Kristallnacht : When the Jews were stranded

 

During the summer of 1938, with an urgent situation facing Jews  in lands under control of the Nazi regime, thirty-two nations gathered in Evian France to find a solution to the Jewish refugee crisis. German, Austrian, and Czech Jewry were desperate to leave but few nations would accept them beyond their meager quotas. At Evian, nothing was resolved, as delegate after delegate on behalf of their respective nations refused to expand their meager quotas.

 

Then representative of the Jewish Agency at the time, Golda Meir (then Meyerson) who attended the conference said that, “nothing was accomplished at Evian except phraseology.” At a press conference, she stated, “Before I die, my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.” The London Jewish Chronicle predicted that the Evian Conference, “will be numbered among the many conferences whose name is failure.”

 

The horrors of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, exacerbated the German Jewish refugee crisis as Nazi hordes swept over Jewish communities in Germany inflicting destruction and terror, removing any doubt that the hour of German Jewry’s demise was near. Nearly one hundred Jews were murdered and thirty thousand were sent to concentration camps. Five hundred synagogues were burnt down and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed.

 

Over two hundred thousand German Jews had not yet left and 200,000 Jews of Austria were under German occupation, which was seized and occupied by the Nazis after the Anshluss (unification) as of March 15 earlier that year. In addition, the Jews of the Sudetenland, handed over to Germany in the aftermath of the Munich accords, were then under Nazi control.

 

Exactly, one year later, on March 15, 1939, the Germans seized all of Czechoslovakia.

 

Just six weeks before Kristallnacht as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain triumphantly proclaimed “peace in our time” following the ill fated Munich deal signed with Hitler, the horrors of Crystal Night shattered any such illusions of peace.

 

A full page advertisement in the London Jewish Chronicle one week later in an appeal for German Jewry simply stated, “HELP! Before it is too late”... Read more.