Crystal Night : 9-10 November 1938

UK: Thames and Hudson, 1974. Hardcover. Good/Good. 5.5" X 9. H/B 192 pages, condition is Good, this is an ex library book with the usual stamps, the flyleaf has been removed. Early in November 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a young German Jew of Polish origin living in Paris, learned that his family had been expelled by the Nazis from their home in Germany and, with thousands of other Polish-born Jews, deported to Poland. Moved by anguish at the plight of his family and race, Grynszpan walked into the German Embassy on 7 November and shot the Third Secretary, Ernst vom Rath, who died two days later. Using the murder as a pretext, Hitler ordered the SS and SA, with the connivance of the police and fire services, to launch the first nation-wide pogrom against the Jews in Germany on the night of 9-10 November (since known as 'Crystal Night', on account of the quantity of shattered glass found in city streets in the morning). Synagogues were burned down, Jewish shops were wrecked and looted, many Jews were beaten up, others were murdered, and some 30,000 of the men (aged between sixteen and eighty) were sent for a period to concentration camps, where many died.