PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Unwelcome visitors storming through your city isn't exactly the ideal way to be woken up in the middle of working towards a good night's rest, but for Jews living in the German Reich during the Holocaust period, being hated with a soul deep feeling wasn't a choice.
The hatred began mild, but only grew stronger and stronger as the time flew. In the beginning, Hitler and his Nazi Party only wanted to rid the Jews of their area, the idea of demolishing their every last smell didn't come to the mind of any race, even them, until late in the year of 1938.
On November 9th, 1938, Nazi forces stormed through the German Reich destroying, looting, and burning down every Jewish owned building, with the only reason being the act of a few days previous: a Nazi leader had been shot and killed by a child whose parents were escorted from their home in Germany simply because of their religion.
In 1933, an Anti-Jewish man named Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Hitler was infuriated, because Germany lost WWI, and needed some excuse as to how his country could've taken defeat. His immediate response was to find a group of people that could easily take full blame for the destruction: the Jews.
After this realization, Hitler began forming any ideas he could as to how to eliminate who he considered the reason for such a great loss.
It started slow, he'd find any place he could to deport the race, but after so long and so many people in need of a new home, the difficulties and need for a new way to rid the Jews became clearer.
The Jewish population was large, and not every place was willing to take in hundreds of thousands of people; there just wasn't enough room.
This is when the great push started: Hitler and his Nazi party would make sure that living anywhere near their area would be the worst experience the Jewish race had ever encountered, so that they would no longer be reluctant to rid the country.
The Jewish race was to be shunned, and their stores were not to be visited. Being a Jew in this period was near the same as being an African American in earlier years: both races were deprived of basic rights that other citizens could obtain.
But after so many encounters of bystanders trying to make the rights equal and Jews not following the Nazi party's ideal way of life for them, Hitler decided it was time to take a greater step and show them who was in control.
The night of Kristallnacht, November 9th, 1938, left shattered glass carpeting the streets, a total number of 2,500 or more Jews dead, 30,000 males sent to concentration camps, 7,767 buildings and synagogues destroyed or looted, and a bigger idea in the Nazi party's mind of just how much power they really had.
Both the Jews and any bystanders who weren't adding on to the destruction were left permanently scarred and terrified of what was to come, and the future only proved that they had every right to have nightmares and fear Hitler.
Freddie Knoller was a school boy in Vienna, Austria at the time and has allowed his bystander story to travel in many books and articles. The way he perceives the story is laced in fear and remorse for something he had no say in changing.
He says, "Somewhere around eleven that night, we heard a noise in our court-yard, and looking down we saw the SA (Nazi official) talking to our caretakers. He took them into the building.
My mother became hysterical: 'What are they going to do? Where are they going? Are they coming up to us?' My father turned off the lights so that the apartment was in darkness. Suddenly we heard a woman's shrill voice, and we heard the glass of a window breaking.
We heard a thud in the courtyard. We looked down and saw a body long there. We didn't know who it was until the woman, Mrs. Epstein from the first floor, came running into the courtyard, screaming and running to her husband's body."
Many other insider's stories have been told, but each one shares the same concept. The Nazis were compacted with hatred, never showing any sympathy for a human being if their race fell under the name "Jew".
People aren't born with such a great hatred bubbling in their stomach throughout their whole life, it's created, which didn't taking reading in between any lines to have the power to scare the Jews to suicide or fleeing the country.
During this tragedy, mobs roamed the streets yelling, "Beat the Jews in death!" Firefighters and police men stood by and watched the lives of many harmless people wash down the drain, and the glass on Jewish owned businesses weren't the only thing being shattered.
In the midst of it all, each and every Jew watched their lives be thrown to the ground and beaten, without being able to do a single thing to convince the Nazis to think of them any differently.
The night of Kristallnacht will forever be known as the turning point of the Holocaust, when the Jewish realized that this is now their life, even if it wasn’t a club they got to choose whether they signed up for or not.
Pure hatred firing in the minds of terrible, selfish, uneducated, controlling Germans caused a catastrophe of many, many years and millions of lives. On November 9th, 1938, over 2,500 innocent people watched at least one of their family members be escorted out of their home, because of their race.
Although this number may not sound huge, two thousand and five hundred people is much larger than the average amount of children attending a junior high school.
Overall, six million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust for a part of them that wouldn't be changed for someone else; Kristallnacht is only a small piece of destruction out of the hundreds of thousands of tragedies occurring during this period, but it will always be highlighted in the era because of its addition to the terror following and all of the lives lost.
