November 9th, 1938.

In the late hours of that day, streets of cities across Germany erupted into anti-Semitic violence. The Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sturmabteilung (SA), acting on an order from Hitler himself, marched into the Jewish quarter of every town and wreaked destruction, while Hitler’s shadow-bureaucracy pulled the strings from above. Synagogues burned. Jewish-owned shops were vandalized and looted, their fractured display windows littering the sidewalks with glass. And, throughout Germany, the homes of Jewish families were systematically raided, robbed, and in many cases, razed to the ground.

Far from resisting, many fanatical Germans took part in the horror. In Esslingen, Nazi party members stormed a Jewish orphanage, threw books and religious insignia and children’s belongings into massive bonfires, and eventually burned the orphanage itself, leaving the children shivering in the cold autumn darkness. Hitler Youth members marched into Jewish cemeteries with sledgehammers and smashed the gravestones, in some cases exhuming the bodies, and the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass shook otherwise quiet residential streets nationwide as opportunistic neighbors took “revenge” on the Jewish families in their neighborhoods. Normal Germans, even the majority that disapproved, stayed locked in their homes, powerless. To speak against the pogrom would brand them as traitors, landing them in front of a judge for a sham-trial and then a sentencing to Buchenwald or Dachau, where they’d be labeled political dissidents and forced to perform backbreaking labor in starvation conditions.

A burning apartment, set alight by the SA members running past.

The sunrise of November 10th highlighted a Germany ablaze. Where there were once homes, there was now ash. Sidewalks were crowded out by debris, remnants of the night’s destruction. In Berlin, where streets had become nigh impassable by the shards of shattered glass from destroyed Jewish storefronts, people started to call the pogrom Kristallnacht: the night of broken glass.

A mother and her child walk past a destroyed Jewish-owned store.

Thousands of Jews were forced to flee their ancestral homes, piling into trains headed for Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Vienna. They carried little, their possessions stolen and their livelihoods burned. The many who didn’t or couldn’t leave cowered behind locked doors, terrified of leaving their homes for days after the pogrom. Almost thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and Nazi reports recorded that over a hundred had been killed (a number that almost-definitely is a drastic underestimate, at the minimum discounting the three hundred that committed suicide on seeing their lives destroyed).

Jews arrested during Kristallnacht form up for roll call at Buchenwald.

For the Third Reich, Kristallnacht had been an unadulterated success. They had successfully fomented and executed a nationwide campaign of unbridled destructive fury against the Jews, extrajudicially detaining and murdering hundreds of them, and they hadn’t encountered any meaningful resistance. This emboldened the Nazis tremendously, and from here, it’s not hard to see the regime’s progression to the mass detention of Jews in Poland and Russia, the complete segregation and deprivation of Jews in all occupied territories, and eventually, in its last genocidal burst, the rise of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno, where almost three million Jews were systematically shot, gassed, or deliberately worked to death between 1943 and 1945.