November 10, 1938. At home on the peaceful outskirts of the city in the quiet residential area around the Battle of Nations Monument, I, as a 7-year-old, didn’t notice anything of the riots. I only remember that my father came home the next day completely distraught from his office in the New Town Hall and my brother and I were immediately sent to bed. My parents certainly talked about what had happened for a long time that night1.
But since my mother couldn’t afford a fur coat anyway and sometimes complained that the Jews charged such inflated prices, there was perhaps even a little bit of malicious joy at that point. She couldn’t have known what fate awaited the Jewish families in the future and that this first night of horror was only the beginning of a martyrdom for people of the Jewish faith. However, she also never knew that her grandchildren, who only knew about these terrible things by hearsay, would one day be confronted with them and would have to bear the guilt of this for the rest of their lives.
I do not want to whitewash myself with these claims. Nor do I have any intention of boasting about false ideas of resistance. During Hitler’s time, I was simply a growing, very enthusiastic child who was initially completely swept along by the Nazi regime’s youth programs, only slowly began to doubt Hitler after my own bitter experiences during the war, and much later realized the disaster that the German wars of aggression had brought upon the entire world.
- Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, took place on the night of November 9–10, 1938. This violent pogrom, orchestrated by Nazi officials, targeted Jewish communities across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were destroyed and vandalized, with an estimated 267 synagogues burned, thousands of Jewish establishments looted, and approximately 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht is widely viewed as a turning point in Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies, marking the shift from economic and social oppression to overt violence and setting the stage for the Holocaust. The name “Kristallnacht,” which translates to “Crystal Night” or “Night of Broken Glass,” refers to the shattered glass from broken windows littering the streets. ↩︎