Nadene Goldfoot
Today is Holocaust Day in Israel and wherever their ambassadors are residing, for they can't forget this day of remembrance. Jews in Germany were reminded of who they were to the Germans on November 9, 1938, when the government ordered that all Jewish stores, homes, synagogues be destroyed. The glass panes on their store were all broken, so this day is also remembered as the day of broken glass. It was called Kristallnacht.
My uncle by marriage's father was forced to clean the streets, even though he was a vet from WWI. It didn't matter. He was a Jew.
Yet people here in the USA were watching the news about the newsworthy killing of a black man, Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee by 5 black policemen at a traffic stop, something that has happened to more than one black male in the past few years. They had slipped back to their gang days and still were the Scorpion Gang, evidently since that has been mentioned. Gang behavior brings out gang rapes and gang tough guys, forgetting they were the police. Is that what happens with anti-Semitism?
Nothing was mentioned about remembering the 6 million Jews that were slaughtered simply because they were Jews.
Kristallnacht was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht (literally 'Crystal Night') comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered.
Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany drew worldwide attention. The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."
And what did our president Franklin D. Roosevelt say about this? Nothing.
The United States continued to keep on having good relations with Germany
from 1933 to 1941 when they entered the war. The USA was in a Depression
and evidently that's all that worried him.
Immigration of Jews never reached the full potential of allowed
German immigration. It remained way below the allowed number of
entries. Roosevelt did nothing to help the Jews.
American Visa checkers in Germany found reason to not allow
most Jews a visa.
Evidently the US Virgin Islands opened their door to Jews after Kristallnacht
Jewish doctors were known to take advantage of this though most were
scared off with reports of jungles, wild animals, etc. and they benefitted the
native population with medical care, education, etc.
The ship, St. Louis with 938 Jewish passengers had been turned back when
it arrived in Cuba, and was returned to Germany where the Jews died.
The USA continued to turn away Jews, saying they only had tourist visas for
most places, and wouldn't accept them. Jews were turned down entrance to
the USA because they had to have a home, and they were homeless. So
they were returned to Germany. It was a deliberate Catch 22.
The Germans used a Nazi's murder as their excuse. Vom Rath was born in Frankfurt am Main to an aristocratic family, the son of a high-ranking public official, Gustav vom Rath. He attended a school in Breslau, and then studied law at Bonn, Munich and Königsberg, until 1932, when he joined the Nazi Party and became a career diplomat. In April 1933 he became a member of the SA, the party's paramilitary unit. In 1935, after a posting in Bucharest, he was posted to the German embassy in Paris. Regarding the "Jewish Question", Rath expressed regret that the German Jews had to suffer but argued that the anti-Semitic laws were "necessary" to allow the Volksgemeinschaft to flourish.
On the morning of 7 November 1938, Polish-German Jew Herschel Grynszpan, 17, went to the German embassy in Paris and asked to speak with an embassy official. After he had learned of the deportation of his parents from Germany to the Polish frontier, Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris. He shot the 29-year-old Vom Rath five times, mortally wounding him with bullets to the spleen, stomach and pancreas. He had a postcard on him written to his parents that read, "With God's help. My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me, the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do. Forgive me." Remember, anti-Semitic acts had been happened since 1933
in Germany. In the first half of , numerous laws were passed restricting Jewish economic activity and occupational opportunities. In July 1938, a law was passed (effective January 1, 1939) requiring all Jews to carry identification cards. On October 28, 17,000 Jews of citizenship, many of whom had been living in for decades, were arrested and relocated across the Polish border. The Polish government refused to admit them so they were interned in “relocation camps” on the Polish frontier.
 Germans pass broken window of Jewish-owned shop () |
Among the deportees was Zindel Grynszpan, who had been born in western Poland and had moved to , where he established a small store, in 1911. On the night of October 27, Grynszpan and his family were forced out of their home by German police. His store and the family’s possessions were confiscated and they were forced to move over the Polish border.
Grynszpan’s seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, was living with an uncle in . Herschel received a postcard from his sister Berta describing how the family had been arrested and sent by cattle car at night without food or water to the Polish border. Once they reached the frontier, the guards forced the Jews to run, whipping those who were not obedient or quick enough to escape the lash. Inside Poland, the Jews were housed in horse stables still filthy with dung.
The letter infuriated Herschel. He decided to seek revenge for the treatment of his family. Little did this 17 year old teen realize that this would cause even more Jews to love everything they had including many of their lives. His revenge harmed all Jews everywhere, though it was bound to happen anyway. Anti-Semitism was at its height. As a kid, he had no way of knowing how his act would affect the Jewish people.
Ironically, Vom Rath was under investigation by the because he was suspected of lacking the proper zealotry, particularly toward the Jews. Grynszpan knew nothing about the man except he represented the government that had deported and abused his family. When Vom Rath asked to see the document he was carrying,
Herschel shouted, “You are a sale boche [filthy kraut] and here, in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, is your document!” He then fired five shots at close range, the first two penetrated the diplomat’s stomach, the rest missed. Vom Rath was wounded but still conscious. Herschel seemed surprised he wasn’t dead and stood calmly in the office as the scene grew chaotic.
Herschel was not your typical Ashkenazi German Jew.
The Grynszpan family was known as Ostjuden ("Eastern Jews") by the Germans and many West European Jews. The "Ostjuden" usually spoke Yiddish and tended to be more religiously observant "Orthodox", impoverished, less educated, and less assimilated than German Jews. Given the Ostjuden situation in Germany, Grynszpan (unlike German Jews, who tended to see themselves as Germans first and Jews second) grew up with an intense sense of Jewishness. He dropped out of school at age 14. Grynszpan was considered by his teachers to be intelligent, if rather lazy, a student who never seemed to try to excel at his studies. He later complained that his teachers disliked him because he was an Ostjude, and he was treated as an outcast both by his German teachers and fellow students. As a child and a teenager, Grynszpan was known for his violent temper and his tendency to respond to antisemitic insults with his fists and was frequently suspended from school for fighting. Of course, this report comes after the fact of his attack on
the anti-Semite.
Herschel felt he didn't fit in, a feeling many Blacks might have felt in the USA. The expression 'Eastern European Jewry' has two meanings. Its first meaning refers to the current political spheres of the Eastern European countries and its second meaning refers to the Jewish communities in Russia and Poland. The phrase 'Eastern European Jews' or 'Jews of the East' (from German: Ostjuden) was established during the 19th century in the German Empire and in the western provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, aiming to distinguish the integrating Jews in Central Europe from those Jews who lived in the East. This feature deals with the second meaning of the concept of Eastern European Jewry- the Jewish groups that lived in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Romania, Hungary and modern-day Moldova in collective settlement (from Hebrew: Kibbutz- קיבוץ). Many of whom spoke Yiddish.
Resource:
JBS TV, FDR's Response to Kristallnacht
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht#:~:text=Kristallnacht%20(German%20pronunciation%3A%20%5Bk%CA%81%C9%AAs%CB%88talna%CF%87t,)%20paramilitary%20and%20Schutzstaffel%20(SS)
https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/photograph-of-jews-cleaning-streets-in-vienna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_European_Jewry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Grynszpan
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-kristallnacht
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_vom_Rath#Assassination_and_motives
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