Kristallnacht November 1938

What to do: 1. Read both sides of the hand out. 2. Consider the next two questions and be ready to share your answers. What did the Nazi's do to the Jews of Germany and Austria on/after Kristallnacht? What was the human impact of this event?

Pogrom: What does it mean? A POGROM is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly aimed at Jews. The term originally entered the English language in order to describe the 19th and 20th century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire.  Similar attacks against Jews at other times and places also became retrospectively known as pogroms.

Keep thinking . . . How can we describe the Kristallnacht?  (In Germany the word Novemberpogrom is preferred to Kristallnacht since it describes more accurately what happened than the Nazi euphemism.) The Nazis claimed that Kristallnacht was a spontaneous reaction of the German people to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish student whose parents had been expelled from Germany.  What evidence is there that this was not true?

Kristallnacht Images

Final thoughts . . . Why did the Nazi's persecute the Jews in the 1930'S? What was life like for Jews in Germany by the end of 1938? What could Jews do about their situation? What feelings might the hundreds of thousand of German Jews who left the country have had?