Arms and legs flailing, the man was screaming as he crashed through the fourth-story window. As he plummeted through the night air his assailants shouted racial insults after him. He fell toward a street that was spewed with smashed furniture, burning beds and scattered glass. When he hit the ground, his limbs became splayed and broken, his body twisted, blood poured from his head. His dead eyes stared up at the SS black shirts in the glassless window.

A middle-aged woman, who was standing in her open doorway glanced at the man’s body, and then flinched from the tall man looming over her. “I’m unable tell you,” she pleaded. “I don’t know!”

The impatient man, who was wearing the brown shirt of SA, slapped her sharply. “Tell me where your husband is hiding!”

“I don’t know where he is!”

The brown shirt raised his Luger and put it to her head. “Where is he?”

“Please! I don’t know!”

He pulled the trigger. The woman’s blood splattered against the splintered door behind her and she crumpled to the ground.

It was the night of November ninth, 1938. Jewish homes, stores and synagogues were being broken into, the windows smashed, their contents being destroyed and thrown into the streets.

SA brown shirts, SS black shirts, and the Hitler Youth had coordinated a massive attack on Jews throughout the German Reich. For hours the cacophony of sledgehammers and axes breaking down doors, the shattering of windows and the destroying of property went on. Women were screaming, babies wailed, and teenaged girls shrieked as boys from the Hitler Youth entered their bedrooms, ripped off their nightgowns and raped them. In many households’ younger brothers tried to protect their sisters and were beaten to death.

Synagogues throughout the Reich were attacked. Chandeliers were torn down and smashed; benches chopped up, as were the rabbis’ seats. Torahs and prayer books were strewn on pavements. The Scrolls of the Law were ripped to shreds and the great Menorahs used as battering rams. When the synagogues were set on fire the glow of the flames was as red as blood. As the mob violence continued the regular German police and crowds of spectators stood by and watched.

Late in the evening the SA and SS men went to the bars to celebrate.

At three in the morning on what was now November tenth, drunken Nazis unleashed a renewed barrage of ferocity. They beat, murdered, raped and burned Jewish property until dawn finally broke. In the Jewish cemeteries, the caretakers were beaten and the tombstones were uprooted and graves violated. Jewish-owned stores were broken into and the merchandise, like garbage, was thrown into the streets. All the windows were smashed. Here and there it was still possible to read among the shards of glass the remains of banners that read, ‘Germans! Buy German—don’t patronize Jewish businesses!’

When one rabbi’s synagogue was set on fire he rushed out to accost the stormtrooper in charge. ‘This is evil!’ he shouted. ‘I know Minister Goebbels has instructed you to burn our synagogues! He is a hateful man!’

The stormtrooper glared back at him. ‘You dirty Jew! You don’t talk about our minister in that manner!’ He turned to his men. ‘Shoot the filthy bastard!’

Three shots rang out and the rabbi fell to the ground.

When the apartment of a Jewish family was pointed out to a group of Hitler Youth the cry went up, ‘Let’s get them!’ They broke down the apartment door and dragged out an elderly man and woman. ‘Kill them! Kill them!’ chanted the onlookers. The boys kicked the old couple to death.

Not even the Jewish hospitals were spared. Doctors, nurses and ward attendants were beaten and kicked. Windows were shattered and chairs, tables, beds, linen, laboratory equipment and other items destroyed. Wearing only their nightgowns, the patients, including sick children, were forced to leave the hospital, walking barefoot over the broken glass.

The insatiably sadistic perpetrators continued their destruction with Berlin and Vienna suffering the most atrocities as they had the largest Jewish communities, in the German Reich. Thousands of homes and businesses were trashed or leveled by fire. Over two hundred and sixty synagogues were destroyed by mobs of brown shirts, black shirts and Hitler Youth. It was the start of what would be called the Holocaust. It became known as Kristallnacht, “the night of the broken glass”.