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Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (Making History)

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The personal narratives that Gilbert found for this book are its most compelling aspect. The overall picture of Kristallnacht has been known for decades. And Gilbert's accounting of that, while written with his usual skill, basically covers well trodden ground.

But what he did was compile eyewitness accounts, from Jews who where there in Germany on that night. Most of these have not been published before. They give flesh to the historical framework. And as a prelude of far worse that was to come.

Martin Gilbert is one of the most distinguished living historians, both for his vast Churchill biography and for the many works he has written on various aspects of Jewish history. This is his seventy- seventh book. In it he employs his usual method of gathering eye- witness factual accounts, and using them to tell history in an incredibly personal way. He reportedly advertised in the 'Jerusalem Post' and received forty- five detailed descriptions of those who had gone through this event.
The event itself, the night of violence and terror in which over fifteen- hundred synagogues throughout Germany were attacked, thousands of Jewish stores vandalized, in which there were beatings and murders of individual Jews. The violence was accompanied by a jeering triumphal Nazi- sympathizing portion of the German population. The image of young mothers holding up their babies so as to allow them to see the cruelties being done, is a truly chilling one.
Gilbert sees the event as a turnaround one, a key to all that would follow, the prelude to the 'Shoah'. If anyone needed writing on the wall, this was it.
Gilbert traces the reactions throughout the world, including the sympathy displayed to the Jewish situation in a wide variety of places.
This is a detailed, moving , frightening account of an evil moment in modern history. The personal testimonies once again provide an element not simply of authentication, but of deeping of perception and feeling of the event.

Prior to Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, two events occurred that unequivocally disclosed to the world the evil mindset of the Nazi regime.

The first of these events was the "Knight of the Long Knives", 30 June 1934, in which the Nazis murdered scores of actual or potential threats to their regime and shortly thereafter Hitler and other Nazis brazenly admitted that they had killed over 75 people outright, without a trial or any other semblance of due process, as enemies of the state.

The second such event was "Kristallnacht" (aka the "Night of Broken Glass"), 10 November 1938, when Nazi thugs began a nationwide rampage against Jews, orchestrated in response to a Jewish man's assassination in France of a low-level German diplomat as retaliation for the deportation of his family (along with 12,000 other Polish-born Jews) from Germany to Poland (which then hesitated to accept them). The result of this rampage was the destruction of over a thousand Jewish synagogues; A far greater number of Jewish businesses and homes had windows and property senselessly smashed and broken. In addition, thousands of Jewish men were corraled and herded off to concentration camps, most never to return to their homes or see their loved ones again. Almost a hundred Jews were killed and many more committed suicide during Kristallnacht.

Martin Gilbert's fine book "Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction" describes the events surrounding this signal event, including what led to the shooting of the German diplomat, what transpired during the Night of Broken Glass, and the aftermath of that officially sanctioned lawlessness.

In telling the story of what happened during the Night of Broken Glass, the author (himself a refugee from Germany as a result of that event) utilizes numerous recently obtained eyewitness accounts of how people were mistreated and property vandalized in this event. Interspersed within these stories are also acts of courage by people who helped to prevent additional harm and damage despite the very real threat that in so doing they would subject themselves to beatings by the Gestapo or being sent to prison or a concentration camp.

Most treatments of Kristallnacht in general history books superficially treat the event by highlighting the destruction of Jewish businesses and showing a stock photo or two of some broken windows and glass on the street. This book demonstrates that this event was about much more than hooligans smashing store windows: It was about the desecration of houses of worship (many of which had stood unharmed for hundreds of years) and the personal invasion of people's homes to humiliate them and wantonly destroy (and in some cases steal) their property.

The author similarly uses eyewitness accounts to help tell the story of the aftermath of Kristallnacht when the Jews in Germany and Austria (by then already annexed to Germany under the "Anschluss" of March 1938) desperately tried to emigrate and escape further degradation and suffering. In the meantime, however, the Nazis continued to pass oppressive laws against the Jews, taking away more and more personal and property rights one by one.

