In the weeks that followed, the German government promulgated dozens of laws and decrees designed to deprive Jews of their property and of their means of livelihood. Thus, the overreaction to Herschel Grynszpan's attempt against the diplomat Ernst vom Rath came into being and led to the November pogrom. In spite of the words, though, most countries, including the United States, kept their restrictive immigration policies against European Jews in place, and there were few ramifications for the Nazis. A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was able to observe the way he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn’t) with the experience.

Grynszpan's parents and the other expelled Polish Jews were initially denied entry into their native Poland. Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from billionaire Thomas Perkins that compared the "progressive war on the American one percent" of wealthiest Americans and the Occupy movement's "demonization of the rich" to the Kristallnacht and antisemitism in Nazi Germany.T he official figure for Jewish deaths, released by German officials in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, was 91, but recent scholarship suggests that there were hundreds of deaths, especially if one counts those who died of their injuries in the days and weeks that followed the pogrom. Kristallnacht owes its name to the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom—broken glass from the windows of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses plundered and destroyed during the violence. Plenty of “good Germans” simply turned the other way because whatever was going on didn’t affect them.

Judenpogrom: "Reichskristallnacht" November 1938 in Grossdeutschland: Daten, Fakten, Dokumente, Quellentexte, Thesen und Bewertungen (Aktuelles Taschenbuch) (in German). In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, many German leaders, like Hermann Göring, criticized the extensive material losses produced by the antisemitic riots, pointing out that if nothing were done to intervene, German insurance companies—not Jewish-owned businesses—would have to bear the costs of the damages. If you’re looking to learn more about Kristallnacht or the Holocaust, here are some books to get you started. Fires were lit, and prayer books, scrolls, artwork and philosophy texts were thrown upon them, and precious buildings were either burned or smashed until unrecognizable.

Yet, the devastation and destruction it caused lives on today, which is why remembering it is so important. Louis Jewish cemetery rededicated after gravestones toppled by vandals - Diaspora - Jerusalem Post". The avant-garde guitarist Gary Lucas's 1988 composition "Verklärte Kristallnacht", which juxtaposes what would become the Israeli national anthem ten years after Kristallnacht, " Hatikvah", with phrases from the German national anthem " Deutschland Über Alles" amid wild electronic shrieks and noise, is intended to be a sonic representation of the horrors of Kristallnacht. Jaime Herndon finished her MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia, after leaving a life of psychosocial oncology and maternal-child health work.