“I can still clearly remember the morning of November 10,” said W. Michael Blumenthal. “My father was arrested early in the morning. Amid the commotion and despite the fact that my mother had forbidden me to do so, I went outside without being noticed. I saw the broken shop windows on Kurfürstendamm boulevard and smoke coming out of the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.”
Blumenthal was only 12 years old at the time.
The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin was set on fire by a Nazi mob on the night of November 9, 1938. The image of burning synagogues and smashed windows became emblematic of a nationwide assault.
On the night of November 9, 1938, Jews across Germany and Austria were attacked by mobs: about 1,300 synagogues and 7,500 businesses were destroyed, and many cemeteries and schools were vandalized. Police largely stood by as Jews were humiliated in the streets, beaten and, in at least 91 cases, murdered. Fire brigades did not stop the synagogues and Jewish shops from burning; they sought only to prevent flames from spreading to “Aryan” properties.
The violence escalated: on November 10 roughly 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to Dachau, Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald. Blumenthal’s father was among those taken. “I still remember my mother’s words when he was taken away by two policemen: ‘What’s going on? What are you doing with him? What has he done? Where is he being taken to?'” Blumenthal recalled. “Even as a 12-year-old, you can feel the fear of adults.”
Blumenthal’s family fled to Shanghai in 1939, one of the few places then admitting Jewish refugees without a visa. He later wrote about the experience in his memoir, From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership in the Twentieth Century.
Why did the pogrom happen on November 9? Anti-Jewish harassment had been official policy since the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 defined Jews and imposed professional bans and social restrictions; property was forcibly “Aryanized.” But historians mark November 1938 as a turning point. Raphael Gross, president of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, says the epoch of German Jewry ended then and German society was irrevocably changed.
The immediate pretext was the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7 by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. After German radio reported the killing, anti-Jewish riots erupted in some cities; two days later, after Hitler gave the order, systematic pogroms began. From Munich, where Nazi leaders gathered for the Beer Hall Putsch anniversary, Joseph Goebbels drafted a speech ordering Jewish businesses destroyed and synagogues burned. Police were instructed not to stop the riots, firefighters to protect only non-Jewish property, and looting was officially banned.
Those orders were implemented that night in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt and many smaller towns and villages. “For different reasons, Germans either participated or looked away,” Blumenthal said. Many did not openly oppose what was happening; many others watched in silence. “The November 1938 pogrom was carried out in plain sight,” Gross said. “It could be seen by everyone — by the press of the world, foreign diplomats and all citizens.”
Despite the ban on looting, theft occurred. Diplomatic reports described young mobs parading away objects looted from synagogues. Diplomats called the events “cultural barbarism.” Hermann Simon, former director of the Centrum Judaicum, who collected reports from 20 countries’ envoys in Germany, cited many disturbing accounts: the Polish consul general in Leipzig reported the Sperling family’s wife stripped naked and nearly raped; the Latvian ambassador wrote that “Kurfürstendamm looked like a battlefield”; the Finnish representative recorded pervasive shame and condemnation among the population.
Diplomats informed their governments, but few made concrete demands. “They were waiting and deceptively hoping that they could somehow come to terms with the Nazi regime,” Simon said, and international responses were limited. Some actions did follow: Gross notes the Kindertransport to England began after November 1938. But overall, reactions were too little.
Few anticipated the Nazis’ later plans for mass extermination. In a grave misjudgment, the Italian embassy wrote on November 16, 1938, that it was inconceivable that Germany would one day send 500,000 people to execution, suicide, or enclose them in huge concentration camps.
This article was adapted from German.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on November 8, 2018, and updated on November 8, 2023. Wording was changed to reflect that the term “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of Broken Glass,” is considered trivializing today. The events of November 9, 1938, are now referred to as “Reichspogromnacht,” or November Pogroms.
It was republished on November 9, 2025.