The commemoration of Crystal Night, (German, Kristallnacht), the night of November 9-10, 1938 with its anti-Jewish brutality continuing for a few additional days and this year’s Veterans Day, fall together on November 11. Because of this unusual coincidence of the anniversary of one of the darkest days in Jewish history and one of the most redeeming acts in that same slice of history coming together, let me invite you to reflect on both these historical events.
First, let me summarize what these two anniversaries commemorate. Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass was a pogrom against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany. The Nazis, more particularly the Nazi paramilitary organization SA, also called the Storm Troopers or Brown Shirts, torched over 1,000 synagogues, vandalized and looted Jewish homes, schools and 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed 71 Jews and arrested some 30,000 Jewish men. Because of this significant number of prisoners, the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen had to be expanded to accommodate them. The name Kristallnatch or in English, Night of Broken Glass, refers to the litter of broken glass left in the streets after these pogroms.
The pretext for the violence was the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jewish student. Grynszpan engaged in the murder as a retribution for the Nazi deportation of Polish Jewish residents in Germany to a no-man’s land at the border of Germany and Poland where the Jews were unceremoniously dumped. Grynszpan’s parents were among the group and so, understandably, he was very upset and worried.
German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, having consulted with Hitler on how the assassination could be antisemitically exploited, urged a group of SA during a large SA rally to engage in violent reprisals against the German Jewish population. The pogroms were to appear as spontaneous antisemitic demonstrations by the German population.
It is no exaggeration to state that this anti-Jewish violence was the overture to subsequent governmental bureaucratic anti-Jewish steps leading to the Wannsee Conference in 1942 and the decision taken there to end the so-called Judenfrage or “Jewish Question” by means of “the Final Solution,” i.e., the Holocaust or the systematic murder of the Jews of Germany and its occupied countries.
Veterans Day, to be commemorated and celebrated on the 11th of November, is an official United States public holiday, observed annually, that honors military veterans, that is persons who served in the United States Armed Forces.
This said, I personally feel deeply indebted especially to those American veterans who fought in World War II. Statistics inform us that 16.5 million men and women served in the Armed Forces during WW II of whom 291,557 died in battle and 670,846 were wounded. While I was liberated by Soviet Russian forces who, along with Great Britain, were our allies in that war, I am deeply grateful to all the allied forces who defeated the Nazis and liberated us, concentration camp prisoners, whose days were numbered. We, too, would have been murdered had it not been for these brave Allied soldiers who gave their all to defeat the Nazi enemy.
By juxtaposing the two historical events, grieving over one and celebrating the other, we touch upon something much deeper that meets the eye – namely the problem of evil, a problem that to this very day has not been resolved.
Why does it exist? Who is its author? Why does it continue to persist? What can and should be done against it? Etc. While for me it would be either pure foolishness or the height of human hubris to claim to have the answers to this quandary, a sober reflection might help us make some sense of it all.
In Part II of this blog, soon to follow, I will try to throw some light on the origin and continued existence of evil both from a theological, anthropological and psychological viewpoint.
I would like to take this moment to include my next public speaking engagements, which you can also view here: https://walterziffer.com/schedule/
Thursday, November 8 – in the evening
Asheville’s AB-Tech College
Excerpts from my Holocaust experiences and comments.
Friday, November 9 – Shabbat evening service
Bet HaTephila Temple in Asheville
Talk/Sermon regarding Veterans Day and Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass).