Kristallnacht in the context of "Herschel Grynszpan"

The Holocaust (/ˈhɒləkɔːst/ HOL-ə-kawst), known in Hebrew as the Shoah (/ˈʃoʊə/ SHOH-ə; Hebrew: שּׁוֹאָה, romanized: Shoah, IPA: [ʃoˈʔa], lit. 'Catastrophe'), was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups.

The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of "living space", and seized power in early 1933. Meant to force all German Jews to emigrate, regardless of means, the regime passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged harassment, and orchestrated a nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht in November 1938. After Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, occupation authorities began to establish ghettos to segregate Jews. Following the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot by German forces and local collaborators. By early 1942, the Nazis decided to murder all Jews in Europe. Victims were deported to extermination camps where those who had survived the trip were killed with poisonous gas, while others were sent to forced labor camps where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or being used as test subjects in experiments. Property belonging to murdered Jews was redistributed to the German occupiers and other non-Jews. Although the majority of Holocaust victims died in 1942, the killing continued until the end of the war in 1945.

The 1930s (pronounced "nineteen-thirties" and commonly abbreviated as "the '30s" or "the Thirties") was a decade that began on January 1, 1930, and ended on December 31, 1939. In the United States, the Dust Bowl led to the nickname the "Dirty Thirties".

The decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War. It saw the collapse of the international financial system, beginning with the Wall Street crash of 1929, the largest stock market crash in American history. The subsequent economic downfall, called the Great Depression, had traumatic social effects worldwide, leading to widespread poverty and unemployment, especially in the economic superpower of the United States and in Germany, which was already struggling with the payment of reparations for the First World War. The Dust Bowl in the United States (which led to the nickname the "Dirty Thirties") exacerbated the scarcity of wealth. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, introduced a program of broad-scale social reforms and stimulus plans called the New Deal in response to the crisis. The Soviet Union's second five-year plan gave heavy industry top priority, putting the Soviet Union not far behind Germany as one of the major steel-producing countries of the world, while also improving communications. First-wave feminism made advances, with women gaining the right to vote in South Africa (1930, whites only), Brazil (1933), and Cuba (1933). Following the rise of Adolf Hitler and the emergence of the NSDAP as the country's sole legal party in 1933, Germany imposed a series of laws which discriminated against Jews and other ethnic minorities.

A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, usually applied to attacks on Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews which occurred in other times and places were renamed pogroms. Nowadays the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups as well. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.

Significant pogroms in the Russian Empire included the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom (1881), Kishinev pogrom (1903), Kiev pogrom (1905), and Białystok pogrom (1906). After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, several pogroms occurred amidst the power struggles in Eastern Europe, including the Lwów pogrom (1918) and Kiev pogroms (1919).The most significant pogrom which occurred in Nazi Germany was the 1938 Kristallnacht. At least 91 Jews were killed, a further thirty thousand arrested and subsequently incarcerated in concentration camps, a thousand synagogues burned, and over seven thousand Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged. Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the July 1941 Iași pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – as well as the Jedwabne pogrom in German-occupied Poland. Post-World War II pogroms included the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom, the 1947 Aleppo pogrom, and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom.

Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic negotiation policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power with intention to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy between 1935 and 1939 of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and most notably Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.

In the early 1930s, appeasing concessions were widely seen as desirable because of the anti-war reaction to the trauma of World War I (1914–1918), second thoughts about the perceived vindictive treatment by some of Germany in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and a perception that fascism was a useful form of anti-communism. However, by the time of the Munich Agreement, which was concluded on 30 September 1938 between Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, the policy was opposed by the Labour Party and by a few Conservative dissenters such as future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War Duff Cooper, and future Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Appeasement was strongly supported by the British upper class, including royalty, big business (based in the City of London), the House of Lords, and media such as the BBC and The Times. However, it would be mistaken to say that the policy was not similarly supported amongst the working and middle classes as well, who were not enthusiastic about another war until popular opinion changed following events like Kristallnacht and Hitler’s invasion of rump Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, and that at the time of Munich elite endorsement rang in concordance with popular opinion.

9 November has been the date of a series of events that are considered political turning points in recent German history, some of which also had international repercussions. In particular the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the beginning of the November pogroms in 1938 (German: Kristallnacht or Reichspogromnacht), the Munich Putsch in 1923 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1918 during the November Revolution in Berlin, when viewed together in their respective contexts and received in relation to one another, form contextually and ideologically contrasting and polarizing highlights of the historical-political examination of Germany's history, especially that of the 20th century.

After the end of the Second World War, various historians and journalists coined the expression Schicksalstag (lit. 'Day of Fate' in German) for this date, but it only became widespread after the events of autumn 1989.

German Unity Day (German: Tag der Deutschen Einheit, pronounced [ˈtaːk deːɐ̯ ˈdɔʏtʃn̩ ˈʔaɪnhaɪt] ) is the National Day of Germany, celebrated on 3 October as a public holiday. It commemorates German reunification in 1990 when the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) ceased to exist and joined the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), so that for the first time since 1945 there existed a single German state. German Unity Day on 3 October has been the German national holiday since 1990, when the reunification was formally completed.

An alternative choice to commemorate the reunification could have been the day the Berlin Wall came down: 9 November 1989, which coincided with the anniversary of the proclamation of the German Republic in 1918, and the defeat of Hitler's first coup in 1923. However, 9 November was also the anniversary of the first large-scale Nazi-led pogroms against Jews in 1938 (Reichspogromnacht), so the day was considered inappropriate as a national holiday (see 9 November in German history). Therefore, 3 October 1990, the day of the formal reunification, was chosen instead. It replaced the "German Unity Day" on 17 June, the national holiday of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1954.

Ernst Eduard vom Rath (3 June 1909 – 9 November 1938) was a German diplomat. He is mainly remembered for his assassination in Paris in 1938 by a Polish Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, which provided a pretext for Kristallnacht, "The Night of Broken Glass" on 9–10 November 1938. Historians consider Kristallnacht the beginning of the Holocaust.