Introduction: American Religious Groups and Kristallnacht

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Maria Mazzenga

Published:

2009

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan US

News of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that transpired in Germany on November 9–10, 1938, shocked the people of the United States. The pogrom followed the shooting on November 7 of the third secretary at the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a young man devastated by news of the deportation of his family from Germany to Poland by the Nazis weeks before. In the Nazi-sanctioned violence following vom Rath’s death on November 9, 91 Jews were killed, and hundreds more beaten. Thousands of Jewish shops and homes were smashed. More than 1,000 synagogues were destroyed. Thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps—where more than 1,000 died. Due to the systematic, thorough, and widespread nature of the violence against Jews during the Kristallnacht pogrom, most scholars now view it as the beginning of the Holocaust.1

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