The November Pogrom 1938
Document, Maps, Comment, Sources
Ober Ramstadt Synagoge: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Trudy Isenberg
Introduction
The November Pogrom of 1938, or Kristallnacht as it is often called, constituted the single largest eruption of anti-Semitic violence in German history prior to the outbreak of World War II. The Nazis destroyed or profaned a staggering number of synagogues, desecrated Jewish cemeteries across the country, damaged countless businesses and homes, killed more than a hundred Jews, and drove many more to such lengths of desperation that suicide seemed the only way out.
Nazi propagandists called it a spontaneous uprising of the German people. In fact, leaders of the Nazi Party had organized the devastation in reaction to the shooting by a young Jewish man, Herschel Grynszpan, of a German Envoy in Paris on the morning of November 7. When the envoy, Ernst vom Rath, died of his wounds two days later, Nazi leaders used his death as a pretext to "teach the Jews a Lesson." On November 9, around 10:00 p.m., Joseph Goebbels, on Hitler's authorization, issued instructions to destroy Jewish businesses and set fire to the nation's synagogues. In a shockingly short period of time, Nazi Stormtroopers drove from town to town burning down synagogues, smashing windows, and assaulting Jews. Thousands of ordinary Germans joined them.
At first, official estimates played down the destruction, reporting that in the course of the night 91 Jews lost their lives and 191 synagogues went up in flames. We now know that the Nazis destroyed or desecrated more than 1300 synagogues, damaged some 7500 businesses, wrecked hundreds of homes, and caused a far greater loss of life than initially assumed. The term Kristallnacht--suggesting the event was mainly about broken glass--was a Nazi euphemism. What happened was a pogrom--a Russian word for devastation, usually referring to the devastation of Jewish communities.
The November Pogrom devastated nearly every community in which Jews lived. Nazi party members and the stormtroopers of the SA, most of them young men between 25 and 45 years of age, vandalized businesses, broke into homes, and torched synagogues. In many places, the perpetrators could count on wider circles of eager participants, with men engaging in physical violence, women looting stores, and just about everyone, including children, delighting in taunting the Jews.
But even as the cynders cooled and the rubble settled, the destructive fury was far from over. Falsely accusing the Jews of torching their own synagogues, the Nazis proceeded to arrest more than 30,000 Jewish men. After forcing these men, most of whom were middle aged or older, to march through their hometowns, the Nazis whisked them off in trucks and trains to the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
Literally overnight, the concentration camp population of Third Reich doubled. During the first five years of the Nazi regime, political prisoners, primarily Communists, made up the preponderance of the population of concentration camp inmates. Suddenly, Jews constituted the majority of prisoners, as some 20% of adult Jewish men now found themselves in the camps. Vicious anti-Semitic guards brutalized the new inmates, and by September 1939, close to a thousand Jewish men would perish in the camps.
The November pogrom utterly shattered the Jewish community. Germany could no longer be a home for them, and those Jews who could leave the country got their papers in order and left as quickly as possible. By the outbreak of World War II, the Jewish community in Germany (1937 borders) declined to some 240,000 people, down from 590,000 in 1933. Most of the Jews who remained were older, and a disproportionate number of women stayed behind to care for elderly and frail parents.
Map
The map above is the first interactive map of the November Pogrom. As such, it is a gateway for scholars, students, preservationists, genealogical researchers, and just about anyone interested in the event. Zoom in to an area to see the communities, or use the search function to type in the town or city you are looking for, and then click the markers. The markers open a window, which contains links, in either English or German. The links are to the following websites:
- Germansynagogues.com
- Judische-gemeinden.de (German)
- Wikipedia sites in English (first choice) or German (second choice) for the synagogue.
- Wikipedia sites in English (first choice) or German (second choice) for the Jewish community.
- Alemannia Judaica (German), a rich source of text and images for southwestern German-Jewish communities, which historians, such as Joachim Hahn, have been collecting for years. Founded in 1992, this community of researchers began by digging up and collating a vast archive for the study of German-Jewish communities in German- speaking Switzerland, Alsace, Baden-Württemberg, and parts of Bavaria and Austria. They have since extended their researches to the Rhineland Palatinate, the Saarland, Hesse, Thüringen, and the rest of Bavaria. The interactive map includes links to their remarkable work in these areas too.
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (which has a powerful search engine that allows students to find sources in its enormously rich collections).
- The Wiener Holocaust Library of London and in particular its special collection of some 350 testimonies, gathered by the library's founder, Alfred Wiener, immediately after the event. The digital site is entitled: Pogrom: November, 1938: Testimonies from 'Kristallnacht.' It can be searched by place name.
