2023-11-09 06:13:00
In the context of the Hamas attack on Israel that, according to specialists, revived a wave of antisemitismthis Thursday will commemorate the 85th anniversary of the Kristallnacht (in Spanish, “the Night of Broken Glass”), an event that marked “a before and after” in the history of discrimination against Judaism, to the point that it is considered a prelude to the Holocaust.
During the night of November 9 and November 10, 1938, a series of events took place in Germany, annexed Austria and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. Violent anti-Jewish attacks coordinated by Nazi leaders with the support of Adolf Hitler. Specifically, according to the United Nations Holocaust Museum, he was instigated by Nazi Party officials, members of the SA (Assault detachments or assault guards) and the Hitler Youth.
“We are seeing an unthinkable level of anti-Semitism”
The episode was named after the fragments of broken glass that covered the German streets after the pogrom, which came from the windows of synagogues, homes and Jewish businesses looted and destroyed during the episode. According to official data from the German government, which is questionable, The incident left 91 Jews dead., to which were added hundreds of synagogues destroyed, burned or damaged (in some cases there are more than 1,500); about 7,000 businesses looted; Jewish houses and cemeteries violated; Jewish schools burned, and Jewish hospitals destroyed.
Besides, around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested without having committed any crime and then transferred to the Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The arrests shocked and shocked Jewish families and communities. Many of those men were released over the next three months as their relatives were able to demonstrate that they planned to leave Germany. However, hundreds died in those places. In that sense, the effects of Kristallnacht They would serve to stimulate the emigration of Jews from Germany in the coming months.
According to the UN Holocaust Museum, The pogrom was particularly destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. In these cities, SA groups roamed the streets attacking Jews in their homes and forcing them to carry out acts of public humiliation. Likewise, the police archive of the period documented that a high number of rapes and suicides occurred after the riots.
After the events, the German-Jewish community, who were prohibited by law from seeking compensation from their insurers, were forced to pay a fine of one billion Reichsmark (about 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates) for the damage caused. In this regard, German leaders such as Hermann Göring criticized the extensive material losses. Likewise, the government blamed the Jews for the pogrom and confiscated compensation from insurance companies.
“Kristallnacht was a defining moment for the Jews of Germany. Subsequently, many Jews concluded that they had no future in Nazi Germany (…) Thus, Kristallnacht “figures as a fundamental turning point in the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, which culminated in the attempt to annihilate European Jewry,” said the UN Holocaust Museum.
The trigger of the “spontaneous” episode
The Kristallnacht dates back to two previous days, November 7, 1938. In that sense, the German government announced that the event originated as a “spontaneous outburst” of public sentiment in response to the murder of Ernst vom Rathan officer at the German embassy in Paris, France.
Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish-German Jew living in Paris, shot the diplomat on November 7, 1938. A few days earlier, German authorities had expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich, among them, their parents. Those expelled found themselves stranded in a refugee camp near the town of Zbaszyn in the border region between Poland and Germany. As a result of this fact, in addition to the fact that he was living illegally in the French city, it is believed that The young man sought revenge for his family situation.
Vom Rath died on November 9, 1938, two days after the attack. His death coincided with the anniversary of the failed 1923 coup attempt, which occurred in a beer hall in Munich, Germany, an important commemoration for National Socialists. On the occasion of the date, the leaders of the Nazi Party had met in a beer hall.
During the event, Nazi leaders learned of the diplomat’s death. In response, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the main instigator of the pogrom, gave an anti-Semitic speech, in which he implied to the “Old Guard” of the party that the young man had not acted on his own, but rather “World Judaism” had conspired in the assassination of the official.
With Hitler’s permission, Goebbels called for an attack on Germany’s Jewish communities, whereupon the Nazi officials called their respective districts and communicated the instructions. “The Führer has decided that (…) demonstrations should neither be prepared nor organized by the Party, but as long as they break out spontaneously, they should not be hindered,” he specified.
Fierce Nazi propaganda maintained that the attacks on those nights were spontaneous, but in reality this was not the case. Along these lines, members of the SA and Hitler Youth teams wore civilian clothes to support the fiction that the riots were expressions of the “outraged public reaction”.
