This day in 1938, was Kristallnacht, a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The euphemistic name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.
Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.
Kristallnacht changed the nature of Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews from economic, political, and social exclusion to physical violence, including beatings, incarceration, and murder; the event is often referred to as the beginning of the Holocaust. In this view, it is not only described as a pogrom, it is also described as a critical stage within a process in which each step becomes the seed of the next step.
After 1945 some synagogues were restored. This one in Berlin features a plaque, reading “Never forget”, a common expression around Berlin.
On this day in 2008, Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who reached No.12 on the Billboard chart in 1967 with ‘Pata Pata’, suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 76. Among her many notable achievements was becoming the first African woman to win a Grammy, for Best Folk Recording in 1966 with Harry Belafonte for ‘An Evening With Belafonte / Makeba’. Pata Pata is recorded in the Xhosa language, a ‘click language’ and you can hear the occasional click in the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNeP3hrm__k
