Kristallnacht

On November 9th 1938, 191 synagogues were burned and 30,000 Jewish people were rounded up, and put into concentration camps this was all part of Kristallnacht. Shops of Jewish owners were smashed, the windows broken and things sold in the shop stollen. Gustav Mark was a victim on the night on Kristallnacht, he owned a butcher shop it was destroyed on this terrible night and he was arrested later by Nazi troops and was put in a concentration camp, all because he was Jewish. This all took place in Germany. Adolf Hitler, Nazi troop leader, was part of the reason this happened because he had something against Jews.

Hitler was scapegoating the Jews because everything that seemed to go wrong in Germany he blamed on the Jews which influenced other Germans to hate them to. For example on November 7, 1938 A seven-year-old Jewish boy Herschel Grynszpan, who was living in France, was angry and frustrated by his inability to help his family living in Germany because of this he marched into the German embassy in Paris and shot a Nazi Official. The Nazi Official did not die that day but to days later, and this made Hitler's followers decided they wold blame it on all the Jews in Germany. Joesph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, held a press conference the next day saying it was not a government action but a "spontaneous" expression of Germans not being happy with the Jews. However they did not do anything to stop it.

Learning about this event has shocked me deeply I had no idea that back in the 1930's this had happened. It is hard to take it from reading handouts and look deeply into it however in class we listened to a lady called Sonia Weitze, a survivor of the whole time of Jewish people being blamed for everything. She wrote poems about when she was in concentration camps and listening to what happened to her made me really upset on how cruel the Nazi's were. I hope this never happens again as it was a shocking time in history.