In the early hours of November 10, Heydrich, in his role as head of the Security Police (Security Police) sent an urgent telegram to the State Police and SA leaders. His orders contained specific instructions: rioters could not take actions that would harm non-Jewish German people or property; they could not subject foreigners, Jewish or not, to violent acts; and they had to remove the archives from the synagogues and properties of the Jewish communities before destroying them, and transfer them to the Security Service (Security service, or SD). He also indicated that They should arrest the largest number of Jews that local jails could accommodate, preferably young, healthy men.
The parallels between Kristallnacht and the Hamas attack
On October 7, the terrorist group Hamas launched an attack against Israel in which, so far, it killed 1,400 people, including more than 300 soldiers.. The event revived a wave of anti-Semitism in different parts of the world.while Khalid Mashallah, one of the leaders of the Islamic group, called for an international “Holy War”: “I ask all Muslims in the world to carry Jihad in their souls; fight and be martyrs of Al-Aqsa “.
The resurgence of anti-Semitic acts in the last month is a reality throughout Europe, to which the Commission denounced that “Europe’s Jews live in fear again”. In Germany, with the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust, the situation is even more worrying, and the government launched a call to combat anti-Semitism in the country.
In that sense, Felix Klein, government commissioner in charge of the fight against anti-Semitism, stated this Tuesday that, for a long time, the European country considered its work of memory and atonement for its genocidal past as exemplary, which led to a certain relaxation. “A large part of the population believed they were immunized against anti-Semitism”he claimed.
The director of Germany’s internal intelligence service, Thomas Haldenwang, recently warned of the return of the “darkest hours in the history” of the country. In this regard, the German federal police reported having counted some 2,000 crimes related to the war between Israel and Hamas. In neighboring France, anti-Semitic acts exceeded a thousand, according to authorities.
“Anti-Semitism is an ancient phenomenon that is full of prejudices and myths that have spanned the history of humanity and in each era it dressed in the clothing of the paradigm of the moment. All eras have managed to find a negative other in the Jew.“Marisa Braylan, director of the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations (DAIA), explained to PERFIL.
In that sense, Braylan stated that Hamas attack “raised a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitism”but more than anything anti-Zionism, which is what we understand as the most contemporary anti-Semitism.” “The level of violence and exhibitionism of Hamas enabled the increase of a very worrying anti-Semitism,” he remarked.
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And he added: “Deep down, or not so deep down, the racist will always find the excuse for what fits with his prejudice, his stigma and that group that he has already prejudged. He will shut him down. any speech to justify aggression, violence, indifference and denial“.
In this regard, the director of the CES maintained that this ideology “uses the excuse of supposed protection of the Palestinian people to justify anti-Judaism, hiding behind a political issue.” “Hamas has declared a war on all the Jews of the world, which transcends the territorial problem, with which takes up the discourse of Nazism in some way“, he expressed.
Along these lines, Braylan explained that in the Annual Reports on Antisemitism in Argentina carried out by the CES “we have been noticing that Every time the conflict in the Middle East peaks, this rebounds in Argentina“. However, he clarified that it is not an exclusive fact of the country, but that it is a “global phenomenon”: “The Jewish diaspora, that is, the entire Jewish community outside Israel, are more harassed, more punished, more discriminated against. “in those contexts.
Regarding the “discourse of Nazism” that is taken up again, the director of the CES mentioned the episodes that occurred in Europe and the United States where “modalities very similar to those of Nazism” are used, such as the “brands” of homes and institutions. beans with the stars of David. In the case of Argentina, she explained that the DAIA is receiving a “very high” number of anti-Semitic complaints, highlighting that “we are seeing the same ways and the same problems” as with Nazism.
“The Kristallnacht It is taken as a milestone of seriousness and expression of hatred. Unfortunately, many years later, and with lessons that were not learned, we realize that It is repeated in its characteristics in a very similar way on October 7 in Israeli territory“, he specified, while adding that the Jewish people “are once again in the place of the accused and the suspected.”
“November 9th is commemorated Kristallnacht, but the best way to call it is the ‘night of the pogron’ that occurred on that occasion. We call ‘pogron’ the same thing that happened in Israel a month ago: the brutal attack against civilians who cannot defend themselves simply because they are Jews. Our entire calendar is going to be taken up to commemorate more acts that revive this latent and constant antisemitism that in each era adopts new disguises and ways, but ultimately it is a hatred that sometimes tries to rationalize, politicize or justify,” Braylan concluded.
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