Shedding Light On Night Of The Broken Glass And Sylt Concentration Camp
The philosopher, poet and novelist George Santyana advised that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Novelist William Faulkner wrote in his “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Santyana and Faulkner could well have been speaking about the two-day, Nazi pogrom known as the Kristallnacht, the start of the Holocaust, which has become little more than a footnote in history. Or they could have pointed to all but forgotten murders of hundreds of prisoners who were subjected to brutal conditions in the notorious Sylt concentration camp.
Eighty-six years ago today, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler ordered Nazi stormtroopers on a two-day rampage as they stormed the streets of the Jewish section of Hamburg, Germany, burning synagogues, assaulting hundreds of Jews and looting Jewish stores. In addition to the violence, up to 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.
Hitler had ordered the pogrom after a teenage, Polish-German Jew shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris. The violence lasted from Nov. 9–10, 1938, and came to be known as the Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass,” symbolic of the shattering of Jewish existence in Germany. It is considered the opening volley of what would become the Holocaust.
As days become weeks and months and years, there are fewer eyewitnesses to the Nazi terror, making it imperative to remind and memorialize events of hatred against Jews and against all minorities. It is especially important now when anti-Semitism is rising and Ukraine is facing the ongoing rage of the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin while trump is expected to undermine military support for Ukraine in order to curry favor with Putin.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported more anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. last year than in any year since the league began compiling statistics. Anti-Semitic violence rose sharply in the U.S. and worldwide after Israel was attacked by Hamas last Oct. 7. It was the worst carnage in Israel since the Holocaust, killing more than 2,000 people. The ongoing Israeli response in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.
The ADL report lists 1,162 anti-Semitic incidents in K-12 schools. There were 1,987 incidents at Jewish institutions, which the ADL says were driven by bomb threats at synagogues and other institutions starting in the summer. A total of 922 incidents were reported at colleges and universities and most took place after the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
The latest act of anti-Semitic violence outside of the U.S. was reported yesterday after a Europa League football tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. After the game hordes of young people on scooters and on foot stormed across the city to assault Israeli fans. The rioters had been called out on the Telegram social media site to target Jews. Five people were treated for injuries at hospitals and 20 to 30 others had light injuries. At least 62 people were arrested.
Tensions had been mounting after Amsterdam authorities banned a planned pro-Palestinian demonstration near the stadium. Before the game, large crowds of supporters of the Israeli team were chanting anti-Arab slogans as they headed to the stadium, escorted by police. A Palestinian flag was torn down from a building in Amsterdam on Wednesday and authorities banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration near the stadium.
“There is talk of people going on a Jew hunt. That is so shocking and so despicable that I still cannot fathom it,” said Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema, who called the violence “an eruption of anti-Semitism that we had hoped never again to see in Amsterdam.”
Police said security was increased at Jewish institutions in the city that has a large Jewish community and was home to Jewish World War II diarist Anne Frank and her family as they hid from Nazi occupiers.
Security concerns over hosting games against visiting Israeli teams led the Belgian soccer federation to refuse to stage a men’s Nations League game in September. The game against Israel was played in Hungary with no fans in the stadium. Israel was exiled from the Asian Football Confederation in the 1970s after Arab nations refused to play against Israel. Israel played in European qualifying for the 1982 World Cup and has been a member of European soccer body UEFA since 1994.
Kristallnacht
The excuse Hitler used for the Kristallnacht pogroms was the shooting in Paris on November 7 of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. His assailant, Herschel Grynszpan, had fled from Germany to France in 1936 and was enraged to learn that his parents were deported from Germany to the Polish frontier. The youth went to the German embassy in Paris to speak with an embassy official. He proceeded to fatally wound the 29-year-old vom Rath.
At the time of the killing, Hitler was in Munich celebrating the anniversary of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. The Fuhrer ordered that violent reprisals look like “spontaneous demonstrations.”
Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram to all police units informing them that “in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” The police were told to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with instructions to let the buildings burn and to act only if a fire threatened adjacent “Aryan” properties.
More than 1,000 synagogues were burned or otherwise damaged. Rioters ransacked and looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. The attackers were often neighbors. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men aged 16 to 60 were arrested and imprisoned at the expanded concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
The Reich confiscated all compensation claims that insurance companies paid to Jews. The rubble of ruined synagogues had to be cleared by the Jewish community. The Nazi government imposed a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks (about $400 million in 1938) on the Jewish community. After assessing the fine, Nazi Party leader Hermann Göring remarked, “The swine won’t commit another murder. Incidentally…I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.”
Grynszpan was arrested and confessed that he wanted to avenge the Jewish people for the actions already taken by the Germans. He had a postcard that he wrote to his parents, that read, “With God’s help. My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me, the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do. Forgive me.”
Germany used the incident to claim that the Jews had “fired the first shot” in a war on Germany. Nazi Gen. Joachim von Ribbentrop spoke at the funeral, declaring, “We understand the challenge, and we accept it.”
Grynszpan escaped from prison when France fell in 1940, but he was captured by the Nazis and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to face a trial. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels planned to turn the trial into Nazi propaganda about an international Jewish conspiracy and to claim it as evidence that Jews had started World War II.
The trial was planned for 1942 but never took place, after Grynszpan said he planned to testify that vom Rath was a homosexual and had been a pimp to send the teenager to be with various diplomats. The Nazis cancelled the trial fearing a scandal would be generated. It is believed that Grynszpan died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Anti-Semitism was baked into the formal, Nazi ideology in a 25-point party program published in 1920, 19 years before Germany invaded Poland to start World War II. The party program declared that Jews would be segregated from “Aryan” society and their political, legal, and civil rights would be denied.
