Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction

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Kristallnacht: The November 1938 Pogroms". Online exhibitions, special topics. US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 17 May 2008 . Retrieved 20 May 2008. German Mobs' Vengeance on Jews", The Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1938, cited in Gilbert, Martin (2006). Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction. New York: HarperCollins. p.42. ISBN 978-0060570835.

a b Taylor, Alan (19 June 2011). "World War II: Before the War". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 7 January 2015.Pehle, Walter H. (1988). Der Judenpogrom 1938: Von der "Reichskristallnacht" zum Völkermord (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 3-596-24386-6. In 1989, Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee and later Vice President of the United States, wrote of an "ecological Kristallnacht" in The New York Times. He opined that events which were then taking place, such as deforestation and ozone depletion, prefigured a greater environmental catastrophe in the same way that Kristallnacht prefigured the Holocaust. [84] Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the 'fun'. [44] The pictures were taken by Nazi photographers during the pogrom in the city of Nuremberg and the nearby town of Fürth. They wound up in the possession of a Jewish-American serviceman who was deployed to Germany during the second world war. How he obtained the photos is uncertain; he never talked about them to his family.

McCullough, Colin, and Nathan Wilson, eds. Violence, Memory, and History: Western Perceptions of Kristallnacht (2014) online Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky dropped the phone and ran to his place of worship. It was 2 a.m., but the sky was already bright. As he approached the Synagogue Prinzregentenstrasse in Berlin, pushing his hat down so he wouldn’t be recognized, Swarsensky saw flames engulfing the building. German soldiers were inside, stoking the flames with gasoline. Nearby, firefighters stood idly by, making sure the flames didn’t extend to other buildings.

The damage was devastating, but it was only the beginning. “First they burned down the synagogue,” recalled Dennis Urstein, who experienced Kristallnacht in Vienna when he was 14 years old. “Then people were put on the street, cleaning the streets and being spit upon and hit upon and [called racial slurs]…I just couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand why it was done.” GermanNotes, "Kristallnacht - Night of Broken Glass". Archived from the original on 19 April 2005 . Retrieved 6 March 2009. , retrieved 26 November 2007 Martin Gilbert collects and relates first hand experiences of Kristallnacht. At times, the book feels like a loosely connected series of mini-narratives, but it is so engrossing that this fact doesn't distance the reader. It should be noted that if Gilbert's footnotes are any indication some of the accounts came from letters that Gilbert recieved (most likely after solicting) from witnesses. a b c Steinweis, Alan E. (2009). Kristallnacht 1938. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 3. ISBN 9780674036239.