By Ronald Lauder
NEW YORK (WJC) Seventy-seven years ago tonight, the entire world faced one of history’s great moral tests. It failed miserably.
On 9 November 1938, Adolf Hitler set loose the darkest impulses of mankind in a brutal attack that raged across Germany and Austria. It was called Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, referring to all the broken glass shimmering in the streets.
Over 1,000 synagogues were burned, the windows of Jewish businesses were smashed and shops looted, individual Jews were rounded up and put into concentration camps. Some 400 were murdered.
Firemen stood idly by just to make sure the fires didn’t spread past the synagogues. The police helped the rioters.
For the past seven decades, people have made the mistake of regarding this event merely as an inner-German affair. But Kristallnacht was much more than just a nation-wide pogrom against the Jews of Germany and Austria.
It was really Hitler’s test to see how the West would respond. And that lack of response would set into motion everything that followed.
In the five years following his rise to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler laid the groundwork for his plan to destroy Jews. He started with public intimidation, and in 1935 implemented racial laws that marginalized Jews within German society. They could not hold jobs in government or in universities. Jewish doctors who cared for Christian patients were no longer allowed to treat them. These changes were outrageous, but they were done gradually.
Hitler was always gauging the world’s response. When he saw no backlash, the master politician understood he could move to the next level. Yet, in a strange inversion, as the laws became more draconian, the world’s responses became more tepid.
On the night of 9 November 1938, it became open. The destruction of European Jewry had begun.
And this was the West’s response: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, commented: “No doubt Jews are not a loveable people; I don’t care about them myself; – but this is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.” Countries like Holland and France barred their doors to Jewish refugees begging for entry.
President Roosevelt recalled the American ambassador from Berlin for “consultations,” but he would not move against Congress to ease its harsh immigration quotas for Jewish refugees. This was the country where a young Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus, penned the words most connected to the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … Send these, the homeless tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
For European Jews in 1938, that comforting lamp went out.
Today, Germany and Europe are a much better place than they were in 1938. And yet, we see worrying signs again. While its neighbors slaughter hundreds of thousands of their own, we see the growing, visceral hatred of the Jewish state of Israel throughout Europe.
Let’s hope the world does not wait again until it is too late to stop the calamity.
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Lauder is president of the World Jewish Congress.
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ADL condemns Arab MK’s Holocaust rhetoric
NEW YORK (Press Release)– The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Monday condemned Israel Member of Knesset Hanin Zoabi of the Arab Joint List Party for comparing the current situation in Israel to the period of Kristallnacht, the mass pogrom against Jews and Jewish businesses in Germany and Austria in November 1938.
Zoabi, who was speaking at a Kristallnacht commemoration event in Amsterdam organized by Platform Stop Racism and Exclusion, said, “Kristallnacht didn’t suddenly fall from the sky, come out of nowhere, it was the result of a development over time. We can see a similar development happening in Israel over the last several years.” Zoabi also called compared Israeli inaction in the face of racist attacks to the German people’s failure to speak out after Kristallnacht.
“The featuring of Ms. Zoabi at this commemoration of a historic act of hate directed against Jews was a deliberate effort by the organizers to draw comparisons between the acts of the Nazis and the situation today in Israel,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “Ms. Zoabi, who has made numerous outrageous accusations against Israel – all while serving as an elected official in its parliament – served this purpose well by trumpeting this despicable comparison.
“While there are, to be sure, acts of racism in Israel, they are not state-sponsored, are condemned by the leadership and people of Israel, and dealt with by the judicial system,” Greenblatt added. “To compare this reality with dictatorial Nazi Germany, which was driven by the most extreme ideology of hate, is not only factually and historically incorrect, it is an affront to those who are dedicated to learning the lessons of Kristallnacht to ensure that such hate and discrimination have no place in modern society.” (Preceding provided by the Anti-Defamation League)