During the first six years of Hitler’s dictatorship, from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939, the government issued more than 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of Jewish public and private lives. State, regional, and municipal officials also issued many exclusionary decrees in their own communities.
The first major law targeting Jews was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Adopted on April 7, 1933, the law excluded Jews and the “politically unreliable” from civil service.
The new law included the so-called Aryan Paragraph which excluded Jews and other “non-Aryans” from organizations, professions, and other aspects of public life. The law was the foundation of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which defined Jews not by religious belief but by ancestral lineage and which formalized their segregation from the so-called Aryan population.
In April 1933, the number of Jewish students at German schools and universities was restricted while further legislation truncated “Jewish activity” in the medical and legal professions. Jewish doctors were barred from public (state) health insurance funds. The city of Berlin forbade Jewish lawyers and notaries to work on legal matters, the mayor of Munich forbade Jewish doctors from treating non-Jewish patients, and the Bavarian interior ministry denied admission of Jewish students to medical school.
The Nazi government revoked the licenses of Jewish tax consultants, imposed a 1.5 percent quota on the admission of “non-Aryans” to public schools and universities, fired Jewish civilian workers from the army, and in early 1934, forbade Jewish actors to perform on the stage or screen.
Jews were required to register their domestic and foreign property and assets, eventually leading to the expropriation of their material wealth. German authorities dismissed Jewish workers and managers and transferred companies and enterprises to non-Jewish Germans at prices officially fixed well below market value.
The Nuremberg Race Laws were introduced in September 1935 marking a new wave of anti-Semitic legislation that brought about immediate and concrete segregation. German court judges could not cite legal commentaries or opinions written by Jewish authors, Jewish officers were expelled from the army, and Jewish university students were not allowed to sit for doctoral exams.
In 1937 and 1938, German authorities required Jews to register their property, preventing them from earning a living. The Nazis forbade Jewish doctors to treat non-Jews and they revoked the licenses of Jewish lawyers. All Jews were obliged to carry identity cards that indicated their Jewish heritage, and in the autumn of 1938, all Jewish passports were stamped with an identifying letter “J.” Jews were barred from all public schools and universities, cinemas, theaters, and sports facilities. In many cities, Jews were forbidden to enter designated “Aryan” zones.
Sylt Concentration Camp
It has been more than 80 years since German forces took control of the seaside cliffs and lazy green grass of the windblown island of Alderney in the British Channel Islands and built the notorious Sylt concentration camp. The Nazis documented a total of 103 deaths at Sylt, but researchers estimate the death toll for all of the camps on Alderney was between 641 and 1,027. The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles that was occupied by Germany during World War II.
Following the fall of France in June 1940 and beginning in 1942, the Nazis built three labor camps on the island, Sylt, Norderney and Borkum. The three mile long and 1.5 mile wide Alderney is the northernmost of the inhabited Channel Islands. It is the island closed to England and France on the English Channel.
The more than 1,000 prisoners were mostly from Ukraine, Poland, Russia and other Soviet territories, along with a significant number of French Jews. In March 1943, Sylt, the harshest labor camp on Alderney, was turned into a concentration camp run by Hitler’s SS paramilitary.
The island was formerly rich in dolmens and other megaliths but the thousands of year old antiquities were destroyed during military constructions of the 19th century and by the Germans during the World War II occupation.
As the war continued, in June 1940, the 1,400 inhabitants of Alderney were evacuated to Britain. The Germans arrived to a nearly deserted island and began to fortify Alderney. In January 1942, they built four camps in Alderney: two work camps, Lager Helgoland and Lager Borkum, and two concentration camps, Lager Sylt and Lager Norderney.
Lager Helgoland and Lager Borkum were built to house workers who were forced to build fortifications including bunkers, gun emplacements, tunnels, air-raid shelters and other concrete and field fortifications. In March 1943, the SS took control of Lager Sylt, which held Jewish slave laborers and Lager Norderney, with Russian and Polish POWS.
In May 2024, an investigative commission led by Lord Pickles concluded that between 641 and 1,027 people likely died in the Nazi camps on Alderney. The report outlined atrocious conditions faced by forced laborers, who endured starvation, dangerously long hours, hazardous construction tasks, frequent abuse, torture, inadequate housing, and, in some cases, execution.
There was considerable hunger and privation during the five years of German occupation until the Germans surrendered Alderney on May 16, 1945, eight days after the Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II in Europe.
The allies removed 2,332 German prisoners of war from Alderney, leaving 500 Germans to clean up the island under British supervision. Two former SS officials from the Norderney camp, Adam Adler and Heinrich Evers, were prosecuted in France in 1949.
Island residents who were formerly evacuated were permitted to return to Alderney in December 1945 but were unaware the island was used for slave labor. There are few signs of the ignominious past; a commemorative plaque on one of the three gateposts to the rear of the island’s airport; some ruins remain, including sentry posts, foundations and a small tunnel, which led from the camp commandant’s house to the inside of the camp.
Alderney has been nicknamed “the island of silence” because not much is known about what occurred there during the occupation. The German officer in charge of the facilities, Commandant Oberst Schwalm, burned the camps to the ground and destroyed all records connected with their use before the island was liberated by British forces 16 May 16,1945.
Notable residents of Alderney include authors T. H. White, “The Once and Future King” and Elisabeth Beresford, “The Wombles,” Beatles producer Sir George Martin and actress Dame Julie Andrews.
In the 1976 film “The Eagle Has Landed,” Alderney is the location where the Nazis conduct an initial meeting to begin their plot to kidnap then Prime Minister Winston Churchill.