Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, marked a turning point in Fascist antisemitism, when Berlin officially sanctioned the deportations and massacres of Jews. Petty bourgeois gentiles and their accomplices all across the Third Reich literally smashed their Jewish competitors’ businesses, massacred at least 91 Jews, and even carnally abused some.

Soon afterwards, Berlin further subtracted Jews’ liberties by disallowing them from operating their businesses, prohibiting them from gentiles’ schools, and forcing twenty or thirty thousand into concentration camps. To add insult to injury, Berlin blamed this tragedy on the victims and forced them to pay for the damages.

Quoting Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, chapter 7:

In October 1938 the [Fascists] discovered that the Poles were about to revoke the citizenship of thousands of their Jewish citizens resident in Germany. They therefore decided to deport the Jews to Poland immediately so that they would not be stuck with thousands of stateless Jews. It was this cold pogrom that led to the massive violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938.

The story was told, many years later, on 25 April 1961, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The witness, Zindel Grynszpan, then an old man, was the father of Herszl Grynszpan who, in despair at the deportation of his father back to Poland, had assassinated a German diplomat in Paris and provided the [Fascists] with the pretext for their terrible night of broken glass. Old Zindel told them of his deportation from his home in Hanover on the night of 27 October 1938: “Then they took us in police trucks, in prisoners’ lorries, about 20 men in each truck, and they took us to the railway station. The streets were full of people shouting: ’Juden raus! Auf nach Palästina!’” [26]

The significance of Zindel’s testimony was utterly lost in the welter of detail in the Eichmann trial. But those Jews were not being sent to Palestine, as the [Fascist] mob cried; the prosecutor in that courtroom in Jerusalem never thought to ask the elderly Grynszpan a question that we would think to ask: “What did you think, what did the other Jews think, when they heard that strange cry coming up from the savage mob?”

Zindel Grynszpan is long dead, as are most if not all the others who suffered there that hellish night; we have no answer to our query. But what really matters was what was shouted, rather than what was thought about it in that police van. However, we can reasonably suggest that if the ZVfD had resisted [Fascism’s] rise, if the WZO had mobilised Jewry against the New Order, if Palestine had been a bastion of Jewish resistance to [Fascism], the [Fascists] would never have told the Jews, and that mob, that the place for a Jew was in Palestine.

Perhaps, then, that Friday night in Hanover the cry would have been “Jews to Poland”, even a straight “kill the Jews”. The sombre fact is that the mob screamed what had been screamed at them by Hitler’s minions: “Jews to Palestine!”

(Emphasis added.)

\ If none of that looks familiar to you, this information concerning U.S. negligence certainly should:

At his press conference on November 15, 1938, one week after Kristallnacht, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced [the Third Reich’s] terror attack on Jews, saying, “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.” FDR made an exception to his practice of off-the-record press conferences by allowing newspapers to quote this statement from his meeting with reporters that day.

[…]

Despite the increasing threat faced by Jews living under [Fascism] in Germany and Austria, President Roosevelt knew that he would not be able to persuade Congress to reconsider immigration regulations. At the same November 15 press conference, a reporter asked the president if he would recommend relaxing the restrictions on immigration in order to admit the Jewish refugees from Europe. Roosevelt replied, “That is not in contemplation; we have the quota system.”

Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, whose department oversaw the Immigration and Naturalization Service, persuaded President Roosevelt to allow approximately 12,000 Germans, most of whom were Jews and already in the United States on visitor visas, to remain in the country indefinitely. Although he knew extending the visas could raise congressional objection, the president made his position clear. “I cannot,” he said, “in any decent humanity, throw them out.” Indeed, no Jew[ish citizens] were forced to leave the United States to return to [Axis]-occupied Europe for the duration of the war.

(Emphasis added. The unedited last line reads ‘no Jews were forced to leave the United States’, which is misleading. While Washington never deported European Jews who officially became U.S. citizens, many other Jews looking to get inside were not so fortunate.)

See also: Kristallnacht 1938

Interview with a survivor.