be dispersed among the 250 Jewish agricultural and urban centres there. To appease the Arabs in Palestine and Muslims in India and other parts of the British Empire the offer to take the children was rejected. The British authorities turned back Jewish ships full of refugees and put pressure on the governments of Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey and Greece not to allow Jewish refugees passage through their territories to the Holy Land. Haven't enough Jewish lives been sacrificed to appease Muslim rage? Proposals were made to settle Jewish in British Guiana, Brazil, Madagascar, Uganda and Tanganyika but all were abandoned. A proposal to resettle Jews in Newfoundland in Canada was rejected due to public pressure from the local population there. Ireland. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull blocked a proposal by the Legislative Council of the Virgin Islands to take in refugees from the Nazis claiming it was 'i

What makes this book a particularly devastating account of events across Germany in November 1938 is the inclusion of numerous eyewitness testimonies to the horrors of the beginnings of the Holocaust. Obviously, many of those who supply their testimony and are quoted here by Professor Gilbert were mere children or adolescents at the time. Their personal accounts of how the events of that night irrevocably changed their world are chilling to read regardless of how familiar the events may be. The extent and suddeness of the Pogrom retains it's power to shock as recalled by those who survived it. One additional aspect of Gilbert's approach is the insertion of numerous examples of individual Germans acting humanely and trying to help in a very dark time.

Prior to Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, two events occurred that unequivocally disclosed to the world the evil mindset of the Nazi regime. The first of these events was the "Knight of the Long Knives", 30 June 1934, in which the Nazis murdered scores of actual or potential threats to their regime and shortly thereafter Hitler and other Nazis brazenly admitted that they had killed over 75 people outright, without a trial or any other semblance of due process, as enemies of the state. The second such event was "Kristallnacht" (aka the "Night of Broken Glass"), 10 November 1938, when Nazi thugs began a nationwide rampage against Jews, orchestrated in response to a Jewish man's assassination in France of a low-level German diplomat as retaliation for the deportation of his family (along with 12,000 other Polish-born Jews) from Germany to Poland (which then hesitated to accept them). The result of this rampage was the destruction of over a thousand Jewish synagogues; A far greater number of Jewish businesses and homes had windows and property senselessly smashed and broken. In addition, thousands of Jewish men were corraled and herded off to concentration camps, most never to return to their homes or see their loved ones again. Almost a hundred Jews were killed and many more committed suicide during Kristallnacht. Martin Gilbert's fine book "Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction" describes the events surrounding this signal event, including what led to the shooting of the German diplomat, what transpired during the Night of Broken Glass, and the aftermath of that officially sanctioned lawlessness. In telling the story of what happened during the Night of Broken Glass, the author (himself a refugee from Germany as a result of that event) utilizes numerous recently obtained eyewitness accounts of how people were mistreated and property vandalized in this event. Interspersed within these stories are also acts of courage by people who helped to prevent additional harm and damage despite the very real threat that in so doing they would subject themselves to beatings by the Gestapo or being sent to prison or a concentration camp. Most treatments of Kristallnacht in general history books superficially treat the event by highlighting the destruction of Jewish businesses and showing a stock photo or two of some broken windows and glass on the street. This book demonstrates that this event was about much more than hooligans smashing store windows: It was about the desecration of houses of worship (many of which had stood unharmed for hundreds of years) and the personal invasion of people's homes to humiliate them and wantonly destroy (and in some cases steal) their property. The author similarly uses eyewitness accounts to help tell the story of the aftermath of Kristallnacht when the Jews in Germany and Austria (by then already annexed to Germany under the "Anschluss" of March 1938) desperately tried to emigrate and escape further

An excellent read. It reports on the total extent of the Kristallnacht event, which was far more extensive than I had known. The reporter did an excellent job in seeking out those that experienced that terrifying event, and he also highlighted those "righteous gentiles", who tried to assist the victims of this Nazi terror.

Martin Gilbert is one of the most distinguished living historians, both for his vast Churchill biography and for the many works he has written on various aspects of Jewish history. This is his seventy- seventh book. In it he employs his usual method of gathering eye- witness factual accounts, and using them to tell history in an incredibly personal way. He reportedly advertised in the 'Jerusalem Post' and received forty- five detailed descriptions of those who had gone through this event. The event itself, the night of violence and terror in which over fifteen- hundred synagogues throughout Germany were attacked, thousands of Jewish stores vandalized, in which there were beatings and murders of individual Jews. The violence was accompanied by a jeering triumphal Nazi- sympathizing portion of the German population. The image of young mothers holding up their babies so as to allow them to see the cruelties being done, is a truly chilling one. Gilbert sees the event as a turnaround one, a key to all that would follow, the prelude to the 'Shoah'. If anyone needed writing on the wall, this was it. Gilbert traces the reactions throughout the world, including the sympathy displayed to the Jewish situation in a wide variety of places. This is a detailed, moving , frightening account of an evil moment in modern history. The personal testimonies once again provide an element not simply of authentication, but of deeping of perception and feeling of the event.