- The Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation , the largest collection of video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in the World (it contains some 4,000 testimonies in open access, and more than 55,000 at its special access points). Click here to see if you are near or part of an institution that constitutes an access site.
- Jewish Places (a vast community-generated, German- language interactive site that includes further links) and often detailed information. As a "network project" bringing together a number of institutions in Europe, Israel, and North America, it is one of the most extensive sites that locates and describes German-Jewish life in central Europe. It relies on the work of volunteer contributors, and, as such, is constantly being revised and updated. For many synagogues, it reveals precise geolocations. (In those cases, roughly 20% of the total, in which these locations have yet to be ascertained, the coordinates 0°N, 0°E (a point in the Atlantic Ocean off the Bite of Africa) are given.
These websites allow researchers to reconstruct the November Pogrom at the local and regional level, and to find myriad primary sources for deepening an understanding of the event.
The underlying data for the map is drawn primarily from two sites: Germansynagogues.com and jüdische-gemeinden.de. Behind the data of each of these sites is a remarkable biography.
Germansynagogues.com was initiated by Meir Schwarz , who was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Nuremberg in 1926. The Nazis murdered his father (a decorated World War I veteran), his mother (by withholding medicine), and his brother Joseph at Auschwitz. The young Meir Schwarz was "fortunate" and escaped to Israel via a Kindertransport. Many years later, he came back to Nuremberg, only to see his boyhood synagogue in Nuremberg's Eßweinstrasse razed and replaced with a gas station. He subsequently helped establish the “Synagogue Memorial” of Jerusalem, the organization behind the website, and he himself visited or found the location of over a thousand synagogues that were destroyed or vandalized during the November Pogrom. In his memoir, entitled Der Synagogensucher (the Synagogue Searcher), Schwarz describes how in town after town he inquired about the location of the erstwhile synagogue. Sometimes people said, “Jews never lived here,” or “that is the first time anyone has asked.” But sometimes, too, people helped. “I’ll take you there,” replied a baker. As it turned out, she had fought for many years to put up a simple plaque commemorating the synagogue.
The second data set, jüdische-gemeinden.de, is based on the tireless work of Klaus-Dieter Alicke, a school teacher who turned to the subject in the 1990s, when he taught in the small Lower-Saxon town of Bergen, known in the wider world for the infamous concentration camp the Nazis erected in Belsen, a neighborhood of the town. Alicke, whose biography reflects many of the unsung heroes of Germany's honest turn to its past, began to collect material in order to write "short portraits" of former Jewish communities in Lower-Saxony. In time, he expanded these "short portraits" to encompass German-speaking Europe from Alsace to East Prussia, and from Austria to the shores of the Baltic Sea. After a herculean amount of work that occupied more than a decade, he published his three-volume work, the "Lexikon der jüdischen Gemeinden im deutschen Sprachraum."
At 2,400 pages, it is simply the most thorough such compendium we have, and it gives a remarkable place-by-place impression of the historical diversity of the Jewish communities in central Europe. Jüdische-gemeinden.de is the slightly expanded and corrected digital version of the three-volume work.
Commentary
The analysis of the November Pogrom, like any historical event, must begin by posing basic questions, such as when and where it happened, and who was involved.
The pogrom was unleashed on November 9, 1938. Yet its proximate context was the heightened German nationalism that gathered force in the Spring of 1938, and the renewal of anti-Semitic violence prior to the actual outbreak of the pogrom.
In the Spring of 1938, Nazi Germany marched into Austria. As it was the first expansion of Third Reich beyond its actual borders, the Anschluss, as it was called, brought forth a wave of nationalist jubilation--both in the Reich and in Austria itself--and these often assumed anti-Semitic hues. Even before the tanks of the German Wehrmacht rolled triumphantly into Vienna, spontaneous and extremely violent anti-Semitic riots in Austria’s capital surpassed anything that Jews had seen in the Reich. Austrian anti-Semites beat Jews, paraded them through the streets, and forced them to perform humiliating tasks, like scrubbing anti-Semitic graffiti off the streets.
The second event of significance was the invasion of the Sudetenland. In a traitorous act, Konrad Heinlein, the leader of the German nationalists in Czechoslovakia, essentially invited Hitler to take over the country in order to "protect" the Germans. In September 1938, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, and then reassured the western powers that this was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe." At the Munich meeting of September, 1938, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, came around to believing Hitler's assurances, and on September 30, Chamberlin returned to London, claiming he had achieved "peace for our time."
