(Special Note: It was this documentary feature that convinced J. C. Kaelin, on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht on which evening this feature was first broadcast, to commit to help memorialize the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, in order to preserve its memory as a historical testament and to help prevent such pogroms taking place in future. This commitment was realized with the creation of his EarthStation1.com and MediaOutlet.com websites and the Holocaust historical material he digitized and brought to the internet through these websites beginning in March 1996, and these efforts were honorably recognized when in 1997 the Israeli Knesset declared his EarthStation1.com website to be an approved website for the teaching of Holocast history.)
On November 9, 1938, a Nazi German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, dies from gunshot wounds by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. This act was used by the Nazis as an excuse to instigate the 1938 national pogrom known as Kristallnacht (The Night Of Broken Glass) between November 9th and 10th, carried out by SA paramilitary Storm Troopers and German civilian mobs. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Over 1,000 synagogues were burned (95 in Vienna alone) and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were either destroyed or damaged. Martin Gilbert writes that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world. The Times wrote at the time: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday." Kristallnacht was followed by additional economic and political persecution of Jews, and it is viewed by historians as part of Nazi Germany's broader racial policy, and the beginning of the Final Solution and The Holocaust.