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Local residents watch as a synagogue in Ober Ramstadt, Germany, burns during Kristallnacht. Firefighters made no attempt to put out the blaze. Photo from the Trudy Isenberg Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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The road to the Holocaust
Posted 5/19/2012 Updated 5/19/2012
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Commentary by Master Sgt. Mark Olsen
177th Fighter Wing Public Affairs
5/19/2012 - Egg Harbor Township, NJ --
Beethoven, Nietzsche and Kandinsky.
Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels.
The country that produced some of the world's greatest composers, philosophers and artists also gave the world the "Final Solution" -- the Holocaust -- an entire political and physical apparatus developed for the purpose of "efficiently" murdering entire races of people.
The Holocaust did not spring into existence overnight. In fact, for a person living in Germany, the road to the holocaust probably seemed incremental.
It began in 1933 when the Nazi government enacted a series of laws restricting the rights of German Jews including being able to earn a living, full citizenship and education. By 1935, the Nazis had enacted 48 additional laws - the most abhorrent were the "Nuremberg Laws" created 'for the protection of German blood and honour' (by) prohibiting Jews from being citizens of the Reich and forbidding marriage between "those of German or related blood" and Jews, Roma (Gypsies), blacks, or their offspring.
By 1938, the German government, emboldened by a lack of international response to what foreign governments referred to as a German internal problem, expelled 12,000 Polish-born Jews. As they left, neighbors and Nazi party members broke into their homes to steal their remaining possessions. Sent to the Polish border, 4,000 were allowed into Poland, the rest were denied entry.
Herschel Grynszpan, the son of one of the deported couples, was living in Paris at the time. On Nov. 3, he received a postcard from his sister asking for help. The next day, he read about the deportations in a newspaper. On Nov. 6, Grynszpan bought a revolver and the following day went to the German embassy in Paris and "in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews," shot Secretary of Legation Ernst vom Rath, fatally wounding him. Grynszpan was arrested, and remanded to the Gestapo where he vanished without a trace.
Rath's death gave the German government the opportunity to launch an orchestrated wave of "grassroots" anti-Jewish violence. On Nov. 9, Kristallnacht (Crystal Night or Night of the Broken Glass) began.
Between 36 and 91 Jews were killed; 30,000 more were deported to Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, where hundreds died within weeks of arrival; 267 synagogues were burned and more than 7,000 Jewish shops, businesses and homes were vandalized and ransacked. The prisoners were released only after they agreed to transfer their property to "Aryans" and leave Germany.
State authorities made no attempt to interfere or stop the rioting. In fact, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the office which oversaw the Gestapo (the state secret police), the regular police and the German intelligence service, sent a telegram nationwide to all police headquarters and stations with the following instruction: "The demonstrations are not to be prevented by the police".
Very few governments condemned Germany, and none leveled economic sanctions or threats of military action for the events of Nov. 9-10.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stated in a private letter: "No doubt Jews aren't a loveable people; I don't care about them myself; - but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom."
The nightmare had begun.
By the end of World War II, more than 11 million people, which included Jews, Poles, Soviet Slavs and Russian prisoners of war, Roma, Africans and some Asians, communists, trade unionists, Freemasons, enemy nationals, along with the handicapped and mentally ill, German homosexuals, Catholic clergy, Confessing Church members (a German Christian resistance movement), Jehovah's Witnesses, prostitutes, alcoholics, drug addicts and criminals had been murdered.
Editor's note: Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 19) and the Days of Remembrance (April 15-22) memorialize all who died in the Holocaust. This year marks the 74th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.
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