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    Crystal Night and the road to the Holocaust

    LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ, UNITED STATES

    10.13.2016

    Story by Master Sgt. Mark Olsen  

    New Jersey National Guard   

    Beethoven, Nietzsche, and Kandinsky.
    And in the same breath, 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" – an entire bureaucratic and physical apparatus developed for the purpose of murdering Jews.
    The Holocaust did not spring into existence overnight. In fact, for the average non-Jewish German, the road to the holocaust was a series of incremental steps that had little impact on their daily life.
    Starting in 1933, the German government began enacting a series of anti-Jewish laws starting with the exclusion of Jews from professional civil service and public schools.
    It was with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws on Sept. 15, 1935 when the position of Jews in Germany became untenable.
    The first, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour” forbid marriage between “those of German or related blood” and Jews. This was later expanded to include Roma, blacks, and their children.
    The second law, which had a more far reaching effect, was the Reich Citizenship Law, which stripped the rights of German Jews of citizenship, essentially losing their legal rights under the German judicial system. These two laws are seen as the tipping point in Germany’s treatment of the Jews.
    On Oct. 28, 1938, under the auspices of the second law, the German government expelled 17,000 Polish-born Jews to the Polish border. 4,000 were allowed into Poland, while the rest were denied entry. As they left, neighbors and Nazi party members broke into their homes to steal their remaining possessions.
    Herschel Grynszpan, the son of one of the deported couples, was living in Paris. On November 3, he received a postcard from his sister asking for help. The next day, he read about the deportations in a newspaper. Four days later, Grynszpan went to the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, the Secretary of Legation. Grynszpan was arrested, and eventually sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he died. His parents survived the war and moved to Israel.
    When Rath died on November 9, Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, saw his death as the excuse to launch an orchestrated wave of "grassroots" anti-Jewish violence.
    That evening Kristallnacht – Crystal Night – began.
    A wave of violence swept Germany, Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia.
    State authorities made no attempt to interfere or stop the rioting. In fact, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of Reich Main Security Office which oversaw the Gestapo, 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."
    By the end of November 10, 267 synagogues had been burned and more than 7,500 Jewish businesses were vandalized, looted or destroyed and at least 91 Jews were killed. In addition, 30,000 more were deported to Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, where hundreds died within weeks of their arrival.
    On November 12, Walter Funk, the Reich Minister for Economic Affairs, coined the term Kristallnacht as a way of trivializing the death and destruction.
    The nightmare had begun.
    By the time of Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945, more than 11 million people, which included Jews, Poles, Russian, and other Allied prisoners of war; Roma, Africans, Asians, the handicapped and mentally ill, homosexuals, Catholic clergy, and Jehovah's Witnesses had been murdered.
    And by the end of World War II, Germany was better known for Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels than Beethoven, Nietzsche, and Kandinsky.

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 10.13.2016
    Date Posted: 10.13.2016 14:23
    Story ID: 211918
    Location: LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ, US

    Web Views: 126
    Downloads: 0

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