A Human Pestilence

Seventy-five years in human memory is quite a long time for some things. And there are many who would shrug off the event that made headlines all across the world in November of 1938, when a 'spontaneous' demonstration of a society deciding it would no longer stand idly by while within its midst a malevolent group of secretive, threatening, disturbingly vicious people lived.

Granted, those people had established a veneer of being law-abiding, cultured, educated, a credit to the society they graced, but those who set out to vent their spleen at their presence knew what lay under that very thin layer of appearances; a threat to all they held dear. That event warning of far worse yet to come for a people whose presence was no veneer but a pointed pride, remains a prolonged agony of rejection.

In this Nov. 10, 1938 file picture, a youth with a broom prepares to clear up the broken window glass from a Jewish shop in Berlin, the day after the "Kristallnacht" rampage, when Nazi thugs set fire to hundreds of synagogues, looted thousands of Jewish businesses and attacked Jews in Germany and Austria. (AP Photo, FILE)

Two nights of intimidation, fear, threats, looting, fire-bombing, violence and death left Jewish-owned businesses, schools and homes vandalized, their residents utterly demoralized, terrorized. It was estimated that at least a thousand synagogues were torched and burned to the ground. So deeply did that maliciously evil cult of deviously manipulating Jews infiltrate German society, so what matter a few houses of worship fewer for them to congregate within?

The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin after it was set on fire by a Nazi mob during the 'Kristallnacht' riots, 9th-11th November 1938. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

This was a different kind of pogrom. Yes, Jews were assaulted, old men degraded, tugged by their beards into the public square so that Nazi Brownshirts and gentle burghers could take their turns beating the cowering old devil. The crowd exulted when they saw the old crow's spirit rising from his beaten corpse.

As punishment for their very presence sending respectable German citizens into a frenzy of hatred and destruction, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent along to concentration camps. The better to concentrate their minds, to relinquish the evil they were so capable of provoking in others.

Journalists on the scene wrote about the litter on the streets, of rivers of glass shards. And those cowering Jews who were rounded up "for their own safety". In France caution was called for, rather than risk actions that might tilt toward conflict. In Britain Neville Chamberlain's government must have felt a twinge of concern over their claim of "peace for our time", but these were only Jews, after all.

AFP/Getty Images

Mostly, the outrage was dampened by that same sense of cautious avoidance; why get involved in something that didn't, after all, impinge on one's own affairs. Condemnation of the attack on German Jews came unreservedly from a Canada that was not prepared to welcome any more Jews, thank you very much.

Besides, this was a spontaneous event. It had no reflection on the government itself. Adolf Hitler would never have given permission for such an event to destabilize the delicate international balance. German authorities would act swiftly to punish the ruffians and restore order.

And he would be prepared reluctantly, to allow German Jews to leave the country of their birth to find haven elsewhere, on the theory that haven might be found elsewhere. Why criticize if one was not prepared to become involved in relieving Germany of its sub-human population so unloved by proper Germans?