Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht and “The Night of Broken Glass”, was a massive nation-wide pogrom in Germany on the night of November 9, 1938 including the early hours of the following day and was directed at Jewish citizens throughout Germany, the newly acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland.

Germans freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. On those two days, this pogrom damaged, and in many cases destroyed, about 1574 synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had), many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps; a few were beaten to death with others forced to watch. The number of Jewish Germans killed is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 36 to about 200 over two days of rioting. The number of Jews killed is most often cited as 91.

For the first time, tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps simply because they were Jewish.  For more about Kristallnacht, click here.

Yad Vashem has produced a special online exhibition regarding the events surrounding Kristallnacht.

It Came From Within… provides an informative and experiential context to the events surrounding Kristallnacht.

All photos Copyright © 2008 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority Yad Vashem:

More photos from Yad Vashem here.

Via Yahoo News:

Yaron Svoray scrapes caked layers of dirt from a shard of glass, revealing a sunflower at the heart of a Star of David. He carefully turns it, speculating it may have been a bowl used for Passover ceremonies in pre-World War II German Jewish homes.

The fragment is one of a handful of artifacts Svoray has pulled from mounds of debris in this former dump about an hour north of Berlin that locals say was used by the Nazis to deposit rejected loot from the 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass.”

“Most of the people in Israel I know who went through the Holocaust, if I take this to Israel, to Yad Vashem, you’ll get every visitor who is a Jew will say: ‘Oh this is what was in our house 50 or 60 years ago,’” Svoray said recently at the site.

Svoray was hunting for a downed Nazi plane in the area’s vast stretches of woods when a former forester tipped him off to the dump, used from 1935 to 1945, outside the village of Klandorf in the largely rural eastern state of Brandenburg.

After two hours of digging with his bare hands and a rusty spade found among the refuse, Svoray had unearthed what appeared to be a beer bottle stamped with a Star of David and a plate-sized alloyed metal swastika. Several weeks later he returned and found the jagged shard of the bowl.

“I don’t claim to say this is from Kristallnacht, I claim there is enough evidence here to provoke a further investigation,” said Svoray, 54, an Israeli journalist who made his name infiltrating German neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s. He would like to see the dump excavated.

Thomas Kersting, an archaeologist employed by the state of Brandenburg to care for buried memorials and archaeological sites, said Svoray’s finds — which he has yet to examine — may give the area historical value.

“A place like this where we have objects with a Star of David directly next to a Nazi swastika, that is of course meaningful … that gives it a certain quality of a memorial,” Kersting said.

But Kersting played down the likelihood of an archaeological dig, citing a lack of funds and arguing that such a disruption would be in direct opposition to his bureau’s aim to maintain the sanctity of such sites.

Arno Gielsdorf, who owns the strip of land where the dump sits, said his father told stories the arrival of “garbage” trains after Kristallnacht.

Since the collapse of communism in 1989, he said, bands of scavengers have picked over the area, selling their finds at weekly flea markets in Berlin. But he is convinced the dump holds valuable artifacts.

“The things from Kristallnacht were buried in the deepest places,” Gielsdorf said. “They are still there.”

Retracing the Nazi Book theft.  Via Spiegel Online:

Hundreds of thousands of book stolen by the Nazis are still in German libraries. A few librarians are acting like detectives, searching for the books and hoping to return them to the former owners or their families. However, many libraries have shown little interest in the troubling legacy tucked away on their shelves. Click here to read the full article.

• Haunted by Nazi History: German Politicians Divided over Anti-Semitism
• Sexual Violence in World War II: New German Study Looks at Rape Trauma 60 Years On
• Art and War: Berlin’s Jewish Museum Displays Looted Paintings
• Remnants of a Nazi Attack: Leftovers from Kristallnacht Found Near Berlin (10/20/2008)
• Pius XII Controversy Intensifies: Sainthood for the Holocaust Pope? (10/09/2008)
• Hitler’s Culture Capital: Linz Tackles Its Past as a ‘Führer’ City (09/17/2008)
• The Art of Soviet Propaganda: Iconic Red Army Reichstag Photo Faked (05/07/2008)
• From the Archive: Nazi Program to Breed Master Race: Lebensborn Children Break Silence (11/07/2006)
• From the Archive: Nazi Sex Slaves: New Exhibition Documents Forced Prostitution in Concentration Camps

This story made me cry.  My beloved husband, the man who I love and esteem most in this world, said to me upon reading the following after seeing me cry “some people are meant to be together - just like us”.  I love my husband so.  Excerpted from 1010 WINS:

Read more »

I thought that this would be a good time to repeat a previous post of mine about the history of England’s principled role in creating nations, carving up nations and occupying the Middle East:

During WWI, the entire Middle East, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire, was split into two parts. Half was controlled by France (the French Mandate), the other half by England (the British Mandate).

