Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

The Pogrom in Magdeburg
256
On the night of 9–10 November 1938, the Nazis unleashed the most violent
pogrom against the Jews of Germany and Austria since the Middle Ages.
Derisively belittling the terrible events that took place, they dubbed it the
Reichskristallnacht, ‘The Night of Broken Glass.’ This pogrom revealed to the
world the savagery and barbarism of the Nazi regime, yet that fateful night also
laid bare the hollowness of the world’s indignation. Although German and, later,
Austrian Jewry had experienced the intensification of the political
disenfranchisement, economic strangulation and social segregation since 1933, no
one expected the widespread violence – a pogrom of the sort connected only with
Tsarist Russia. The execution of the pogrom in Magdeburg occurred with the
same uniformity and in the same manner elsewhere. 16 This included the looting
and destruction of the interior of the Synagogen-Gemeinde, initial attacks on a
minimum of twenty-six businesses and the incarceration of 120 Jewish males in
the early hours of the morning of 10 November. 17 The demolition of synagogues
symbolised the end of Jewish public life in Germany and Austria and the image of
broken glass symbolised the shattering of German and Austrian Jewry.
In the early hours of the morning of 10 November 1938, Ernst Levy was on
his way home from a social evening with some friends and walked through the
city centre to his home at Gustav-Adolf-Straße 29. On his way home he noticed a
large amount of broken windows on shop fronts and that a number of these shops
16
Detailed accounts of the Reichkristallnacht have been well documented. See Pehle,
ed., op. cit.; Barkai, “Exclusion and Persecution: 1933–1938,” in Meyer, ed. op. cit.,
pp. 216–230; Döscher, op. cit.; Friedländer, op. cit.; Kaplan, op. cit.; and Read and
Fisher, op. cit.
17
Funkspruch, 10. November 1938, Bestand Rep. C 20 I. I b, Signatur Nr. 1996, Band
V, LHASA MD, p. 116.