Thread by @RudiGeerts

"Kristallnacht" - The Night of Broken Glass
1/n
After his family was deported across the German border to Poland, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on November 7, 1938. Days later, the Nazi regime used vom Rath’s death as the justification for

2/n Kristallnacht or "The Night of Broken Glass."
Among those deported on October 27 in Hanover, Germany was the family of Sendel Grynszpan. Grynszpan described police coming to their home on October 27, demanding that they go to the nearest precinct with their Polish passports.

3/n On Saturday October 29, the Grynszpan family arrived in Zbąszyń, confused and scared. On October 31, Sendel Grynszpan's daughter Berta was able to send a postcard to her brother Herschel Grynszpan in Paris. The post card, which detailed the cruelty and tragedy of the family's

4/n forced relocation reached Grynszpan.
Horrified and distressed by the plight of his family and thousands of Polish Jews, Grynszpan took it upon himself to enact revenge. Purchasing a pistol, he went to the German Embassy in Paris on November 7.

5/n There he shot and ultimately killed First Secretary of the Reich Ernst vom Rath. The assassination of vom Rath stunned the Nazi regime. On November 9 & 10 Jewish businesses, properties, synagogues were destroyed, burned, and looted across the Reich,

Ernst vom Rath

6/n with the assassination used as a pretext. This event, known as as "Kristallnacht" is often seen as a key moment of significance in the formulation of the Holocaust.

7/7 “I have to protest in a way that the whole world hears my protest,” Sendel wrote to his par­ents in a con­fes­sion­al post­card that he was unable to mail before his arrest, ​“and this I intend to do.”