Comprehensive and heartwrenching
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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."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.
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 'incompatible with existing law".
The book is an important testimony and contains hitherto unrevealed accounts.
It is an account of how hatred can lead to destruction on such a massive scale.
Today we are faced with Jew-hatred on a scale as great as that of the Nazis in the form of hatred of Israel.
If this is not stopped who knows where it will lead?
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A pivotal night
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Writing history as a snapshot of time is a risky venture. While a close examination of an event provides a sense of precision, broader implications are too often omitted. This is the case with Martin Gilbert's "Kristallnacht". It's an example of fine journalism underpinned by good research and scholarly presentation. Hardly an entertaining evening's read, this book chronicles how guided prejudice led to an orgy of violence and destruction against Germany's Jews. Stores were smashed and looted, synagogues burned and demolished, homes invaded and people terrorised during a two-day expression of hatred. The wreckage littering the streets, particularly the shop windows, gave the episode its name - and this book's title. It is a glimpse into the past we all must see and endure.
Gilbert gathered the remembrances of people or their offspring who survived the onslaught. There are letters, journals and interviews with the author, bringing a disturbing intimacy to this account. That there were survivors to make these records seems surprising after a half-century of condemnation by the victorious Powers. Yet, Kristallnacht itself wasn't an orgy of killing. Less than a hundred died of beatings or unknown causes, although there were many suicides. Jews were seized and incarcerated, even in the notorious concentration camps, but most were later released. Pre-war Germany was more interested in ridding itself of its Jews by exile and emigration was encouraged. "Time to leave" became a byword among Germany's Jews after Kristallnacht, which was part of its purpose, according to Gilbert. Emigration, however, was more than packing up and leaving. There had to be places to go, and not all nations opened their borders to Jews fleeing manifest hatred.
Although the historian notes how the destruction was orchestrated by Nazi officials and that Brownshirts and the Hitler Youth were present, the attackers were either joined or cheered on by a large, although not universal, proportion of the general population. The opportunity to obtain goods, stores, homes and money was seized by many Germans. Firms were closed, to open "under new management" by the stroke of a pen. Homes gained new owners as Jews emigrated, were shoved into ghettos or concentration camps or, later, killed. There were few enough to defend them and Gilbert avoids explaining whether lawyers helped or hindered the processes. Given the absolute powers the Nazi regime granted itself, the only good lawyer was one who acceded to the process. Another void in this book is the lack of accounts from smaller towns. Gilbert provides a series of maps showing how many towns experienced Kristallnacht's violence. Yet, the text focusses on Vienna, Frankfurt-am-Main, Hamburg and other large cities. How big did a town have to be to host a synagogue? How many small-town neighbours assisted in its destruction? We aren't given this information.
If history has "watersheds", Kristallnacht serves as a type specimen. Only the French massacre of St Bartholomew's Night stands as a peer. In the same way that a cabal of French Catholics plotted to rid their country of its Protestant minority, so too, did Nazi thugs await a trigger to launch their onslaught. It came with the murder of a German diplomat in Paris, but the event hardly matches the scope of the response. Clearly, "everyday" Germans participated in the destruction, but Gilbert ties the causes solely to Nazi policy. That hardly seems sustainable, but worse, it denies the possibility of a reprise in different nations under different leaders. If this book could teach us anything, it's that being on guard against those promoting hate is an endless task. Read this book for what happened, but go elsewhere to learn why it did. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Ontario]
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another magisterial combination of narrative and analysis from Sir Martin Gilbert
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prolific historian Sir Martin Gilbert has produced another of the works on 20th century history that he does so well, combining narrative and analytical history with well-chosen vivid contemporary accounts of the relevant events. many of these accounts have clearly been gathered by Sir Martin in his own interviews and correspondance with eye-witnesses.
Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, was a dreadful event. On 10th November 1938, in response to the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish man, the Nazi high command launched an officially sanctioned wave of hooliganism and crime directed against the German Jewish community. thousands of Jewish businesses and homes were trashed, synagogues (many centuries old) were burned, 93 people were murdered, many more were beaten or arrested and enough glass was smashed to account for the whole output of the Belgian glass industry for a year (hence the name of the event). as the series editors point out in their excellent introduction, Kristallnacht was a defining moment that marked the transition of Naziism from a rough populism to systematic criminality and set Nazi Germany on a downward trajectory away from any legitimacy and towards the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Sir Martin's short account is clear and vivid, his use of eye-witness accounts masterly. the horror of the events are dramatically brought home. Sir Martin also discusses the aftermath of Kristallnacht, again illustrated with personal stories, which led to 70 % of German and Austrian Jews leaving the Reich, many to safety in Britain and the United States, many, sadly to other European countries where they would be victimised after the German conquest in 1940.
there are minor criticisms of course. Martin Luther's inflammatory comments of 1538, referred to in the introduction, are symptomatic of thought at that time and don't really seem to relate to the events of 400 years later. By the 1930s Germany's Jews were some of the most integrated in the world and as Sir Martin points out the community had served their country with distinction in many spheres, not least during the First World War. And the quantum leap between the sanctioned hooliganism and criminality of Kristallnacht and the cold blooded, systematic, industrial killing of the Holocaust is not always clear although Sir Martin's closing thoughts that evil is a process is one that the world continues to needs to learn.
But there is hope. On the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1989 the Berlin Wall, symbol of another tyranny, finally fell and a free and united modern Germany was able to take her place among civilized nations.
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