The situation for all Jews in the Reich suddenly became much clearer on the night of November 9/10, 1938, which has gone down in history as Reichskristall-nacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass.” Having decided that a demonstration of sweeping and spectacular violence was needed to prod the Jews to leave the country, Hitler and his aides were looking for a suitable pretext to launch a modern-day pogrom. This was conveniently delivered with the assassination in Paris of a German embassy official, Ernst vom Rath, by a young Polish Jew who was distraught over the expulsion of his parents from Germany in the recent deportation. When news of Rath’s death reached Berlin, the top Nazi officials were assembled in Munich to commemorate the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, as they did every year. After consulting with Hitler, Goebbels declared in a speech on November 9 that if the Rath assassination inspired “spontaneous anti-Jewish riots,” the Jews had only themselves to blame.
There was nothing spontaneous about what happened next. Acting on instructions from Goebbels, on the night of November 9/10 Nazi thugs, mainly from the SA, began attacking Jews and Jewish property in cities and villages across the Reich. They burned synagogues, wrecked shops, beat, raped, and murdered Jewish citizens. Some ninety-one Jews died in the attacks, over one hundred synagogues were burned, and about 7,500 shops lay in ruins, their shattered windows scattered in crystals on the sidewalks (hence the oft-used euphemistic term, “crystal night”). About 20,000 Jews were summarily arrested and carted off to concentration camps. Throughout the action, police forces made no effort to intervene, except occasionally to curtail looting; fire departments prevented blazes from spreading to non-Jewish properties, but otherwise kept their hoses coiled.
Although the attacks were especially vicious in rural areas, Berlin, regarded hitherto as something of a refuge for Jews from the provinces, was also very hard hit. In preparation for the action there, Police Chief von Helldorf ordered that gas and telephone lines to Jewish houses and shops be cut off. Barricades were placed around the areas to be targeted. Then, at 2:00 A.M., SA groups received the signal to embark on their “spontaneous” rampage. They immediately set fire to nine of Berlin’s twelve synagogues, among them the famed temple in Fasanenstrasse, which was completely gutted. The huge “New Synagogue” in Oranienburger-strasse, by contrast, received only light damage because a courageous lone policeman held the SA at bay. A handsome red brick synagogue in Worthstrasse in Prenz-lauer Berg was spared because it stood next to valued non-Jewish buildings, including a brewery. Jewish-owned shops around town were stripped of their wares and then wrecked. SA men carried off the loot, joined by townspeople who could not pass up such a bargain. Other targets included Jewish aid organizations and the Zionist headquarters on Meineckestrasse, which was reduced to “splintered wood and mounds of torn records.” Thugs invaded Jewish mansions in Grunewald to arrest the men, rape the women, and collect the contents. The Jews who were pulled out of their suburban villas that night belonged to the hundreds of Berliners who were packed off to “protective custody,” mainly in Sachsenhausen. In the late afternoon of November 10, Goebbels went on the radio to announce that the anti-Jewish action had accomplished its “desired and expected purpose,” and was now over.
That morning young Peter Gay rode his bicycle on an inspection tour through “a city that seemed to have been visited by an army of vandals.” The facades of the Jewish-owned stores along Tauentzienstrasse “had been efficiently reduced to rubble, their huge display windows shattered, their mannequins and merchandise scattered on the sidewalk.” Over on Olivaerplatz, a ladies’ clothing shop owned by Gay’s uncle had obviously provided a night of entertainment for some Nazi thugs:
Its waist-high glass counters holding stockings, gloves and ladies’ underwear had proved irresistible; they had been smashed and their contents savagely torn to pieces. But the wall cabinets had given the wrathful German people avenging the death of vom Rath even more entertaining targets. One of the cabinets, well over five feet tall, with an array of shallow glass-fronted drawers, had held innumerable fine shadings of thread; the other, quite as high and as minutely subdivided, had contained buttons, with a sample sewn onto the front of each drawer. Both had been ripped from the wall and emptied pell-mell, their contents mingling with glass fragments strewn all over the floor. It was as though the store had been swept by a hurricane.
