Kirstallnacht, Night of Broken Glass, November Pogrom
On the night between November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi authorities unleashed a pogrom across the Third Reich, encompassing Nazi Germany, Austria, and parts of former Czechoslovakia in response to the murder of the Nazi German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, on November 7. The news that the Jewish youth of Polish origin Herschel Grynszpan shot Rath reached the Nazi leadership in Munich where they commemorated the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The antisemitic onslaught destroyed lives and property, left Jewish communities deprived of their synagogues and ceremonial objects, and continued in mass deportations and financial deprivation. About 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps and the Jewish community was heavily fined to cover the reconstruction. The government that incited the aggression forced the victims to take financial responsibility while their property and insurance policies were taken from them.
The following list of recent publications available from Emory Libraries and other institutions aims to assist readers in learning about this event. Kristallnacht is commemorated annually all over the world. November 9 and 10, 2023, marks the 85th anniversary of these pogroms.
Archives and Museums:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's encyclopedia entry "Kristallnacht" offers a wealth of information and includes links to various items in the museum's collection.
Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remember Center's online exhibition on the November Pogrom is available here.
The Leo Baeck Institute's collections offer archival resources on the history and memory of Kristallnacht.
The Jewish Women's Archive provide the perspective of women surviving and remembering Kristallnacht.
The Jewish Museum Berlin's online exhibition of Kristallnacht is available here.
In Hamburg, the Bornplatz synagogue is rebuilt for the 85th anniversary of the November pogrom. The Bornplatzsynagogue Foundation's website offers a history of the building from design to inauguration, through destruction, and to reconstruction.
Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover by ISBN: 0191955531Publication Date: 2022This book revises standard assumptions among historians of Nazi Germany that physical violence against Jews slowly accelerated from 1933 onwards, with a first high point in November 1938 ("Kristallnacht"), and then further escalating to deportations and the mass murder of the Holocaust. Based on documentary evidence from about twenty German archives, the present work shows that there were many hundreds, possibly thousands, of violent attacks on Jews in Germany ranging from brutal assaults, abductions, and expulsions to murder. The work examines in detail the reaction of those German institutions and elites that were still in a position to react and protest in the spring of 1933. It makes two essentially new contributions to the literature on the history of the Third Reich: (1) a detailed examination of the antisemitic violence-from boycotts, violent attacks, robbery, extortion, abductions, and humiliating "pillory marches" to grievous bodily harm and murder-which has hitherto not been adequately recognized; (2) an analysis of the reactions of those institutions that still had the capacity to protest against Nazi attacks and legislative measures-the Protestant Church, the Catholic Church, the bureaucracies, and Hitler's conservative coalition partner, the DNVP-and the mindset of the elites who led them, to determine their various responses to flagrant antisemitic abuses. Individual protests against violent attacks, the April boycott, and Nazi legislative measures were already hazardous in March and April 1933, but established institutions in the German State and society were still able to voice their concerns and raise objections. By doing so, they might have stopped or at least postponed a radicalization that eventually led to the pogrom of 1938 and the Holocaust.
State Violence in Nazi Germany by Call Number: DD256.5 .M348 2020ISBN: 9780367409852Publication Date: 2019-12-20Through analyses of three eventful years in Nazi Germany's history - the Kristallnacht pogrom, the invasion of Poland and the invasion of Soviet Russia - this book explores the violence of states. All three events were part of the Nazi colonial project and led to mass killings, eventually resulting in the systematic murder of Jews becoming a major war aim - one that Germany would pursue to the end, even when it became clear that the military conflict could no longer be won. Drawing on voluminous historical and sociological literature, as well as documentary and contemporary evidence, the author presents a new account of the phenomenon of extreme state violence as a special category of violence, in which the armed forces, maintained in a state of readiness, are used unnecessarily and excessively, often on thin pretexts, and, unlike coercive violence, only rarely for the purposes of carrying messages to the public. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, history and anthropology concerned with mass and state violence.
New Perspectives on Kristallnacht by ISBN: 1612496164Publication Date: 2019-12-15On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed anunprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria,and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazidiplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out ofthe country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinaryGermans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) andransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops,and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentrationcamps. Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes a series of articles presented at an internationalconference titled "New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogromin Global Comparison." Assessing events 80 years after the violent anti-Jewish pogromof 1938, contributors to this volume offer new cutting-edge scholarship on theevent and its repercussions. Contributors include scholars from the UnitedStates, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom who represent a wide variety ofdisciplines, including history, political science, and Jewish and media studies.Their essays discuss reactions to the pogrom by victims and witnesses insideNazi Germany as well as by foreign journalists, diplomats, Jewish organizations,and Jewish print media. Several contributors to the volume analyze postwarnarratives of and global comparisons to Kristallnacht, with the aim ofsituating this anti-Jewish pogrom in its historical context, as well as itsplace in world history.
