Of
Nils Minkmar
It is a date from history school books, illustrated with the familiar black-and-white pictures, but just sorted and only rarely looked at: The German Night of Broken Glass in 1938 is a station on the way to the mass murder of European Jews, and when we remembering it today and thinking about it, we can appreciate how long the crime had spread in Germany, how the intentions, which were already clear in 1933, were acted out and developed year after year. The way to the death camps and mass shootings was really long and well lit, all this did not come as a storm over the Jews, but one can understand for a long time and well documented what hatred was spread early on, what violence was prepared for and finally carried out. The administration, the judiciary, science, culture, the economy, the churches – almost all of the traditional German power elites were then mostly either actively involved or they kept quiet and approved of the exclusion, the attacks, the murders.