Why is this anniversary of Kristallnacht different from all others? - opinion

Why is this Kristallnacht anniversary different from all other Kristallnacht anniversaries since the end of World War II? 

The short answer is October 7, 2023, and Hamas’s barbaric, genocidal rampage against Israel. 

When the Kristallnacht pogrom erupted on November 9, 1938 the Nazis did not have a policy of murdering the Jews of Germany or anywhere else. The pogrom was a specific point in the continuum of events that unfolded and led to the Nazis’ policy to annihilate the Jews everywhere. Hamas’s attack was clearly part of their stated, patently genocidal goal to destroy the state of Israel.

The barbarism of Kristallnacht, with more than 100 murdered, a great many beatings, the wanton destruction of communal and private Jewish property, the massive intrusion into Jewish homes and the arrest of some 30,000 Jewish men and their incarceration in concentration camps essentially to force them to emigrate, may be considered the start of the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

This was not yet the total annihilation of a national, ethnic or religious group, but it was those aspects directed at making it impossible for such a group to remain intact as a group by any combination of murder, ethnic cleansing, destruction of culture, persecution of leaders and more.  

Before Kristallnacht, Nazi policies aimed to separate Jews from Aryans and convince them that they had no future in Germany, but the Jewish collective in Germany, albeit with many restrictions, could still continue to exist.  Kristallnacht was arguably the start of the stage of shutting down Jewish communal life and of ethnic cleansing, using brutal physical force to coerce Jews into leaving Germany.

October 7 testimonies remind of Kristallnacht horrors

Elements of the testimonies we have about the Nazi rampage bear striking similarity to those we have heard from survivors of October 7. The late Hillel Schechter related in his testimony about Kristallnacht:

“The general picture was of shouting and yelling of SA and SS, including some in civilian clothes…. They went into one house after the other. They knew the neighborhood was mostly Jewish. At this point they did not differentiate between Polish and non-Polish Jews, we were all the same. We heard screaming, looked through a window and saw them beating Jews, pushing men around. They had lists of Jews with German citizenship and took them to concentration camps like Buchenwald. All my uncles were taken there. They went into houses, threw the furniture through the windows, beat up the people. A whole group of them came into our house. My mother hid me in a closet. She was afraid they would beat me…. [In our house] Jews lived on the first and second floors, on the third floor lived our landlord who was non- Jewish. We lived on the fourth floor and there were Jewish families on the fifth floor. When they got to our apartment, they started breaking the door…. What saved us was that above us was a Jewish family with three sons. They had resisted the SA men…and so the SA upstairs called the ones on our floor for assistance. This saved us.

"They fought upstairs for a long time until everyone had been arrested. They had beaten them all terribly. This is why they could not accomplish their mission to break into our apartment. During this whole event we heard screaming and crying. It was terrible. We saw how they were beating people furiously. It was very difficult to watch. They took some of the men. Not far from our house was a river that looked like a canal…. They took the Jews over there, put them up against the wall and beat them. We, thank God, did not suffer physically from the SA, at least not then… We sat in the apartment for three days. We did not dare put on a light. We had covered the windows. We did not know what was going on. We did not know if we could go out. We did not dare to leave.”

When Jews were caught by the Nazis on Kristallnacht, they were beaten horrifically and arrested, but relatively few were actually murdered. 

On October 7th Hamas did not commit a pogrom like the one 85 years ago. Rather, Hamas murdered just about everyone they encountered. They indiscriminately killed soldiers and mostly civilians, men, women, children, infants, the elderly, Jews and foreign workers – everyone, except for nearly 250 they took as hostages. 

No one drove away the rampaging Nazis from their Jewish victims on Kristallnacht. There are stories of Germans who hid their Jewish neighbors from the attackers, but it can be said that virtually nobody defended Jews with force. After the Kristallnacht pogrom around the world, there were expressions of shock and some sympathy for the Jews.  Some doors briefly opened for Jewish emigrants and soon were mostly shut again. Short-lived sympathy would only go so far.

The Hamas atrocities ignited a defensive war. Many leaders around the world have declared support for Israel’s right and responsibility to defend its citizens against Hamas and defeat Hamas.  But in many quarters, throngs celebrated Hamas, and in many quarters the initial wave of sympathy and understanding that Hamas must be defeated has waned in the light of reports and images of the destruction in Gaza the war has engendered. 

Following Kristallnacht, beginning two years into World War II, the Jews of Germany, and all parts of Europe that came under Nazi domination and influence were subjected to the Final Solution, resulting in the murder of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe.  Hamas is not carrying out a Final Solution for all Jews, rather Hamas is currently focused on destroying Israel and killing all the Jews there. Israel’s war against Hamas is to ensure that Hamas never again will take any steps toward perpetrating their declared genocide.

On this Kristallnacht anniversary, we must remember that Jewish Lives Matter and can never again be forfeited like they were during the Holocaust years.