Die "Reichskristallnacht" in Schleswig-Holstein: der Novemberpogrom im historischen Kontext by Call Number: DS134.36.S35 R45 2016ISBN: 9783943423303Publication Date: 2016Papers presented in conjunction with an exhibition to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Reichskristallnacht, held 2013-14 at the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, later traveling to other north German museums.- Rückblick: in Erinnerung an die Reichspogromnacht 9. November 1938. Für Altsaxofon und Klavier : 2002 / byCall Number: M269 .M36 R83 2014Publication Date: 2014Saxophone and piano music to commemorate Kristallnacht. Contents: I. -- II. Elegy -- III. -- IV. Lament.
A World Without Jews by ISBN: 9780300190465Publication Date: 2014-04-15A groundbreaking reexamination of the Holocaust and how Germans understood their genocidal project: "Insightful [and] chilling." --Kirkus ReviewsWhy exactly did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible everywhere in Germany on November 9, 1938? The perplexing event has not been adequately accounted for by historians in their large-scale assessments of how and why the Holocaust occurred. In this gripping new analysis, Alon Confino draws on an array of archives across three continents to propose a penetrating new assessment of one of the central moral problems of the twentieth century. To a surprising extent, Confino demonstrates, the mass murder of Jews during the war years was powerfully anticipated in the culture of the prewar years.The author shifts his focus away from the debates over what the Germans did or did not know about the Holocaust and explores instead how Germans came to conceive of the idea of a Germany without Jews. He traces the stories the Nazis told themselves--where they came from and where they were heading--and how those stories led to the conclusion that Jews must be eradicated in order for the new Nazi civilization to arise. The creation of this new empire required that Jews and Judaism be erased from Christian history, and this was the inspiration--and justification--for Kristallnacht. As Germans entertained the idea of a future world without Jews, the unimaginable became imaginable, and the unthinkable became real."At once so disturbing and so hypnotic to read . . . Deserves the widest possible audience." --Open Letters Monthly
The Third Reich Sourcebook by Call Number: DD256.5 .T5245 2013ISBN: 0520208676Publication Date: 2013-07-10No documentation of National Socialism can be undertaken without the explicit recognition that the "German Renaissance" promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horror--World War II and the genocide of European Jewry. With The Third Reich Sourcebook, editors Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman present a comprehensive collection of newly translated documents drawn from wide-ranging primary sources, documenting both the official and unofficial cultures of National Socialist Germany from its inception to its defeat and collapse in 1945. Framed with introductions and annotations by the editors, the documents presented here include official government and party pronouncements, texts produced within Nazi structures, such as the official Jewish Cultural League, as well as documents detailing the impact of the horrors of National Socialism on those who fell prey to the regime, especially Jews and the handicapped. With thirty chapters on ideology, politics, law, society, cultural policy, the fine arts, high and popular culture, science and medicine, sexuality, education, and other topics, The Third Reich Sourcebook is the ultimate collection of primary sources on Nazi Germany.- New Perspectives on Kristallnacht by ISBN: 1612496164Publication Date: 2019-12-15On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed anunprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria,and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazidiplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out ofthe country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinaryGermans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) andransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops,and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentrationcamps. Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes a series of articles presented at an internationalconference titled "New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogromin Global Comparison." Assessing events 80 years after the violent anti-Jewish pogromof 1938, contributors to this volume offer new cutting-edge scholarship on theevent and its repercussions. Contributors include scholars from the UnitedStates, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom who represent a wide variety ofdisciplines, including history, political science, and Jewish and media studies.Their essays discuss reactions to the pogrom by victims and witnesses insideNazi Germany as well as by foreign journalists, diplomats, Jewish organizations,and Jewish print media. Several contributors to the volume analyze postwarnarratives of and global comparisons to Kristallnacht, with the aim ofsituating this anti-Jewish pogrom in its historical context, as well as itsplace in world history.
Articles and Book Chapters
Goldman, Karla, and Jonathan D. Sarna. “‘DON’T HUSH ME!’: American Jewish College Students and Jewish Identity in the Interwar Period (1939).” In New Perspectives in American Jewish History: A Documentary Tribute to Jonathan D. Sarna, edited by Mark A. Raider and Gary Phillip Zola, 223–33. Brandeis University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1zvc7j4.35.
Goldman, Natasha. “Marking Absence: Remembrance and Hamburg’s Holocaust Memorials.” In Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past, edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul B. Jaskot, 251–72. University of Michigan Press, 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.286865.15.
Jacobs, Janet. “Memorializing the Sacred: Kristallnacht in German National Memory.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 3 (2008): 485–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20486936.
Jonca, Karol. “The Expulsion of Polish Jews from the Third Reich in 1938.” In Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 8: Jews in Independent Poland, 1918-1939, edited by ANTONY POLONSKY, EZRA MENDELSOHN, and JERZY TOMASZEWSKI, 255–81. Liverpool University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv4rfrpv.20.
Marrus, Michael R. “The Strange Story of Herschel Grynszpan.” The American Scholar 57, no. 1 (1988): 69–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41211491.
Steinweis, Alan E. “The Trials of Herschel Grynszpan: Anti-Jewish Policy and German Propaganda, 1938-1942.” German Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 471–88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27668588.