On the night of November 9-10, 1938, a mass Jewish pogrom began in Nazi Germany, which went down in history as “Kristallnacht” or “Night of Broken Windows.”
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis killed more than 90 people, hundreds were injured and maimed, thousands were subjected to humiliation and insults, 30 thousand Jews were captured and then sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentration camps. Several hundred synagogues were burned to the ground. More than 8 thousand shop windows and windows of private houses owned by Jews were broken – hence the historical name of the pogrom.
Nazi propagandists tried to present the events of that night as a “spontaneous act of violence.” The head of propaganda for the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, J. Goebbels, noted in his speech on November 9, 1938: “…the Führer has decided that… any demonstrations will not be prepared or organized by the party; however, they may arise suddenly and should not be prevented.”
But it was known that the events of Kristallnacht were carefully prepared and were the result of a planned state policy. In fact, the Jews were not just strangers in Germany, the entire people were held responsible for all the troubles and catastrophic situation of the state in the early 1930s. The Reich's “scientists” quite seriously declared the Jews “subhuman”, which according to the Nazis was supposed to eliminate any violence against this category of the population.
According to historians, the almost complete lack of reaction to the pogrom both within Germany itself and in other European countries gave the Nazis free rein and served as an incentive to begin the mass extermination of European Jews. Kristallnacht became a turning point in the fate of German and Austrian Jews and a prologue to one of the most terrible crimes of the Nazi regime – the mass extermination of Jews - the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 6 million people.
The International Day against Fascism, Racism and Anti-Semitism is celebrated around the world on November 9th, as a reminder of the Third Reich's first mass act of physical violence against the Jewish people.
The day of remembrance was initiated by the International Network Against Racism UNITED, which unites more than 500 organizations from 49 countries and operates independently of political parties and governments.
80 years have passed since the regime that brought millions of victims to the world was defeated by joint efforts. After 1945, the peoples of all countries, and above all those who suffered the most, hoped that not only Hitler's military armada had been defeated, but also the Nazi ideology itself had been eradicated. But there are still people who are cynical about the Holocaust or justify the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.
Today, the methods of the Nazis are widely used precisely by “freedom fighters.” Those who today brand all dissenters as “Nazis” are adopting the same methods against whom they are theoretically speaking. Modern totalitarian states use the same methods of organizing internal state life and aggressive expansion against other peoples, trying, like the Nazis of the 1930s, to determine the fate and “destiny” of peoples.
However, evil is already pronounced, and totalitarian countries are only capable of demonstrating cultural backwardness and trying to destroy more developed civilizations. The ideology and practice of such regimes should be condemned by the world community, just as Hitler's Nazism was condemned.
Pavel Polliul