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Organization involves training police or army units in order to persecute a group in future.
Organization involves training police or army units in order to persecute a group in future.
In November of 1938, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, called on loyal Germans to attack Jews. That night violence began to erupt in throughout the German empire.
Secret orders were given by the Nazi government to the Hitler Youth (a youth group used to brainwash German children to become Nazis) and SA (the Nazi paramilitary militia group also known as Stormtroopers) to dress in civilian clothing, pretending not to be working for the government, and to start destroying Jewish property. The orders also indicated that police officials should arrest as many Jews as local jails could hold, preferably young, healthy men.
See an image and caption describing both groups below.
Joseph Goebbels
Hitler Youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a Nazi organization that aimed to indoctrinate and mobilize German youth to support Adolf Hitler's ideology through activities, propaganda, and military training during the Third Reich.
The SA (Stormtroopers)
The SA (Stormtroopers)
The Nazi SA, or Sturmabteilung, was a paramilitary organization in Nazi Germany that played a significant role in Hitler's rise to power, using violent methods to suppress opposition and promote Nazi ideology before being largely replaced by the SS.
The rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and Jewish institutions throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Many synagogues were burned throughout the night in full view of the public and of local firefighters. Firefighters had received orders to let Jewish buildings burn, and only to intervene to prevent flames from spreading to nearby non-Jewish owned buildings. SA and Hitler Youth members across the country shattered the shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial establishments and looted their wares. Jewish cemeteries were vandalized and desecrated.
Mobs of SA men roamed the streets of Berlin and Vienna, attacking Jews in their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation. Although murder did not figure in the direct orders, many Jews died that night. Although the Nazis claimed only 91 Jews died, historians suggest that there were hundreds of deaths. Police records of the period also document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence.
A Jewish-owned business that had its windows shattered by the mob
These images show Jewish people watching their synagogues burn while firefighters did nothing. The image in the lower left shows the burned inside of one such building the next morning.
These events came to be known as Kristallnacht (commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”), a reference to the broken windows of synagogues (which are Jewish churches), Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes plundered and destroyed that night. Instigated by the Nazi regime, rioters burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized or looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. Kristallnacht was a turning point in Nazi anti-Jewish policy that would end in the Holocaust—the systematic, government-sponsored mass murder of the European Jews.
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