It would seem that worldwide publicity about Kristallnacht would engender worldwide sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Germany. But such was not the case. Only Britain and the U.S. took in any significant number of Jewish refugees (and even these countries imposed limits) while many other nations (e.g., Mexico and Ireland) shamefully refused to take in any at all under any circumstances. (The total number of Jews living in Germany and Austria at the time of Kristallnacht was but several hundred thousand.)

Nonetheless, there were a few brave souls working for countries outside of Germany and Austria who tried to do what they could to help the Jews emigrate (even though reprimanded or punished by their superiors) and several of their stories are told here, as well as accounts of those politicians in the U.S. and Britain who opposed aid to the Jewish people.

The author wisely includes several maps that pinpoint each city in Germany were synagogues were destroyed. These maps show more than any single description could how widespread the destruction was and that it occurred throughout every corner of Germany, from one end to the other.

A minor drawback to the book is that it should have included a more complete explanation of the Nazi planning and implementation of Kristallnacht as well as the Nazis' decisions affecting the Jews immediately thereafter as this would have made the book more cohesive. Still, this book is an excellent portrayal of Kristallnacht and is essential reading for students of history in general, as well as students of the histories of Europe, Germany, or the Holocaust.

An excellent read. It reports on the total extent of the Kristallnacht event, which was far more extensive than I had known. The reporter did an excellent job in seeking out those that experienced that terrifying event, and he also highlighted those "righteous gentiles", who tried to assist the victims of this Nazi terror.

One of the things I really like about Martin Gilbert's works is how he brings history back down to the personal level. Instead of a deluge of numbers and benign facts and dates he uses personal, eyewitness accounts in his works. This reminds us that what we are reading is real and affected actual human beings. This forces the reader to truly face the reality of what happened and understand the true toll of these events. Of course in doing this kind of book the author must walk a fine line between giving the reader enough personal accounts to keep the reader focused on the human aspects of the historical event, and not too many so as to deluge the reader and bog the work down in to relentless tedium. In my opinion the author has done a fine job with this book in walking that line.

Kristallnacht is very detailed work that doesn't limit itself to major cities, but instead goes into detail about what happened with each Jewish community during this event. The book goes into detail about the psychological affects on the Jewish community of this event, and how this event really brought home to the German and Austrian Jews the precariousness of their situation. As the reality of this night set in there was a renewed effort to escape the Nazi regime.

What I really like about this book is how it talks about some of the heroes. Every nationality and government, down to regular citizens had some very brave individuals who followed their conscience to do a service to humanity rather than take the easy way and quietly acquiesce to their superior's demands. These, tragically, few individuals created a bright spot in a world of darkness, and this is the power of these books that focus on the micro instead of the macro.

My only real criticism is that the author focused exclusively on the Jewish perspective of Kristallnacht, and because of this narrow focus I felt the book was somewhat incomplete. I would have been very pleased had the author added a chapter detailing the German perspective. Those who participated on the ground level, those who simply stood by and those who actually stood against the racist tide. This book is peppered here and there with some superficial accounts of German actions, but these are from the Jewish perspective and quite fleeting. Kristallnacht was more than a Jewish experience. It had to have a profound effect on the ordinary German and Austrian citizen as well. Up to that point they may have been able to assuage their moral qualms about the Nazi regime with the fact that it hadn't really shown its true colors. They probably attributed prior abuses to the newness of the government and assumed it would be tempered with time, but after this event they had to have some realization of just how bad things were going to get. I would have loved to have had some personal accounts from German perspective, but this was lacking and as such I found the work lacking as well.

All in all I still found the work to be very readable and very informative. The author has a great talent for writing and a wealth of knowledge and information. I think anyone would get a lot out of this book which is why I still give it four stars even with my disappointment with the possible omission of the German and Austrian perspective. I certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in this event or time period.

