farmdoc's blog post number 203

Tonight is the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht (‘crystal night’), named for the myriad glass shards in the streets of Germany and Austria after violent anti-Jewish pogroms on the night of 9/10 November 1938. Instigated by Nazi Party officials and perpetrated by Storm Troopers and Hitler Youth, these pogroms were retribution for the Paris shooting of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee. Ernst vom Rath died on 9 November 1938. The resultant pogroms were planned to look like a spontaneous uprising against the Jews. That night, shop windows of many Jewish-owned business were smashed and the shops were looted; and 191 synagogues and countless Jewish homes were burnt down. The Nazis directed firemen and police not to intervene unless non-Jewish property was at risk. Some 92 Jews were murdered that night, and 30,000 were arrested and deported to Dachau concentration camp. Kristallnacht was not only the largest scale attack on the Jews since the Nazis took office in 1933, but it marked the beginning of the systematic eradication of Germany’s 2,000-year-old Jewish community. In times of economic hardship, like now, anti-semitism flourishes. Seventy years on, let Kristallnacht remind us all of the need for eternal vigilance, and also of the famous words of George Santayana: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Never again. Ever.