9 November—Kristallnacht, as it’s now known, was perpetrated by the Nazis 86 years ago tonight. It wasn’t the first anti-Jewish pogrom, just the most horrific—up until 1938, anyway. It’s called Crystal Night in English, or Night of Broken Glass (both euphemisms of course), from the shards of glass that littered the streets all over Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland after the windows of Jewish-owned shops, homes, hospitals, schools, synagogues, and other buildings had been shattered. Among other monumental destruction, to be sure.

The Nazi party’s pretext for the atrocity was the assassination on 9 November of a Nazi diplomat by a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew in Paris. The Nazis certainly had shown they didn’t need a pretext, but it was nice to have one.

The loosely coordinated vandalism by thousands of Nazi paramilitary and civilian thugs (another euphemism) was supplemented by the enthusiastic participation of countless old-fashioned antisemites and other sledgehammer-wielding morons who couldn’t resist the temptation to join the riots and commit criminal mayhem. And get away with it.

Over 260 synagogues were destroyed on Kristallnacht, as well as over 7,000 Jewish businesses. It’s estimated that 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. And Jewish fatalities that night and shortly after are estimated to have been in the hundreds, including murders, suicides, and victims of post-arrest maltreatment.

The vandals and thugs technically and officially had nothing to do with the government. So suffice to say, German government authorities—Nazis and antisemites to the core, of course—did nothing to intervene. Or punish the perps.

Adolf Hitler himself had nothing to say in public about Kristallnacht and didn’t even acknowledge it. (You wonder if any reporters had the chutzpah to ask him about it.) But Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s PR maven, spun the horrendous events as resulting from “the healthy instincts” of the German people.

(No, don’t even think about Donald Trump’s non-violent 6 January 2021 “day of love” at the U.S. Capitol.)

The Times (commonly called The Times of London) observed, “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.”

Kristallnacht was just a prelude to the Final Solution and murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust . . .