Between the late evening hours of November 9 and the early morning of November 10, 1938, gangs of German brownshirts and the SS destroyed and firebombed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Historian Richard Evans said the police and the SS were instructed not to stop the destruction of Jewish property or restrict those committing hostile acts against German Jews. Looting was prohibited, foreign nationals were to be unharmed even if they were Jewish, and German properties had to be shielded from being damaged, which meant no fires were to be started next to Jewish stores or synagogues.
Stormtroopers shattered shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses. Jewish homes and apartments were ransacked, and the contents stolen. Residents were terrorized and beaten. In many towns, gravestones in Jewish cemeteries were smashed.
Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 were sent to concentration camps. Historian David Cesarani said approximately 11,000 were transported to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. Overcrowding and malnutrition led to disease causing a number of deaths. Those with emigration papers, individuals prepared to sell their businesses and the lawyers required to assist them, were among this initial group. The next group included combat veterans and elderly men, and then those over 50 years old and teenagers.
The objective of Kristallnacht was to coerce Jews to emigrate. Historian Christian Gerlach pointed out that out of a Jewish population of 500,000 living in Germany at the beginning of 1933, 214,000 remained by 1939. By 1941, two-thirds of the German and Austrian Jews had emigrated. READ MORE
