The Night of Broken Glass PDF Download

Author: Uta Gerhardt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150955260X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
November 9th 1938 is widely seen as a violent turning point in Nazi Germany’s assault on the Jews. An estimated 400 Jews lost their lives in the anti-Semitic pogrom and more than 30,000 were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps, where many were brutally mistreated. Thousands more fled their homelands in Germany and Austria, shocked by what they had seen, heard and experienced. What they took with them was not only the pain of saying farewell but also the memory of terrible scenes: attacks by mobs of drunken Nazis, public humiliations, burning synagogues, inhuman conditions in overcrowded prison cells and concentration camp barracks. The reactions of neighbours and passersby to these barbarities ranged from sympathy and aid to scorn, mockery, and abuse. In 1939 the Harvard sociologist Edward Hartshorne gathered eyewitness accounts of the Kristallnacht from hundreds of Jews who had fled, but Hartshorne joined the Secret Service shortly afterwards and the accounts he gathered were forgotten – until now. These eyewitness testimonies – published here for the first time with a Foreword by Saul Friedländer, the Pulitzer Prize historian and Holocaust survivor – paint a harrowing picture of everyday violence in one of Europe’s darkest moments. This unique and disturbing document will be of great interest to anyone interested in modern history, Nazi Germany and the historical experience of the Jews.

Author: Steven J. Ross
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781557538703
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes a series of articles presented at an international conference titled "New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison." Assessing events 80 years after the violent anti-Jewish pogrom of 1938, contributors to this volume offer new cutting-edge scholarship on the event and its repercussions. Contributors include scholars from the United States, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom who represent a wide variety of disciplines, including history, political science, and Jewish and media studies. Their essays discuss reactions to the pogrom by victims and witnesses inside Nazi Germany as well as by foreign journalists, diplomats, Jewish organizations, and Jewish print media. Several contributors to the volume analyze postwar narratives of and global comparisons to Kristallnacht, with the aim of situating this anti-Jewish pogrom in its historical context, as well as its place in world history.

Author: Martin Gilbert
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061121355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
In the early hours of November 10, 1938, Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods across Germany, leaving behind them a horrifying trail of terror and destruction. More than a thousand synagogues and many thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed, while thirty thousand Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—was a decisive stage in the systematic eradication of a people who traced their origins in Germany to Roman times and was a sinister forewarning of the Holocaust. With rare insight and acumen, Martin Gilbert examines this night and day of terror, presenting readers with a meticulously researched, masterfully written, and eye-opening study of one of the darkest chapters in human history.

Author: Wiener Library
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780285643079
Category : Antisemitism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A major contribution to Holocaust studies, and the definitive eye-witness account of the events of the Night of Broken Glass. Drawn from the extensive archives of the Wiener Library.

Author: Alan E. Steinweis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674036239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
On November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, fatally shot a German diplomat in Paris. Within three days anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout Germany, initially incited by local Nazi officials, and ultimately sanctioned by the decisions of Hitler and Goebbels at the pinnacle of the Third Reich. As synagogues burned and Jews were beaten in the streets, police stood aside. Men, women, and children—many neighbors of the victims—participated enthusiastically in acts of violence, rituals of humiliation, and looting. By the night of November 10, a nationwide antisemitic pogrom had inflicted massive destruction on synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish-owned businesses. During and after this spasm of violence and plunder, 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds would perish in the following months. Kristallnacht revealed to the world the intent and extent of Nazi Judeophobia. However, it was seen essentially as the work of the Nazi leadership. Now, Alan Steinweis counters that view in his vision of Kristallnacht as a veritable pogrom—a popular cathartic convulsion of antisemitic violence that was manipulated from above but executed from below by large numbers of ordinary Germans rioting in the streets, heckling and taunting Jews, cheering Stormtroopers' hostility, and looting Jewish property on a massive scale. Based on original research in the trials of the pogrom's perpetrators and the testimonies of its Jewish survivors, Steinweis brings to light the evidence of mob action by all sectors of the civilian population. Kristallnacht 1938 reveals the true depth and nature of popular antisemitism in Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.

Author: Jane Caplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198706952
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Nazi Germany may have only lasted for 12 years, but it has left a legacy that still echoes with us today. This work discusses the emergence and appeal of the Nazi party, the relationship between consent and terror in securing the regime, the role played by Hitler himself, and the dark stains of war, persecution, and genocide left by Nazi Germany.

Author: Gerald Schwab
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
On November 7, 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot Third Secretary Ernst von Rath in Paris, setting off the Night of Broken Glass and the Holocaust. Examining German documents never-before-revealed--including a startling coded "confession", Schwab probes the background of Grynszpan and demonstrates the power of the human spirit against overwhelming odds.

Author: Robert Gellately
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he and other Nazis had firm ideas on what they called a racially pure "community of the people." They quickly took steps against those whom they wanted to isolate, deport, or destroy. In these essays informed by the latest research, leading scholars offer rich histories of the people branded as "social outsiders" in Nazi Germany: Communists, Jews, "Gypsies," foreign workers, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals, and the homeless, unemployed, and chronically ill. Although many works have concentrated exclusively on the relationship between Jews and the Third Reich, this collection also includes often-overlooked victims of Nazism while reintegrating the Holocaust into its wider social context. The Nazis knew what attitudes and values they shared with many other Germans, and most of their targets were individuals and groups long regarded as outsiders, nuisances, or "problem cases." The identification, the treatment, and even the pace of their persecution of political opponents and social outsiders illustrated that the Nazis attuned their law-and-order policies to German society, history, and traditions. Hitler's personal convictions, Nazi ideology, and what he deemed to be the wishes and hopes of many people, came together in deciding where it would be politically most advantageous to begin. The first essay explores the political strategies used by the Third Reich to gain support for its ideologies and programs, and each following essay concentrates on one group of outsiders. Together the contributions debate the motivations behind the purges. For example, was the persecution of Jews the direct result of intense, widespread anti-Semitism, or was it part of a more encompassing and arbitrary persecution of "unwanted populations" that intensified with the war? The collection overall offers a nuanced portrayal of German citizens, showing that many supported the Third Reich while some tried to resist, and that the war radicalized social thinking on nearly everyone's part. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Frank Bajohr, Omer Bartov, Doris L. Bergen, Richard J. Evans, Henry Friedlander, Geoffrey J. Giles, Marion A. Kaplan, Sybil H. Milton, Alan E. Steinweis, Annette F. Timm, and Nikolaus Wachsmann.

Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195313585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Author: Nikolaus Wachsmann
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429943726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
The “deeply researched, groundbreaking” first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps (Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker). In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called “the gray zone.” In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Closely examining life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century. Praise for KL A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015 A Kirkus Reviews Best History Book of 2015 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category “[A] monumental study . . . a work of prodigious scholarship . . . with agonizing human texture and extraordinary detail . . . Wachsmann makes the unimaginable palpable. That is his great achievement.” —Roger Cohen, The New York Times Book Review “Wachsmann’s meticulously detailed history is essential for many reasons, not the least of which is his careful documentation of Nazi Germany’s descent from greater to even greater madness. To the persistent question, “How did it happen?,” Wachsmann supplies voluminous answers.” —Earl Pike, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)