On November 7 1938, a 17 year old German Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, enraged by the suffering of his parents, who had been expelled from Germany together with 12 000 other Jews, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot junior German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, who died three days later.
Vom Rath's assassination sparked what the Nazis had been planning for months, a nationwide pogrom and orgy of destruction against the Jews, across the Third Reich (Germany, Austria and Sudetenland).
On on November 8 it had been announced that Jewish children could no longer attend "Aryan" state elementary schools, something that had hitherto been allowed where there were not sufficient Jewish elementary schools. At the same time all Jewish cultural activities were suspended "indefinitely.
On the night of the 9-10 November Kristallnacht took place co-ordinated by the Nazi leadership.
That night 91 Jews were murdered, and 25,000-30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps.

In the early hours of November 10, coordinated destruction broke out in cities, towns and villages throughout the Third Reich.
More than 2 000 synagogues were destroyed and tens of thousands of Jewish businesses and homes ransacked.

In this disturbing and heart wrenching work, Gilbert gathers together hundreds of eye witness accounts of the Kristallnacht atrocities.
As one British newspaper reported:"Brownshirts smashed their way into Jewish houses, tore down their curtains, slashed carpets and upholstery with knives and broke up the furniture...Terrified children were turned sobbing out of their beds, which were then smashed to pieces.

Extremely disturbing is the refusal of the nations of the world to take in refugees.

Between January 1933 and March 1938 more than 35 000 German Jews were granted immigration certificates to Palestine. Following the 1936 Arab Revolt, the British restricted Jewish immigration the Holy Land to 3000 a year.
On November 30 1939 the Jewish National Council for Palestine offered to take 10 000 German Jewish children into the Holy Land to be dispersed among the 250 Jewish agricultural and urban centres there.
To appease the Arabs in Palestine and Muslims in India and other parts of the British Empire the offer to take the children was rejected.
The British authorities turned back Jewish ships full of refugees and put pressure on the governments of Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey and Greece not to allow Jewish refugees passage through their territories to the Holy Land.
Haven't enough Jewish lives been sacrificed to appease Muslim rage?
Proposals were made to settle Jewish in British Guiana, Brazil, Madagascar, Uganda and Tanganyika but all were abandoned.
A proposal to resettle Jews in Newfoundland in Canada was rejected due to public pressure from the local population there. Ireland. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull blocked a proposal by the Legislative Council of the Virgin Islands to take in refugees from the Nazis claiming it was 'incompatible with existing law".

The book is an important testimony and contains hitherto unrevealed accounts.
It is an account of how hatred can lead to destruction on such a massive scale.
Today we are faced with Jew-hatred on a scale as great as that of the Nazis in the form of hatred of Israel.
If this is not stopped who knows where it will lead?

Writing history as a snapshot of time is a risky venture. While a close examination of an event provides a sense of precision, broader implications are too often omitted. This is the case with Martin Gilbert's "Kristallnacht". It's an example of fine journalism underpinned by good research and scholarly presentation. Hardly an entertaining evening's read, this book chronicles how guided prejudice led to an orgy of violence and destruction against Germany's Jews. Stores were smashed and looted, synagogues burned and demolished, homes invaded and people terrorised during a two-day expression of hatred. The wreckage littering the streets, particularly the shop windows, gave the episode its name - and this book's title. It is a glimpse into the past we all must see and endure.

Gilbert gathered the remembrances of people or their offspring who survived the onslaught. There are letters, journals and interviews with the author, bringing a disturbing intimacy to this account. That there were survivors to make these records seems surprising after a half-century of condemnation by the victorious Powers. Yet, Kristallnacht itself wasn't an orgy of killing. Less than a hundred died of beatings or unknown causes, although there were many suicides. Jews were seized and incarcerated, even in the notorious concentration camps, but most were later released. Pre-war Germany was more interested in ridding itself of its Jews by exile and emigration was encouraged. "Time to leave" became a byword among Germany's Jews after Kristallnacht, which was part of its purpose, according to Gilbert. Emigration, however, was more than packing up and leaving. There had to be places to go, and not all nations opened their borders to Jews fleeing manifest hatred.