Yet far from appeasing Germany, the Anschluss and the annexing of the Sudetenland only emboldened the Nazis, and in late October, they deported some 17,000 Polish Jews from German territory. Neither full subjects of Germany or Poland, the deported Polish Jews, many of whom had lived in Germany for decades, found themselves housed in refugee camps near the Polish-German border. It was in this context that Herschel Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, with the young Jewish man hoping to bring public attention to the plight of the deported Jews. The Nazis then used the misguided assassination in order to turn against the Jews, just as a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Hesse and Franconia had already begun to stir anti-Semitic fervor.
In its dimensions, the anti-Semitic violence of the Pogrom on November 9 was unprecedented. Yet it was also the culmination of successive outbreaks of anti-Semitic assault characteristic of nazi rule. The first major outbreak occurred in March 1933, on the eve of the boycott of Jewish businesses, while a more significant spike occurred in late 1934 and in the first half of 1935, when sporadic violence in cities and towns, mainly from Hitler's enthusiastic supporters, terrorized Jews. Convinced that they were no longer safe in Germany's small towns, thousands of Jews fled to the anonymity of larger cities. Then, in the late summer and early fall of 1938, violence against Jews increased again, especially in the regions of Franconia and Hesse, where anti-Semitic prejudice ran deep. Some historians even claim that on the night of November 9, Nazi leaders essentially nationalized local surges of anti- Semitic violence, much as the Nuremberg Laws constituted a reaction to the perceptible increase of anti-Semitic violence in the Spring of 1935.
The timing of the Pogrom--amidst an outbreak of nationalist fervor and in the context of heightened anti-Semitic violence--helps explain its near ubiquity. Yet the question of where is more complicated. For what the spatial pattern of the attacks reveals is far from self-evident. Consider, first, what it does not reveal.
As the Nazis attacked almost all functioning synagogues, the pattern neither reveals Nazi strongholds nor the virulence of anti-Semitism. Rather, it merely reflects the locations of Jewish communities still in existence at the time of the pogrom, and these locations largely represent where Jews had lived for centuries. Nor does the map show synagogues that survived completely unscathed. The vast majority of these cases involved communities in which local Christians, or the town itself, owned the synagogue. As Jews left the dangerous countryside for seemingly safer cities, it came to pass that too few were left in the town or village to form a Minyan, the quorum of ten men necessary to recite certain public prayers, with the consequence that Jewish communities were often forced to sell off the synagogue. Ironically, it is often these synagogues that survived the Third Reich and were restored in the course of the preservation efforts of the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, the pattern does not disclose where the November Pogrom was particularly violent. In the tiny Rhenish town of Hilden, for example, the Nazis killed seven Jewish villagers, but because there was no synagogue in the community, it is not marked on the map
The spatial pattern does tell us that anti-Semitic violence was not something distant, or something people had merely heard about. Rather, it was a direct, visible, experiential part of life in the Third Reich. The experience was, however, different from place to place. One might even think of the November Pogrom as an amalgamation of many smaller pogroms, unfolding in different ways in different localities.
The map both hides this reality and leads researchers deeper into it. On the surface, it represents the violence of the November Pogrom with one point for each event of destruction or desecration. But closer analysis reveals that in some cities, like Berlin and Vienna, the destruction went on for days, while in others, like Konstanz, it was over in a few hours, with the brown-shirted SA doing most of the damage. Digging deeper also unearths that there were some towns, like Treuchtlingen in Franconia, where nearly the whole community became involved.
The map's use of single points also masks another differentiation. The points do not distinguish between synagogues destroyed, or structurally damaged, and those wrecked and profaned on the inside only. The destruction of the interiors usually involved cutting up the Torah scrolls, tearing apart prayer books, smashing holy objects, taking an ax to chairs and tables, and pilfering valuable objects, like silver candleholders, spice boxes, and kiddush cups. Sometimes, as occurred in Mosbach in Baden-Württemberg, the SA took the religious objects out of the synagogue and heaped them on a pile, setting them aflame. They also invited the locals to watch.
Both the complete and the partial destruction of the synagogue were extremely violent affairs. Throughout Germany, fervent Nazi party members and the stormtroopers of the SA were the main purveyors of violence, with townspeople joining the perpetrators in many places. But what of the wider circles of Germans? How did they view the event?
Older scholarship emphasized the disapproval and non- participation of most non-Jewish Germans, underscoring that, in the main, they complained about the shards of glass on the street, the wanton destruction of property, and the spectacle of old people and women being beaten. Average Germans, according to this scholarship, also complained that the Pogrom caused nearly a billion RM in property damage and the loss of some 14,000 jobs. Moreover, the dismay of the general population seemed especially palpable in the countryside, particularly in Catholic regions of Germany, like the Rhineland.
