Kristallnacht shatters German Jewry

November 9, 1938

After a Polish Jewish teenager shot a German diplomat in Paris, Nazi stormtroopers and ordinary Germans smashed the windows of Jewish shops, burned synagogues, beat Jews in the streets, and sent thirty thousand to concentration camps in a single coordinated night of terror. Glass glittered on sidewalks across the Reich the next morning. The Holocaust had visibly begun.