Today’s Annihilating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The Nazi pogrom of November 9/10, 1938 (“Kristallnacht”), which was staged as a sudden, irruptive event, already contained the implicit threat of annihilation: Jewish synagogues were burned to the ground, blown up and torn down, religious objects were destroyed, and “non-Aryans” were threatened, beaten up and murdered in their homes. Approximately 30,000 Jewish men were taken as hostages to the concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The new level of persecution was characterized by Reich-wide, regime-sponsored, centrally controlled, public and demonstrative physical violence against Jews of a previously unknown dimension, with perpetrators of such acts going basically unpunished. Up to this point, there had been individual acts of violence against Jews since the early months of the Nazi regime, including murders, but these had been limited to a local or regional scope.
A synagogue burns during the November pogrom
The November pogrom revealed that the Nazi state assigned ever-decreasing value to the life of Jews. The Reich Ministry of Justice, in an agreement with the Secret State Police Office, notified the attorneys general in mid-November 1938 that murders and assaults were only to be prosecuted if the Gestapo reported the motives as “selfish” to the state prosecutor. “Politically” motivated murders without intent to profit from the act – well over a hundred Jewish men and women were murdered during the “Night of Broken Glass” – were to be decriminalized and remain unpunished.
Persecuted Jews during the November Pogrom
No German could remain unaware of this anti-Jewish violence, which was practiced openly and not legitimated by any laws. Such violence was often staged before hundreds of spectators in city and community centers as ostensibly spontaneous outbursts of the “people’s wrath.” In fact, the perpetrators were SA and SS men, supported to some degree by members of the Hitler Youth. Not a few Germans were thoroughly offended by such violent acts. At the core of the population’s reaction, as investigated by the regime, however, was not outrage at the injustices committed against the Jews; Germans were much more offended that valuable goods, including those that were scarce and subject to rationing, were being destroyed “without sense and without reason.”
Destroyed Jewish Storefront after Kristallnacht
In previous years, threats of extermination against the Jews had been limited to Germany and had not yet been announced by the state leadership itself. This changed in early 1939. On January 30, 1939, Hitler, explicitly threatened “the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe” in a speech before the coordinated “Reichstag”. This speech was broadcast on the radio, printed verbatim or nearly so in all newspapers, shown on weekly newsreels in cinemas and distributed as a leaflet. In retrospect, the genocidal intentions seem to be abundantly clear in these statements; contemporaries, however, did not understand such statements in a literal way.
However, Hitler returned again and again in his public addresses to the German people to his threat of January 1939, repeating it four times in 1942 alone. On January 30, February 24, September 30 and November 8, 1942, he reminded his countrymen, as Europe’s Jews ere already being murdered, of his “prophecy”.
Culled from: Topography of Terror
Ghastly! – “Only the Lonely”
Death for this unidentified elderly man came at a seedy rooming house on St. Peter Street in downtown St. Paul in March, 1947. When the house’s proprietor came to collect the rent, he found the man hanging in a small closet.
Culled from: Strange Days Dangerous Nights: Photos From the Speed Graphic Era