Who Started WW2? Kristallnacht Part One

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Two major sources for this article are The Bizarre Story Of Kristallnacht by Ingrid Weckert and her article, Crystal Night’ 1938: The great Anti-German spectacle

As with all things covered in this series about the lead-up to WW2, Kristallnacht, or Crystal Night, has a story that Holocaust fabulists want you to believe. Then there is the truth which reveals itself when all the relevant information is presented.

For a brief description of Kristallnacht I will quote from the article ‘Crystal Night’ 1938: The great Anti-German spectacle, by Ingrid Weckert:

“Crystal Night” is the name that’s been given to the night of 9-10 November 1938. In almost all large German cities and some smaller ones that night, store windows of Jewish shops were broken, Jewish houses and apartments were destroyed, and synagogues were demolished and set on fire. Many Jews were arrested, some were beaten, and some were even killed. The “Reich Crystal Night” (Reichskristallnacht) was one of the most shameful events of National Socialist Germany. Although the Jews suffered initially, the greatest harm was ultimately done to Germany and the German people.

It is important to Holocaust fabulists that you believe certain talking points about Kristallnacht. This is illustrated from the screenshot below from Holocaust Denial on Trail’s (HDoT) website. They want you to think the populace believe that the German people were champing at the bit to do violence to the poor innocent Jews who didn’t do anything wrong. In this article, I will provide some background information so that you are better prepared to confront nonsense from Holocaust fabulists.

In October 1938, the Polish government issued a decree requiring all Polish Jews living abroad to renew their passports in Poland by the end of the month, or risk having their citizenship revoked. At the time, around 70,000 Polish Jews resided in Germany, particularly in Berlin. Many felt that Nazi Germany was still a better place to live. Not wanting thousands of stateless people in their country, the German government organized special trains (no, they weren’t cattle cars) to take around 17,000 of them to the Polish border. During this time, Poland was deporting German Jews back to Germany. When the Polish Jews living in Germany arrived, Polish border officials let them in at first, but quickly blocked them from entering. This created a standoff between German and Polish officials. As a result, some 8,000 Jews were stranded in the border zone for several days. The conditions of the border zone are a point of contention that will be addressed in another article. Ultimately, both countries agreed to halt the deportations on October 29, with the Germans allowing the Jews to return home.

The one-sided view you are presented with today condemns Germany for attempting to remove the Jews that were Polish citizens, while ignoring the Polish government’s initial decree. Why should Germany be demonized for not wanting to bear the burden of thousands of stateless citizens? Why should Poland’s role in this be minimized? No, those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answer is simple. Poland gets leniency because they helped the Allies fight their enemy, the Germans.

To illustrate this leniency, take a look at this section from the Wikipedia entry on Kristallnacht. The section is called “Expulsion of Polish Jews in Germany.” The first sentence makes the unsubstantiated claim that in 1938 Germans announced that residence permits for foreigners were being cancelled. This statement lacks a citation because it is objectively false. It was the Polish government that made this announcement. The title of the section is technically correct, but it is dishonest and misleading when coupled with this false statement. An honest section header would be something like “Germany Responds to Ant-Semitic Polish Decree”. And don’t think I didn’t notice the lack of evidence for the claim that Jews had their things stolen.

The next domino to fall was a the murder of a German official by a Jewish man. A man who also took out his grievances on Germany instead of Poland. On November 7th 1938, enraged by the deportation and mistreatment of his fellow Jews—including his own parents—a Polish-German Jew living in Paris named Herschel Grynszpan went to the German Embassy in Paris and shot embassy official Ernst vom Rath. While it is often said that Grynszpan acted out of fury over his family’s deportation, the truth about his motivations remains more complex and debated. This topic will be covered later. Vom Rath died of his wounds two days later, on November 9th.

When news of his death broke, it triggered a wave of anti-Jewish violence across the country. That night riots broke out targeting Jewish individuals, synagogues, businesses, and community centers. We are supposed to believe the violence was a coordinated, nationwide pogrom. I’m not sure how the Germans could have coordinated something like this so quickly, and with the communication technology available at the time no less. It is more likely that this was a natural reaction from the German people. This and the claim that Kristallnacht was sanctioned by the government, and therefore a pogrom, is another topic I will cover later.

There is no doubt that there was violence and destruction. As we will see later, this event caused a great headache for the German government. Furthermore we must take into account that the extent of the damage is often overplayed. According to Weckert:

In 1938 there were approximately 1,400 synagogues in Germany, of which only about 180 were destroyed or damaged. Furthermore, Jews owned approximately 100,000 shops and department stores in Germany in 1938. Of this number, only about 7,500 had their windows broken. These figures show just how much the so-called “historical truth” differs from what actually happened. The damage and destruction that did actually occur was, of course, a terrible shame, but the exaggerations, especially by German historians who use them to condemn their own people, are also a shame.

As we venture on into the topic of Kristallnacht it will become apparent that it was, and still is, misrepresented to dehumanized and vilify the German people.

Continue to part two