[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 16716-16717]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   75TH ANNIVERSARY OF KRISTALLNACHT

  Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, I rise today to remember those who 
perished and suffered during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, 
75 years ago on November 9 and 10 in Germany, German-occupied Austria, 
and German-occupied Czechoslovakia.
  Earlier that year, in March 1938, Germany absorbed Austria--the so-
called Anschluss. Then, at the September 1938 Munich conference, 
France, Britain, and Italy allowed Germany to annex the western rim of 
Czechoslovakia and to claim its 3 million Sudeten Germans as its own. 
In both acts, the concept of loyalty to the state was equated with 
ethnic identity.
  Then, in October 1938, Germany expelled 17,000 Jews with Polish 
citizenship from Germany into Poland. These families were arrested at 
night, transported by train to the Polish border, and effectively left 
in limbo, as Poland initially refused to accept them. The son of two of 
these expellees, a Polish Jew in France, took revenge: He assassinated 
a German diplomat in Paris.
  Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels subsequently asserted that 
``World Jewry'' was responsible for the assassination and gave the 
signal for the start of the first large open pogrom in Germany: ``The 
Fuhrer,'' he stated, ``has decided that . . . demonstrations should not 
be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt 
spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.''
  As described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:

       The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, 
     Austria, and the Sudetenland. Many synagogues burned 
     throughout the night, in full view of the public and of local 
     firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to 
     prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. SA and 
     Hitler Youth members across the country shattered the shop 
     windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial 
     establishments, and looted their wares. Jewish cemeteries 
     became a particular object of desecration in many regions. 
     The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and 
     Vienna, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the 
     German Reich. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking 
     Jews in their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to 
     perform acts of public humiliation. Although murder did not 
     figure in the central directives, Kristallnacht claimed the 
     lives of at least 91 Jews between the 9th and 10th of 
     November. Police records of the period document a high number 
     of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence.

  Kristallnacht was thus a crucial turning point in the Holocaust--
moving from a policy of removing Jews from Germany and German occupied 
lands, to murdering them. It also stands as an enduring example of the 
danger of associating citizenship with ethnicity, of tying loyalty to 
the state with blood identity.
  Kristallnacht is but one example of how hate can proliferate and 
erode our societies and why I have worked tirelessly to advance global 
efforts to ensure atrocities such as this never happen again. In my 
capacity as a chair of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in 
Europe and decades-long work as a Member of Congress, I have advanced 
efforts to combat anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance and 
discrimination in North America and Europe.
  This work has ranged from commission hearings to raise awareness of 
the continuing scourge of anti-Semitism to leading interparliamentary 
efforts to create personal representatives or high-level officials 
within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to 
combat Anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance. Sadly, the 
election of anti-Semitic political parties in Europe coupled with 
efforts to adopt circumcision, ritual slaughter, and other laws in 
Europe that would alter Jewish life and continuing incidents of anti-
Semitic violence let us know that the work to eradicate anti-Semitism 
is not yet complete.
  As we honor the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, I ask that you 
join me in honoring the victims and families of

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that horrible tragedy and join me in fighting hate and bias in all its 
forms.

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