On the morning of November 10, 1938, the sunlight caught German city streets littered with shattered shop windows—so densely that the cobblestones shone as if after an ice storm. In a single night, hundreds of synagogues were burned in Germany and Austria, thousands of Jewish businesses were ransacked, dozens of people were murdered, and approximately thirty thousand were sent to concentration camps. This pogrom, named the «Night of Broken Glass» due to the sound of the breaking glass, is considered the beginning of the Holocaust: it was after this event that the discrimination against Jews in the Third Reich shifted from paper restrictions to open, mass violence.
Five Shots in Paris
In late October 1938, the Nazi authorities deported approximately seventeen thousand Jews of Polish descent from Germany—they were forcibly moved to the Polish border near the village of Zbońszyn, where many lived outdoors for weeks, unable to enter either country. The Grinspan family from Hanover was among those deported that day. Their seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, was staying with an uncle in Paris at the time and learned of his parents' expulsion from his sister’s letter. On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grinspan went to the German embassy and shot its secretary, Ernst vom Rath, five times. Vom Rath died two days later, on November 9, from his wounds. According to his own testimony, Herschel acted on behalf of «twelve thousand persecuted Jews.»
The supposedly enraged populace
On the evening of November 9, when news arrived in Germany of the death of Paul Rathenau, the Nazi leadership was gathering in Munich to commemorate the anniversary of the «Beer Hall Putsch» of 1923. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels addressed the assembled SA members and indicated that it was time to target the Jews, but to do so in a manner that appeared to be a spontaneous reaction of an enraged populace. Police and stormtroopers were given tacit orders not to impede the pogroms—only to ensure that the property of non-Jews remained safe.
Night of Hate
Just hours after the Munich conference on German and Austrian cities, groups of stormtroopers, SS members, and Hitler Youth marched out—some in uniform, some in civilian clothes. They stormed synagogues, removed and burned scrolls of the Torah and books, and then set the buildings alight themselves. Estimates suggest that between two hundred and over one thousand four hundred synagogues were destroyed in a single night. Approximately seven and a half thousand Jewish stores and businesses had their windows smashed. According to various sources, between ninety and several hundred people were killed, and about thirty thousand men were arrested and sent to the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
Compensation from victims
The morning after the pogrom, another blow struck—this time, a financial one. On November 12, 1938, during a meeting with major German industrialists, Hermann Göring announced that the Jewish community was obligated to pay a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks—formally as compensation for the death of Tom Rat. The state simply confiscated insurance payouts for the destroyed property, and the process of forcibly selling Jewish businesses and assets—the so-called «Aryanization"—accelerated sharply. On February 11, 1939, at Göring’s initiative, the Imperial Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established, headed by Reinhard Heydrich—and at one of its first meetings, he clearly stated his department’s objective: «To drive the Jews out of Germany entirely.»
The Missing Teen
The fate of Hershel Grinspan, whose shot sparked the riots, eventually vanished almost without a trace. After the German occupation of France in 1940, he was handed over to the Gestapo, spent twenty months in custody without trial, and was then sent to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. On September 26, 1942, he was transferred to the forced labor camp in Magdeburg—this is the last documented mention of him in German archives. What happened to Grinspan afterward remains unknown: according to one version, he died shortly before the end of the war; according to another, he survived and disappeared among the anonymous prisoners. The Nazis never dared to hold an open, public trial for him, despite threatening to do so throughout the war, because they feared that Grinspan would speak in court about the alleged homosexuality of Paul Rat, the embassy secretary he had killed, and other Parisian Nazis with whom Paul Rat had been involved.
In the two years leading up to that dark night, the Nazis attempted to present a completely different face to the world. During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler authorized a temporary easing of anti-Jewish policies: prohibitive signs, posters, and brochures disappeared from the streets, and German newspapers were forbidden from publishing antisemitic material during the Games. Sport proved to be the perfect window display—a beautiful picture behind which the ugly truth could be hidden—and the state’s habit of making the desirable seem like reality proved surprisingly resilient in this arena.