Although the historian notes how the destruction was orchestrated by Nazi officials and that Brownshirts and the Hitler Youth were present, the attackers were either joined or cheered on by a large, although not universal, proportion of the general population. The opportunity to obtain goods, stores, homes and money was seized by many Germans. Firms were closed, to open "under new management" by the stroke of a pen. Homes gained new owners as Jews emigrated, were shoved into ghettos or concentration camps or, later, killed. There were few enough to defend them and Gilbert avoids explaining whether lawyers helped or hindered the processes. Given the absolute powers the Nazi regime granted itself, the only good lawyer was one who acceded to the process. Another void in this book is the lack of accounts from smaller towns. Gilbert provides a series of maps showing how many towns experienced Kristallnacht's violence. Yet, the text focusses on Vienna, Frankfurt-am-Main, Hamburg and other large cities. How big did a town have to be to host a synagogue? How many small-town neighbours assisted in its destruction? We aren't given this information.

If history has "watersheds", Kristallnacht serves as a type specimen. Only the French massacre of St Bartholomew's Night stands as a peer. In the same way that a cabal of French Catholics plotted to rid their country of its Protestant minority, so too, did Nazi thugs await a trigger to launch their onslaught. It came with the murder of a German diplomat in Paris, but the event hardly matches the scope of the response. Clearly, "everyday" Germans participated in the destruction, but Gilbert ties the causes solely to Nazi policy. That hardly seems sustainable, but worse, it denies the possibility of a reprise in different nations under different leaders. If this book could teach us anything, it's that being on guard against those promoting hate is an endless task. Read this book for what happened, but go elsewhere to learn why it did. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Ontario]

What makes this book a particularly devastating account of events across Germany in November 1938 is the inclusion of numerous eyewitness testimonies to the horrors of the beginnings of the Holocaust. Obviously, many of those who supply their testimony and are quoted here by Professor Gilbert were mere children or adolescents at the time. Their personal accounts of how the events of that night irrevocably changed their world are chilling to read regardless of how familiar the events may be. The extent and suddeness of the Pogrom retains it's power to shock as recalled by those who survived it. One additional aspect of Gilbert's approach is the insertion of numerous examples of individual Germans acting humanely and trying to help in a very dark time.

Excellent details on the opening night to the a terrible event of genecide. Learned quite a bit and the the individual accounts/stories were mind blowing. The "stairs of death" and other practices used I had never heard of.

Read this one before reading Shindlers List

I read this book looking for a solid, comprehensive history of Kristallnacht. I was very disappointed.

First of all, the book seems to be pieced together a series of stories or anecdotes. There is story after story of tragedies from that night and its aftermath, but there isn't much of an overview.

Second, I thought that the quality of research behind this book was very low. At least 80% of Gilbert's quotes and research comes from British newspapers, such as the Manchester Guardian, The Times, and the Daily Telegraph. Many stories come from letters sent to the author, but these were sent to him 65 years after the event. The people writing the letters were children at the time of Kristallnacht. How accurate are their childhood memories? There is a *small* amount of research done in at the British Foreign Office archive and other British and American archives. Virtually no German archives are used, not even the Federal Archive in Berlin that contains all of the Nazis' records. The author also did not use the Leo Baeck Institute archive (in New York), the world's most important archive for German-Jewish history.

As I read all of the tales in this book, I kept wondering about all of these fantastic and horrible anecdotes. The Nazis committed horrendous injustices, but it is critical that a historian, especially one with Gilbert's stature, have rock-solid evidence and verifiable sources whenever possible. This book tells a tragic and interesting story, but it did not reach the high standards that the author owes his readers.