Yet it has become increasingly clear that critical voices represented a minority opinion, and that too few Germans supported their Jewish neighbors. By 1938, the German public had been cowed into silence. They had never publicly stood up to anti- Semitic violence—not in April 1933, at the time of the first boycott, and not in 1935, during the second major wave of anti-Semitic violence. In November 1938, many ordinary Germans crossed a threshold and became actively involved in Nazi Germany's persecuting society. Once they were beyond this threshold, it was difficult to step back and articulate anti- Semitic actions as wrong. It became cognitively easier to bend them to the side of supposed right.
For German Jews, the complete lack of public resistance was writing on the wall. Hedwig Rastow, who committed suicide twenty days after the event, penned, as her last words:
"I am leaving life as someone whose family has had German citizenship for over 100 years and has always remained loyal to Germany. I have taught German children for 43 years and have helped them through all their trials and tribulations. I have done charity work for the German people for even longer, both in times of war and times of peace. I don’t want to live without a fatherland, without a homeland, without an apartment, without citizenship rights, ostracized and reviled. And I want to be buried with the name my parents both gave me and passed on to me, which is untainted." (Jewish Responses to Persecution, p. 369)
For many Jews, the November Pogrom represented a point of no return. There had been periods of more or less intense anti-Semitism. But a shift had suddenly occurred. And now German Jews faced their oppressors utterly alone--not just in a few cities and towns, but in more than thirteen hundred separate communities throughout Germany.
Sources
*denotes mainly primary sources
Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015 (stimulating and controversial thesis on the religious dimension of persecution).
*The Night of Broken Glass. Eyewitness Accounts of Kristallnacht. ed, Ute Gerhardt and Thomas Karlauf. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012 (drawn from a collection of prize essays submitted in 1939).
Raphael Gross, November 1938. Die Katastrophe vor der Katastrophe. Munich: Beck, 2013 (the best short account in German)
*Susanne Heim, ed. The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933,- 1945, vol. 2, German Reich, 1938-August 1939, trans. coordinator, Caroline Pearce with the assistance of Dorothy Mas. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2019 (extensive collection of documents from various kinds of sources).
Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 (excellent general treatment, with a strong emphasis on the gendered aspects of Jewish life).
Wolf-Arno Kropat, Kristallnacht in Hessen. Der Judenpogrom vom November 1938. Eine Dokumentation. Wiesbaden, Kommission für die Geschichte der Juden in Hessen, 1988 (crucial for new interpretations, emphasizing a rise in anti-Semitic violence prior to November 9).
*Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel, eds. The Secret Nazi Reports on Popular Opinion in Germany, 1939-1945, trans. William Templer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010 (by far the most comprehensive source edition, certainly in translation. Comes with a cd-rom disk with a still a larger store of German documents).
*Prelude to the Holocaust. Pogrom. November 1938., ed. Ruth Levitt. London: Souvenir Press, 2015 (the English language texts of the Wiener Library collection). For the original German language texts, Novemberpogrom 1938, ed. Wiener Library London, ed. Ben Barkow, Raphael Gross, and Michael Lenarz. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2008.
Peter Lowenberg, "The Kristallnacht as Public Denigration Ritual," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 32 (1987), 309-323 (powerful argument, with psychoanalytic insight, arguing for the ritualistic elements of the November Pogrom).
*Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman, eds., Responses to Persecution, ed. , vol. 1, 1933-1938. Lanham, Maryland: Alta Mira Press, 2010 (an excellent collection of printed documents, emphasizing how Jews experienced the event).
Michael Ruetz, Pogrom 1938: das Gesicht in der Menge. Wädenswil, Switzerland: Nimbus Kunst und Bücher AG, 2018 (a remarkable collection of photographs).
Alan Steinweis, Kristallnacht, 1938. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2009 (the best short account in English).
Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL – A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2015. (on the fate of the Jewish men sent to concentration camps after the November Pogrom).
Michael Wildt, Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany. New York: Berghahn, 2019 (important for understanding the waves of rural anti-Semitism; advances an argument for how the violence against Jews was constitutive of Nazi Germany's racial community.)
Acknowledgements
My gratitude for allowing me to "deep link" the interactive map entitled "Destroyed and Desecrated Synagogues during the Novemberpogrom 1938" to individual urls in their websites to the following sites and institutions: Germansynagogues.com; Judische-gemeinden.de; Alemania Judaica; and Jewish-places.de. Any errors are of course my own--and I am happy to field criticism, and correct where possible. For contact details go here . Unless otherwise acknowledged, all images are screenshots with links to the original, or images covered under creative commons license.