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In August 1938, around 17,000 Jews of Polish descent became stranded at the Polish border when German authorities attempted to forcefully expel them from the country. Included among them was the Grynszpan family, who then wrote to their 17 year old son, Herschel, in Paris, asking him to send money. Four days after receiving the letter, on November 7, Herschel went into the German embassy in Paris and shot a diplomat by the name of Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan was arrested immediately, and when Nazi leadership in Germany learned of the motive behind the attack they began imposing stricter sanctions on Jews. Two days later, vom Rath died of his wounds; when news of this reached Hitler's inner circle, Joseph Goebbels gave a speech heavily implying (but not directly ordering) that a nationwide pogrom should take place immediately. What followed is now considered a major turning point in the Nazi regime's treatment of Jews, and a precursor to the Holocaust.

The pogrom

Telegrams were then sent to Nazi headquarters and offices across the country, and various police, paramilitary, and Hitler Youth groups were mobilized in the middle of the night to take revenge against the Jewish population. Jewish synagogues, prayer houses, and cemeteries in particular were targeted by rioters, who attacked or burned out over 1,400 places of worship. Emergency services were also slow to put out the fires, usually only doing so if the fire would spread to a non-Jewish property. Of the roughly 9,000 Jewish businesses still operational in 1938, approximately 7,500 were attacked; the smashed windows, displays, and chandeliers from these shops is what gave Kristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass") its name. The riots, however, did not just results in damaged property; Jewish homes were broken into and people were beaten, abused, and murdered. Accurate figures for the number of people killed in the riots remain unclear; a figure of 91 deaths was widely-circulated for decades, but later investigations have found that this likely undercounts the total number of murders, and fails to include the hundreds of deaths in the concentration camps or the suicides directly related to the pogroms. Recent estimates suggest that at least 1,300-1,500 Jews died as a result of the pogrom.

Aftermath

After the riots, approximately 30,000 Jews were arrested and transported to concentration camps; most were freed within months under the pretense that they would leave the country and forfeit most of their wealth to the state, but several hundred still died in prison. The Nazi regime then placed a heavy tax on the Jews, in order to repair the properties damaged during the pogrom; properties that would then be taken by the government and sold to non-Jews. A target for this tax was set at one billion Reichsmarks (RM), despite the damages being valued at just 225 million RM. Public opinion in Germany was generally unfavorable of the pogroms, and Nazi-aligned movements in other countries lost much of their support, but the repercussions for the Nazi regime itself were relatively mild. Kristallnacht marked an escalation in the German authorities' treatment of the Jews, where oppressive restrictions and taxes were compounded with violence, incarceration, and murder.