The French Mandate included the northern part of the Ottoman Empire. The British Mandate included the southern and eastern part of the Ottoman Empire.

It is important to keep in mind that the Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East from the 16th to the 20th century — for some 400 years. During this time, the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. did not exist. The residents in these areas were predominately Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire, living in loosely organized tribal communities.

The British Mandate included the landmass on the West Bank of the Jordan River all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the landmass on the East Bank of the Jordan River, an area known as Trans-Jordan. The British called this whole huge area “Palestine.”

When the British took over the land of Israel, suddenly the dream of a homeland for the Jews became a real possibility.

By this time, there were between 85,000 to 100,000 Jews living in the Land of Israel, of a total population of 600,000. (See “History of the Jews” by Paul Johnson, p. 430.) Most of the Arabs living in the land had migrated there only in the previous thirty years attracted by the jobs created by the Jews who were building and farming. (Note that when Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there.)

A big boost for a Jewish homeland came from Earl Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), then foreign secretary, who in 1917 promised British support for the cause.

Balfour became a friend of the Jewish cause in some measure because of Chaim Weizmann whose invention of artificial acetone, the chief ingredient in gunpowder, enabled the British to mass-produce gunpowder for the war effort. Balfour said that acetone converted him to Zionism.

Balfour’s support for a Jewish homeland became known in history as the Balfour Declaration which was issued in the form a letter to Lord Rothschild on November 2nd, 1917. It stated:

“His Majesty’s government looks with favor upon the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for the Jewish people.”

But talk is cheap, and when it came to the reality of creating such a state, the British had many other considerations and interests to take into consideration.

Despite the support of certain British political figures, the British Foreign Ministry and others were generally much more pro-Arab, and the British government got busy carving out Arab countries from the lands of the Ottoman Empire.

Through their efforts the country of Iraq was created in 1921. It was a monarchy with Faisal ibn Hussein, the son of Hussein the Sherif of Mecca, as king. Soon thereafter Iraqi oil started to flow to the West.

Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world (after Saudi Arabia) and it is no wonder the British were interested in having a bond with this country as well as other oil-rich Arab states.

Another country created by the British was Jordan. In 1927, the British installed Abdullah ibn Hussein, another son of the Sherif of Mecca, as emir of the new country called Trans-Jordan, later Jordan. Jordan was confined to the East Bank of the River Jordan and did not include any part of the West Bank.

Why were the sons of the Sherif of Mecca made rulers of these countries?

The British wanted alliances with all the Arab kingdoms. They had shored up support for the Ibn Saud of the Arabian Peninsula, who had fought the Turks alongside them. Ibn Saud got Saudi Arabia.

But when that happened, the British had to pay off the Hussein Sherif of Mecca, who was in charge of the Islamic holy sites. (The Hussein family are Hashemites, the tribe of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, and have been traditionally the keepers of the “holy” city of Mecca.)

They had to give him and his children some land, so they gave them Iraq and Trans-Jordan — the land on the East Bank of the River Jordan.

Yet despite all this country-making, and despite the Balfour Declaration, the British could not get around to creating a country called Israel.

Why not?

There was a clear British bias against the Jews as is readily apparent to anyone who has studied the series of White Papers issued by the British government in the 1920s and 1930s.

The reasons for this bias were:

The British had to deal with the issue of an Arab majority living in what was left of Palestine. They came up with all kinds of partition plans all of which were rejected by the Arabs. (Not all Arabs were opposed by-the-way; King Faisal of Iraq signed an agreement with Chaim Weizman calling for peace and cooperation.)

Many members of the British government and military were clearly anti-Semitic and had a romantic/patronizing attitude toward the Arabs.

The Arabs had oil and England needed oil. In the final analysis, the British had to take into consideration what was in their best interest. Looking after their strategic interests and placating tens of millions of Arabs was more important in their eyes than saving a few hundred thousand Jews, even though this went against the conditions of the mandate that they were granted in 1920.

Meanwhile the poor Jews, not knowing that the British were going to back out of their promise, kept migrating to the land.

The third migration or aliyah (between 1919 and 1923) brought 35,000 Jews to the land. The fourth aliyah (between 1924 and 1928) brought 80,000 Jews to the land. The fifth aliyah (between 1929 and 1939 as Hitler rose to power in Germany) brought 250,000 Jews to the land.

