This day, the world community celebrates the International Day Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Since 1995, independent of political parties and governments, the network “UNITED” (“United for Intercultural Action”, Ukrainian “Together for intercultural interaction”), which unites more than 500 organizations from 46 member states of the Council of Europe, coordinates the annual November 9 campaign. The date was not chosen by chance. It was on the night of November 9-10, 1938, that the first targeted mass action of physical violence and terror against the Jews of Germany took place. These bloody events, led by the Nazi authorities of the Third Reich, went down in history under the name “Kristallnacht” (German: Kristallnacht) or “Night of Broken Glass” (German: Reichskristallnacht). The formal reason for the action was the murder of Ernst von Rath, an employee of the German embassy in Paris, by the Jewish teenager Herschel Grinszpan. Grinspan, having learned about the deportation of his family in Poland, decided to take revenge and committed an attack in the German embassy. The death of the third secretary of the embassy von Rath caused a wave of anti-Semitic propaganda. On November 7, the leading Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter sounded a call for pogroms: “The German people have drawn the necessary conclusions from your crime. They will not tolerate an intolerable situation. Hundreds of thousands of Jews control entire sectors of the German economy, rejoice in their synagogues, while their fellow tribesmen in other countries call for war against Germany and kill our diplomats.”. The Nazi authorities used this murder as a convenient excuse for their supporters to attack Jewish property, and then to legally eliminate Jews from participating in the economic life of the country. The pogroms were not a “spontaneous manifestation of righteous anger” over the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew, as Nazi propaganda claimed. Instead, they were supposed to contribute to the implementation of the “Aryanization” policy that began in the spring of 1938 and the acceleration of the expropriation of property and enterprises from Jews, which were planned to be directed to finance the rearmament of Germany.

In the period from November 9 to 13, 1938, a wave of pogroms swept through German cities. Jewish homes and shops were ransacked by Hitler Youth, SA stormtroopers and civilians, leaving the streets covered with fragments of broken glass from windows and shop windows (hence the name Kristallnacht). As a result of the November events, several hundred Jews throughout the Reich were killed, hundreds were wounded and maimed, thousands were humiliated, and at least 300 committed suicide. It has been proven that approx. 30,000 Jews were arrested and deported to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Most of the prisoners who remained alive were released by August 1939, subject to written consent to “emigrate” and hand over property to the state. Moreover, 1,406 synagogues and prayer rooms were completely destroyed during the pogroms. In Vienna, out of 25 synagogues, only one remained intact, all the others were set on fire. 11 out of 14 synagogues in Berlin were completely burned, the rest were badly damaged. It was also destroyed approx. 7,500 Jewish shops, apartments, cultural centers, cemetery buildings. After the November pogroms, former German Kaiser Wilhelm II said: “For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German.” The events of Kristallnacht are considered the symbolic beginning of the systematic extermination of the Jews, which began with the discrimination and expulsion of German Jews from 1933 and ultimately led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

Today, the International Day Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism has a double meaning: one part of the campaign is aimed at commemorating the victims of the Kristallnacht pogroms and in general the victims of the Holocaust, Nazism and fascism throughout history; the other is focused mostly on contemporary problems of racism, anti-Semitism, right-wing extremism and neo-fascism. So, we remember the slogan of the victory over Nazism “Never again!” and struggle with modern challenges to humanity.

Dilfuza Hlushchenko