Warning sounds of the shattering of European Jewry
Today, on the 9th of November 2017, we recall the horrendous pogrom Kristallnacht against Jews throughout Nazi Germany (9-10th November 1938), carried out by SA (Sturmabeteilung) paramilitary forces and German civilians.
The German authorities looked on without intervening!
The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.
Some 91 Jews were murdered during the attacks, but when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll climbed into the hundreds. Additionally, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.
Hunting Season
It was “open season” on Jews, and people had a free pass to attack Jews and destroy their property. In an ensuing orgy of hate, Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers.
Over 1,000 synagogues were burned – 95 in Vienna alone – and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were either destroyed or damaged.
Sir Martin John Gilbert, the British historian and honorary Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany “sent shock waves around the world.”
Clearly those shock waves were not enough!
As it affected Jews, there were no economic sanctions against Nazi Germany, no severing of diplomatic relations, no easing of immigration quotas, and no opening of the gates to the Jews’ own ancient homeland.
The free world’s muted reaction to the Kristallnacht paved the way to Auschwitz and the destruction of European Jewry.
In the Shoah (“Holocaust”) that was soon to follow, over six million Jews were murdered (1939-1945).
In South Africa, the warning signs were all too evident in the 1930s with the rise of South African National Socialism, and the emergence of the Afrikaaner Grey Shirts modeled on the Nazis.
(See Israel Link:)
– Legacy of a Ledger – figuring out the past.
After Evian – Nothing!
Four months prior to Kristallnacht, the US administration of President Roosevelt organized a conference in Evian, France, that brought together delegates from 32 countries to discuss the Jewish refugee problem.
The delegates reaffirmed their reluctance to liberalize their immigration quotas, and the British refused to even discuss Palestine as a possible haven.
The conference was a pretense.
The U.S. administration had convened the gathering to give the impression that the free world was acting when it was doing nothing of the sort.
As one German newspaper’s comment on Evian so poignantly exposed the hypocrisy of the world’s concern for the plight of the Jews:
“We can see that one likes to pity the Jews … but no state is prepared to … accept a few thousand Jews. Thus, the conference serves to justify Germany’s policy against Jewry.”
Evian was the green light to the Germans. Four months later – Kristallnacht!
What Changed?
What changed with the breaking of the glass in November 1938 was the nature of the persecution of Jews. From economic, political, and social, it evolved rapidly to being physical with beatings, incarceration, and murder. In the words of historian Max Rein in 1988:
“Kristallnacht came…and everything was changed.”
However, in a sense today, little has “changed” in reminding Jews that their survival depends not on the good graces of others, but on the strength of themselves. This realization is embodied in a strong defensible Israel.
In the same way the police of Germany stood idly by while Germans had free reign to murder Jews and destroy their property, so the world today stands by to the daily assaults on Israel by word and deed for the ‘crime’ of defending itself.
Message to the world – Israel is not obliged to commit suicide!
How do we know when little has changed?
Smile Concealing Treachery and Terror. MK Hanin Zuabi
When on an anniversary of Kristallnacht firebrand MK Hanin Zoabi of the Joint (Arab) List party – who has been welcomed in South Africa – accuses the Jewish state of crimes akin to those committed by the Nazis. She says this to an enthusiastic applause from Europeans in the heart of Amsterdam, standing just meters from the former site of a centuries-old Jewish orphanage decimated during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Spewing lies and hatred in the Goebbels tradition, Zoabi drew parallels between Hitler’s genocide against the Jews and current Israeli policy against Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs.
More applause; reminiscent of the rousing responses that Hitler and his murderous cohorts received when denouncing Jews at Nazi rallies.
And look at the behaviour of the world body established after WWII to safeguard the world.
The United Nations’ cultural arm UNESCO, recently passed a resolution ignoring Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in a move that can only be described as “anti-Semitic” and “absurd”.
The resolution, adopted at the committee stage, used only Muslim names for the Jerusalem Old City holy sites and was harshly critical of Israel for what it termed “provocative abuses that violate the sanctity and integrity” of the area.
Unwelcome in Europe in the twentieth century, unwelcome in its ancestral home in the twenty-first century, Jews still hear that “shattering glass.’
And if the message of Kristallnacht was then for Germans to boycott Jewish businesses, the message today from our enemies is for the world to boycott Israel.
However, what has dramatically changed is that since 1948, we have a nation state of the Jewish People, and in the words of Cape Town-born Israeli politician and diplomat Abba Eban:
“Israel’s future will be longer than its past”
