Never Again - Kristallnacht 70 Years On

Sound of Broken Glass Still Echoes from Nazi Atrocity

By Ciaran Walsh

November 10, 2008 "RT" -- - November 9th is a bitter-sweet day for Germany and her people. On that day in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated to mark Germany’s defeat and the end of World War I.

Exactly five years later, Hitler failed in a coup d'état in Munich and November 9th, 1989, also marks the fall of the Berlin Wall.

However the date of one of Germany darkest hours, which is marking its 70th anniversary, casts a dark shadow over the rest.

Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass, occurred on November 9th and 10th in 1938. The two nights of state-backed violence against Jews and their property is widely regarded as the prelude to the most shameful part of Germany’s past - the holocaust.

It is an event that former Berliner, Dr Fred Lyon, will never forget: “I was a 10 year old child and November 9th is vividly imprinted on my mind. My father awoke me and told me to get dressed as quickly as I could and come with him to our synagogue. W e ran all the way and we were met by the caretaker of the building who took us in the back door.

“The caretaker put a Torah in each of our arms and we carried them outside. As we walked out of the building we were met by this angry, scowling, terrible looking man in the brown uniform of the SA (Stormtroopers). He and some others tore the Torahs out of our arms and proceeded to throw them in the bonfire which was burning in front of the synagogue.

“I was frightened and concerned and so I looked around me and the bonfire and saw many other people - civilians not uniforms - that seemed to be celebrating as if this was a holiday. They were singing and laughing. I noticed the fire engine but the fire engines did nothing - they were just watching.”

As a child, Fred was confused and terrified. For many other Jews, the experience had even deadlier consequences.

As many as one hundred Jews were murdered in their homes and on the streets over the two days. The orgy of destruction was followed by the immediate deportation of 30,000 Jewish men to concentrations camps. Dr Lyon’s father, an Iron Cross of Valour decorated veteran of World War I, was among them.

The world was outraged. Foreign journalists who witnessed the events reported in the fullest detail to their newspapers, which gave the destruction wide coverage. Foreign diplomats alerted their foreign officers to the anti-Jewish excesses of that night.

However, the foundations for the violent persecution lay three years earlier. Sir Martin Gilbert, author of ‘Kristallnacht – Prelude to Destruction’, says: “Ever since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 turned the 600,000 Jews of Germany into second class citizens, the Nazi leaders had been looking for a way to frighten them into a mass exodus.”

It was those attempts to stimulate an exodus that provided the catalyst to Kristallnacht. In October 1938, using a legal loophole, more than 12,000 Polish-born Jews, who were then living in Germany, were taken by train over the Polish border and dumped there. One of those deported sent a graphic description of their grim plight to her Paris-based brother, Hersh Grynspan.

Sir Martin describes what happened: “Incensed by what he read, Grynspan went to the German Embassy in Paris and shot a junior German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, who died the following day. Even as vom Rath lay dying, the Nazi leaders ordered a savage reprisal, one they had long been preparing. All they needed was an excuse. This they now had.”

On the morning of November 9, when vom Rath’s death had become known, the German newspapers – all of them controlled by the Nazi Party - denounced the Jewish people as murderers, and demanded immediate and severe punishment. The state sponsored campaign of terror had begun.

As Gilbert says, there was no turning back. “Hitler was told on the evening of November 9 that attacks on Jews had begun in several cities. He told his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels: ‘Demonstrations should be allowed to continue. The police should be withdrawn. For once the Jews should get the feel of popular anger.’”

Starting in the early hours of November 10th, while it was still dark, Nazi stormtroopers rampaged through the streets of every German town. That night, a thousand synagogues were destroyed and tens of thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked. In the morning, as the burning and looting continued, German schoolboys and Hitler Youth were taken from their classrooms to join the orgy of destruction.

Up until now, the anti-Jewish feeling had been growing. But after Kristallnacht the anger was so concentrated and directed that it led to what we now call the Holocaust.

Sir Martin Gilbert illustrates that these two nights of terror mark the moment when the systematic attempt to rid the world of Jews began: “Before Kristallnacht the Jews could hope that Nazism might moderate its racial policies; after Kristallnacht, that hope could no longer be sustained.”

Dr Lyon had felt the ‘popular anger’ before. Two years prior to Kristallnacht he received a flavour of what was to come when he was in the supposed sanctuary of the classroom: “In 1936 towards the end of term we were told we could no longer attend school because we were Jewish - my teacher, who was already wearing a swastika, called me up in front of the class. He demanded I drop my pants and underpants and evidently I was a little hesitant in doing so, for he ripped my pants down and pointed to me and said to the class: ‘This is what a Jewish male looks like, you can always distinguish a Jewish male just look at his circumcised penis.’ You can imagine my fear and humiliation; I just pulled up my pants, took my schoolbooks and walked out of the school never to return.”

Young and confused by his treatment and the violence he saw during Kristallnacht, it was only in the days following the attacks that Fred could fully comprehend what was happening. Hours after Kristallnacht, Fred found himself walking among the broken glass and smoke and debris: “I walked around Jewish stores and saw some of them completely ransacked and destroyed on the interior and other stores with intact windows with the word ‘Jude’ in white paint. Outside one store a Nazi was holding a sign saying that no Gentile person should enter a Jewish store and patronise it. It was then that I started to understand what was happening.”

The things Dr Lyon saw when he was a ten-year-old have not faded with time. "Those were things that I remember; it's like they've been imprinted in my mind and I see them every once in a while. I'll wake up at night with nightmares and my wife will say, 'is it the same old story?' And I'll say it is."