The Anti-Semitism that Led to the “Night of Broken Glass” in Germany, Has Not Gone Away
Author: WUNRN
Date: November 12, 2018
Parts of the Holocaust memorial project “Stolpersteine” (stumbling blocks) in Berlin.
By Jill Petzinger in Berlin – November 9, 2018
Eighty years ago November 9, the Nazis instigated a horrific two-day mob attack against Germany’s Jews, smashing and looting thousands of Jewish homes and businesses and destroying more than 1,000 synagogues. The Nazis called it “Kristallnacht.” In English it became known as the Night of Broken Glass. At least 91 Jewish people were killed, and the Nazis rounded up some 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. Those who could, fled. Millions who couldn’t escape would later perish in the Holocaust.
This year’s remembrance of the terror unleashed on German and Austrian Jews takes place against a backdrop of rising nationalism and populism across Europe and the US. “We have sadly almost become accustomed to the fact that every synagogue, Jewish school, kindergarten, restaurant and cemetery needs to be either guarded by police or given special protection,” German chancellor Angela Merkel said in her address at Berlin’s Rykestrasse synagogue today. This reality is all too fresh for the Jewish people of Pittsburgh, who are mourning the death of 11 people on Oct. 27, when a gunman opened fire in the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
Berlin will mark the November pogrom today with a number of events (link in German). People will gather across the city to read the names of Holocaust victims inscribed on brass blocks embedded in pavements outside the houses where they used to live. The Stolperstein project (translated as “stumbling blocks”) began in 1996. With some 70,000 blocks now in place all over Europe, it has become the biggest decentralized monument in the world.
Jewish leaders in Europe have warned that the rise in populism across Europe is fueling a resurgence in anti-Semitism. In April, the European Jewish Congress said Europe’s largest Jewish communities are suffering a level of mainstreamed anti-Semitism “not seen since the Second World War.”
A report investigating online anti-Semitism during the US midterms by Jewish civil-rights group Anti-Defamation League said that once rare anti-Semitic harassment and attacks have become “normalized” and “a daily occurrence” since the election of Donald Trump. ADL national director Jonathan Greenblatt says that the midterm elections were a “rallying point” for far-right extremists spreading hatred against Jews online.
A German police report earlier this year said an average of four anti-Semitic crimes a day occurred in 2017, which was around the same as in 2016, but noted that right-wing extremists were behind the majority of the crimes, which ranged from damage to property to incitement to hatred and acts of violence.
