Night of Crystal, also known as Kristallnacht in German, was an anti-Jewish pogrom that was taken place on the night of November 9 and 10, 1938. Kristallnacht came to be the name of this tragic event due to the amount of shattered glass that was dispersed in the German streets on the morning of November 10th. It all started with the forced deportation over the Polish border of Zindel Grynszpan and his family. The reason behind all of this was the anti-Semitic laws, which caused many Jews of Polish citizenship, including Zindel and his family, to move out of Germany. Zindel's seventeen-year old son Herschel, who was living with his uncle in Paris, found out about this, and decided to make his way to the German embassy located in Paris. Once there, he assassinated a German embassy official named Ernst vom Rath, who died in two days after being fatally wounded by Herschel. Hitler's Chief of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, decided to take this incident as an excuse to launch Kristallnacht against the Jews, and he described the assassination as an attack to the Reich and the Fuhrer. .
The rioters consisted of members from the SA (Storm Troopers or Brown-shirts) and Hitler's Youth. These two forces were ordered to destroy as many Jewish-related buildings as possible by Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking German official. On the night of November 9th, 1938, the attacks started, and rioters destroyed a total of 267 synagogues from Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland combined. A majority of the holy buildings were left to burn all night because the firefighters were only ordered to stop fires that spread to non-Jewish buildings. Along with synagogues, SA and Hitler Youth members destroyed the windows of around 7500 commercial establishments that were owned by Jews, and looted their wares as well. While all of this chaos was occurring during the night, the Gestapo (Secret State Police) and the SS arrested approximately 30,000 Jewish males, and took them to prisons in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
