Kristallnacht pogroms swept Nazi Germany
On this day · 9 November 1938
On one coordinated November night, Nazi mobs torched synagogues across Germany and turned discrimination into open, state-backed violence.
On the night of 9-10 November 1938, a nationwide wave of anti-Jewish violence tore through Germany and German-annexed Austria. Nazi leaders disguised the rampage as spontaneous public outrage, but it was orchestrated from the top: police and security forces were ordered to stand aside while mobs burned, looted, and beat.
The scale was staggering. More than 1,400 synagogues were set ablaze and roughly 7,500 Jewish businesses and homes were wrecked, leaving streets glittering with shattered glass, the detail that gave the night its name, Kristallnacht. Around 400 people were murdered or driven to suicide, and some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and shipped to the Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.
It marked the transition from discrimination to systematic persecution.
The Nazi state then forced a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks on the very community it had attacked. The pretext was the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris, but the pogrom revealed a regime ready to move from harassment toward annihilation.
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