The Arabs made it clear that they were not going to sit still for a Jewish state. In August of 1929, due to the instigation of the preachers in the mosques, a series of riots broke out in which many Jews were massacred.

The New York Times in its history of Israel (Israel: from Ancient Times to the Modern Nation, pp. 38-39) writes of this time:

“The riots of August, 1929, were ignited in Jerusalem over a rumor spread by Arab leaders that Jews were going to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third most holy shrine. Fighting soon spread throughout Palestine. The worst massacres were in Hebron, sacred to Jew and Muslim alike, where 67 Orthodox Jews - men, women and children - were slaughtered by Arabs and 50 more wounded. Pierre van Paassen, a reporter, described the horror that he witnessed by lamplight in a Jewish seminary in Hebron: ‘The slain students in the yard, the dead men in the synagogue, slashed throats and mutilated bodies.’ By the time order was restored 133 Jews had been killed, 399 wounded.”

The 1930s saw more rioting and more massacres, especially in Jaffa and again in Hebron. In response, the British convened the Peel Commission which almost totally did away with the Balfour Declaration that had originally promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine on both sides of the River Jordan.

In July of 1937, the Peel Commission issued a report which said that all the Jews should be confined to a tiny state that would include a sliver of land along the Mediterranean coast and a small piece in the north abutting the west side of the Lake Kineret (”Sea of Galilee”).

The Arabs greeted the Peel Commission recommendation with a revolt which lasted until 1939.
The Arab Revolt was led by Haj Amin Husseini, who was originally appointed as the Mufti of Jerusalem by the British. It is interesting to note that in addition to hundreds of Jews who were killed by Arabs, some 3,000 Arabs died in this revolt at the hands of other Arabs and at the hands of the British.

For all the British criticism of Israel today, at that time the British were not shy in their efforts to quell the rioting. They introduced the policy of housing demolition and used artillery to shell rebellious towns.
The revolt was finally crushed and the Mufti fled first to Beirut and later to Europe, where he became an ally of Adolph Hitler, organizing a Bosnian S.S. unit to kill Jews in the Balkans.

After the war he was captured but escaped. He was later involved in fomenting violence, including the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan in 1951. He was last heard of living as a guest in Saudi Arabia. (Faisal Husseini, who was the PLO’s representatives in Jerusalem and who recently died of a heart attack was a relative of his.)

The British did not keep the promise contained in the Balfour Declaration and neither did they keep the promise contained in the Peel Commission report.

They did enforce one aspect of the Peel Commission report — that which limited Jewish migration to the land to only 12,000 a year for the next five years (1939-1943). By doing so the British doomed the Jews under the control of Nazis — they would no longer be able to find refuge in their homeland.

They did this, knowing full well what the Germans were doing to the Jews — this was after the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht (see Part 60). And still the British closed an escape route that would have saved millions of Jewish lives.

The Jews were desperate and they tried to come illegally. In response, the British set up a blockade to keep them out.

Many Jews managed to circumvent the blockade and it is estimated that 115,000 Jews got through. But 115,000 is a very small number compared to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust and who could not find refuge in the land of Israel.

The British presently show the same callousness in regard to Jewish men, women and children being murdered today, as they did during the British Mandate.

I gratefully acknowledge Aish for their assistance in providing facts contained in this post. You can read the White Paper of 1922, White Paper of 1939, and the Balfour Declaration, here, here, and here.

In 1938, the Italian government passed a law banning Jews from teaching in public schools. A few months later, Italian leader Benito Mussolini formed an axis with Adolf Hitler. Discrimination continued against thousands of Italian Jews, and in 1943 they were deported to German camps, with several small camps built in Italy as well. Recently, anti-Semitism has again flared in Italy; in 2003, Holocaust archives were destroyed at a school in Varese, and school walls were painted with graffiti such as “burn the Jews.”

Excerpted from Today In Jewish History

Today is the 68th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.

What is Kristallnacht?

Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht and “The Night of Broken Glass”, was a massive nation-wide pogrom in Germany on the night of November 9, 1938 including the early hours of the following day and was directed at Jewish citizens throughout Germany, the newly acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland. Germans freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. On those two days, this pogrom damaged, and in many cases destroyed, about 1574 synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had), many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps; a few were beaten to death with others forced to watch. The number of Jewish Germans killed is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 36 to about 200 over two days of rioting. The number of Jews killed is most often cited as 91.