Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (Making History)

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When his wife no longer has enough milk to feed them both, in desperation he throws his daughter into the forest, hoping that she’ll be saved. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the 'fun'.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels orchestrated a “spontaneous” reaction to the political assassination. Herschel Grynszpan carried a revolver and thoughts of revenge with him as he walked through the streets of Paris on the morning of November 7, 1938. It is believed the goods were brought by rail to the outskirts of the village and dumped on designated land. m. on 10 November 1938, Reinhard Heydrich sent an urgent secret telegram to the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; SiPo) and the Sturmabteilung (SA), containing instructions regarding the riots.A British newspaper told its readers that hundreds "are reported to be lying about, penniless and deserted, in little villages along the frontier near where they had been driven out by the Gestapo and left. This book is a good start to learning more about this subject, with a detailed bibliography for further reading. The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. Perkins subsequently apologized for making the comparisons with Nazi Germany, but otherwise stood by his letter, saying, "In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it's class demonization. In 1938, just after Kristallnacht, the psychologist Michael Müller-Claudius interviewed 41 randomly selected Nazi Party members on their attitudes towards racial persecution.

It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race. After he was taken to the office of Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath, Grynszpan fired five bullets at Vom Rath, two of which hit him in the abdomen. Word of his death reached Hitler that evening while he was with several key members of the Nazi party at a dinner commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. After ruining their property and their temples in a murderous attack, the Nazis then made their victims pay for all the damage from the “night of broken glass. Although violence against Jews had not been explicitly condoned by the authorities, there were cases of Jews being beaten or assaulted.Many sought asylum abroad; hundreds of thousands emigrated, but as Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936, "The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter. From the day Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, anti-Semitism had become encoded in the governmental policies of Nazi Germany. As the number of Jews and Romani wanting to leave increased, the restrictions against them grew, with many countries tightening their rules for admission. Plenty of “good Germans” simply turned the other way because whatever was going on didn’t affect them. Primo Levi, an Italian chemist, was arrested as a member of the anti-fascist resistance during the war and deported to Auschwitz.