“Annihilating blow to Germany’s Jews”, read Svenska Dagbladet’s headline on 11 November 1938 after Nazi Germany unleashed “the wrath of the people” against Jews all over the country on the night of 10 November.
Jews were humiliated and beaten in the street, hundreds were murdered and tens of thousands were arrested to be sent to concentration camps. By morning, over 1,400 synagogues and houses of worship had been burned and destroyed, and an estimated 7,500 Jewish shops looted and vandalized.
The responsibility was placed on the Jews themselves, who were ordered to pay a collective billion in damages to the German state and were forced to clean up after the destruction.
The shards of glass from the thousands of broken windows that lined the streets gave the terror its name, the Kristallnacht. However, the violence began already on the 7th and lasted until the 13th of November, which is why the November pogrom is considered more just.
“Racial hatred celebrates orgies all over Germany,” wrote Gothenburg’s Handels- och Sjöfartstidning. “Munich’s Jews are hunted like animals,” read the headline in the Social-Demokraten. Accurate descriptions of another crossed threshold along the way to the Nazis’ final solution to the so-called Jewish question – extermination.
A synagogue on fire and broken shop windows of Jewish businesses in Berlin on November 10, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht. Stock image. The violence increases again
Eighty-five years after Kristallnacht, against the backdrop of Hamas’ terrorist acts in Israel on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, hatred, threats and violence against Jews around the world are once again on the rise.
In France, more than twice as many anti-Semitic hate crimes have been reported in the last month as in the whole of last year. In the United States, the federal police agency the FBI states that 60 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes are directed at Jews – who make up 2.4 percent of the country’s population.
In Berlin, the capital from which the Nazi regime oversaw the mass murder of six million Jews, ceremonies commemorating Kristallnacht are guarded by heavily armed police and snipers.
The Jewish congregation in Malmö has opted out of a public demonstration on Remembrance Day for security reasons. Stockholm’s synagogue is also cutting back on social gatherings due to the tense situation.
Heavily armed police guard a synagogue in Berlin in connection with the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht on November 9. Searched at their homes
Hamas’ terrorist act was celebrated in several places in Sweden with demonstrations, car caravans and fireworks. In the month after the crime, the police received 57 reports of incitement against groups of people with anti-Semitic motives, an increase of nearly 50 percent compared to the month before.
“The most remarkable thing is that you start targeting people and looking for them where they live,” said Per Engström, head of section at the police’s national operational department, to TT this week.
Victims testify to verbal attacks, spitting, bomb threats, beatings and swastikas sprayed on the front door.
From Hamburg to Stockholm
A small synagogue in Hamburg survived the rampage of the perpetrators on that November night 85 years ago. Much thanks to its location in an apartment building where, it was reasoned, even non-Jews would suffer the destruction.
The chief rabbi of Hamburg, Joseph Carlebach, contacted a Jewish friend in Sweden and together they ensured that the synagogue’s furnishings, labeled as “old household goods and wood”, were transported to Stockholm.
Carlebach was deported to a concentration camp outside Riga, where he was murdered in March 1942. The interior he saved from the Nazis was restored and lives on to this day in the Adat Jeschurun synagogue in central Stockholm.