Word: kristallnacht
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Seventy years ago on Nov. 9, the Jews of Germany - and perhaps most of Europe - had their fate revealed to them on one frightening night. Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass," saw the ruling Nazi party unleash bands of thugs on Jewish communities throughout Germany and Austria, ostensibly to avenge an attack on a German diplomat in Paris by a young German Jew whose family had been forced to flee Hitler's regime. By dawn on Nov. 10, 92 Jews lay dead, among the 400 beaten, shot or driven to suicide by the abuse. Some 267 synagogues had been torched...
Germany will commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht on Sunday through a series of events aimed at ensuring that a new generation of Germans, too young to have known anyone connected with those events, learn about the horrors that flowed from the racism of Germany's past, in the hope of guarding against any future recurrence...
Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to mark the anniversary by speaking alongside the head of Germany's Jewish community, Charlotte Knobloch, at the Ryke Street synagogue in the old eastern part of Berlin. Although the synagogue was torched on Kristallnacht (or Reichspogromnacht, as some German Jews now prefer to call it), its structure remained intact, and it was reopened last year for the first time since World War II. The ceremony will include the screening of a documentary on the infamous night and another on the Jewish community in Germany today. (See pictures of Kristallnacht...
...philharmonic chamber orchestra. The mayor will accompany a ceremonial procession from the old city hall in Alexanderplatz in former East Berlin to the so-called new synagogue in the center of the city, where an exhibit of rare photographs of the event entitled "Fire! Anti-Jewish Terror on Kristallnacht" is being shown...
...contrast, I have been brought into contact with any number of historians, in America and abroad, who have twisted the facts of history to suit their own particular political or social views or prejudices. Mainstream German history textbooks today routinely ignore or treat merely as footnotes such events as Kristallnacht, the Holocaust and German guilt, while the more extreme deny their existence entirely. At various points in the past century, entirely reputable historians came down on all sides of the Vietnam War, the Armenian massacres by Turks, the humanity of Soviet communism and, today, American policies across the Middle East...