Therefore, Jews were no longer German citizens. Now they were merely subjects. In order to protect the "German Blood and German Honor", Jews were forbidden to marry "Aryans" and to fly the Reich and national flags (Protection of German Blood And German Honor of 1935). Anti-mixing decrees constituted the first phase of a process aimed toward social separation of the Jewish people. World War II was precipitated by Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, resulting in the Third Reich's control of a population of nearly 1.3 million Jews. Concentration camps were a direct result of the invasion, as the Germans needed a way to deal with all the newly acquired Jews. In addition to more concentration camps, the planning of the final solution (the total destruction of the Jews) was synchronized with Hitler's plans for the invasion of Poland. Dawidowicz states "Hitler had already decided that the actual mass murder of the Jews would take place on those territories [Poland and The Soviet Union]" (Dawidowicz, 55). All of this was brought to one sudden, organized, murderous attack called the Kristallnacht, meaning literally "the night of the broken glass". This riot took place on the night of November 10th, 1938 throughout Germany and Poland. It was a nationwide organized massacre in which hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, almost a hundred Jews were murdered, and between twenty-six and thirty-six thousand Jewish people were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Although Kristallnacht is generally considered the beginning of the Holocaust, it was not. It was, however a very important turning point in the violence against Jews. Within months of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, the Dachau concentration camp was created. According to the Nazis, one of the purposes of Dachau was "re-education." Anyone who was in prison was in a "rescue operation" to bring them back to the community.
