The following provides background on Kristallnacht (Night of Glass), one of the pivotal events in the Nazi"s campaign to destroy German and, ultimately, world Jewry.

The following is excerpted from Robert E. Conot's Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).

"Among the emigrants was Zindel Grynszpan, who had been born in western Poland when it was part of the Imperial Reich and had moved to Hanover, where he established a small store, in 1911. On the night of October 27, Grynszpan and his family were rousted out of their home. Grynszpan's store and the family's possessions were confiscated. Penniless, famished, soaked to the skin and freezing, they were herded over the Polish border.

Zindel Grinszpan's seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, was living with an uncle in Paris. When he received a letter from his father containing an account of the expulsion, he decided to strike back in order to demonstrate that "Jews are not animals." Resolving to assassinate the German ambassador, he went to the embassy on November 7. When he was unable to get near his target, he settled on a more accessible diplomat, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Rath, who, as it happened, was an anti-Nazi, was critically wounded.

Grynszpan's action was doubly unfortunate in that it came two days before the annual party ceremony commemorating the November 1923 putsch in Munich. Hitler was just leaving the evening festivities in Munich on November 8 when Goebbels brought him word that Rath had died. Grynszpan's provocation could be turned to good account, just as van der Lubbe's firing of the Reichstag had been, Goebbels argued. For years the party had been fighting a futile battle against Germans shopping in Jewish stores, where prices were low and quality better. Goebbels' perpetual propaganda that the failure of the standard of living to improve was due to the plotting of the international Jewish financiers was wearing thin. Here was the opportunity to give the average Nazi a chance to vent his spleen in a "spontaneous" outburst of indignation, to terrorize the Jews into a mass exodus, to take the wealthy ones hostage for ransom, and to dramatize to Jews in other countries what would happen to their coreligionists in Germany if they did not cease to speak out and halt their economic boycott.

Hitler, in a state of high excitement, agreed. To him, the assassination was not the act of a desperate Jewish youth, but a conspiracy by the "International Jews." The victim was not a minor foreign office official, but, symbolically, he himself. Goebbels, returning to the party leaders who remained gathered, reported that anti-Jewish demonstrations during which shops were demolished and synagogues set on fire had broken out in two districts. The Fuehrer, at his, Goebbel's, suggestion, "has decided that such demonstrations are not to be prepared or organized by the party, but so far as they originate spontaneously, they are not to be discouraged either."

The Gauleiters (district chiefs), Kreisleiter (county chiefs), and SA and SS leaders were accustomed to reading between the lines of such declarations. If they had any doubts, they were resolved by a teletype message sent out a few minutes before midnight by Heinrich Muller, the head of the Gestapo, to all central police stations.

"1. Actions against the Jews and in particular against their synagogues will occur in a short time in all of Germany. However, it is to be made certain that plundering and similar lawbreaking will be held to a minimum.
2. Insofar as important archive material is present in the synagogues, it is to be secured by immediate measures.
3. The seizure of some twenty to thirty Jews in the Reich is to be prepared. Wealthy Jews above all are to be chosen. More detailed directives will appear in the course of this night."

This message was followed an hour and a half later by one from Heydrich. Heydrich directed that the police leaders were immediately to confer with the party leaders "about the handling of the demonstrations. Only such measures may be taken which do not jeopardize German life or property (for instance, burning of synagogues only if there is no danger of fires for the neighborhood). Business establishments and homes of Jews may be destroyed but not looted. The police have been instructed to supervise the execution of these directives and arrest looters. Subjects of foreign countries may not be molested even if they are Jews . . . For the performance of the measures of the Security Police, officers of the Criminal Police as well as members of the SD, the special troops, and the SS may be used. . . . After the arrests have been carried out, the appropriate concentration camp is to be contacted immediately with a view to a quick transfer of the Jews to the camps. Special care is to be taken that Jews arrested on the basis of this directive will not be mistreated."

Since these teletypes were open to considerable leeway in interpretation, officials in various jurisdictions reacted differently, and these differences were exacerbated as the directives were passed on from one level to the next. The casuistry, hypocritical criminality, and moral perversity of the orders were typical of the Nazi regime. The Kristallnacht, as it came to be known (The term "Krystallnacht", coined by Funk, was a measure of poetic license, and referred to the fact that the shards of glass from the thousands of broken windows glittered like crystal in the streets.), joined the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre as an example of an aberrant government's insensate incitement of riot against a portion of its own subjects.

The attacks were intended to take place under the cover of darkness; and in some places the riots got under way at two or three o'clock in the morning. But since, in most areas, a few hours of organization were required, people on their way to work in the bleak hours of the dawn were greeted by the astonishing sight of men and youths shattering the doors and windows of synagogues, applying gasoline, then setting the structures afire -- while all the time firemen and their engines stood by to keep the flames from spreading, and police officers were on hand to preserve order.

The assault against Jewish stores was launched concurrently with the firing of the synagogues -- and here confusion reigned. In some cases merely the windows were smashed; in others the windows were smashed, the shelves ripped off the walls, and the contents chopped to pieces; in still others, the goods were heaved into the streets; in a lesser number, the entire establishment was put to the torch. To Germans starved of consumer goods and squeezed by inflation, it seemed madness to destroy what was in short supply; so widespread looting -- or, in many cases, simply scavenging -- set in.

This was the visible element of the Kristallnacht, and it was met by the average German, steeped in law, order, and the sanctity of property, with numbness and incomprehension; the same Nazis who had rioted against the Communists, Social Democrats, and Weimar Republic now seemed to be rioting against themselves.

(No one, of course, was fooled by the pretence of spontaneity or noninvolvement of the Nazi Party when the burning of the synagogues was orchestrated in every detail, and the men leading the rampages were the neighborhood block leaders and SA Scharfuehrer [sergeants]. If there was one element lacking in the German character, it was spontaneity.)

Yet it was the invisible and theoretically unsanctioned activity that was by far the more horrifying. Armed Nazis broke into Jewish homes throughout the land, smashed furniture, threw belongings into the street, looted money and valuables, and raped women and girls as young as thirteen before the eyes of their families. Any sign of resistance -- even a word or a gesture -- was suppressed with ruthless brutality.

Women as well as men and boys were beaten, knifed, and shot. Pets were hurled out of upper-story windows alongside their owners. Jews were plunged into ice-cold rivers. When they tried to claw their way out, German boys were encouraged to throw bricks at them, onlookers were ordered to spit at them, and party members kicked them in the face. A number of the victims drowned. Those few Germans who dared come to the defense of the Jews were beaten and threatened with incarceration. A few prominent Germans who protested were arrested. Goebbles announced that there was "a spontaneous wave of righteous indignation throughout Germany as a result of the cowardly Jewish murder of Third Secretary vom Rath." Jews were imprisoned for assault when they tried to defend themselves, and for arson when their shops were burned down.

More than one hundred Jews were killed; and thirty thousand men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, nearly twenty percent of the total, were picked up and packed off to concentration camps. Goebbels, lying with inimitable crudeness and aplomb, told foreign reporters: "Not a Jew has had a hair disturbed." All stories to the contrary were `stinking lies."