75th anniversary of the infamous 'Kristallnacht' new accounts how it Shocked Foreign Diplomats.

Here, a member of the SA posts a sign on a Jewish shop urging Germans not to buy from Jews. 

75th anniversary of the infamous 'Kristallnacht' new accounts how it Shocked Foreign Diplomats.HT: Spiegel.

In the days surrounding Nov. 9, 1938, the Nazis committed the worst pogrom Germany had seen since the Middle Ages. To mark the incident's 75th anniversary, an exhibition in Berlin gathers previously unknown reports by foreign diplomats, revealing how the shocking events prompted little more than condemnation.

Consul-General Robert Townsend Smallbones had already seen much of the world. He had been in Angola, Norway and Croatia, and he had spent eight years in Germany with the British diplomatic corps. Despite the Nazi dictatorship, the 54-year-old held Germans in high esteem. They were "habitually kind to animals, to children, to the aged and infirm. They seemed to me to have no cruelty in their makeup," Smallbones wrote in a report to the British Foreign Office.

Given his impression of the Germans, the representative of the British Empire was all the more astonished by what he experienced in early November 1938. In Paris, Herschel Grünspan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee from the northern German city of Hanover, had shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in an act of protest against Hitler's policies regarding the Jews. At first, the Nazis only hunted down Jews in the Hesse region of Germany, surrounding Frankfurt. But, after Rath's death on Nov. 9, the pogroms spread throughout the German Reich, where synagogues were burned, Jewish shop windows were smashed and thousands were taken to concentration camps and mistreated.

Smallbones reported from Frankfurt that Jews had been taken to a large building and forced to kneel and place their heads on the ground. After some of them had vomited, Smallbones writes, the "guards removed the vomit by taking the culprit by the scruff of the neck and wiping it away with his face and hair." According to Smallbones' account, after a few hours, the victims were taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where many were tortured and a few beaten to death. The prisoners were even forced to urinate into each other's mouths. This was one of the details Smallbones learned from a golfing partner, a German Jew, after the latter's release from Buchenwald.

"I flattered myself that I understood the German character," the consul-general wrote, but added that he had not expected this "outbreak of sadistic cruelty."

The pogroms in November 1938 lasted several days, although history books often refer to the event merely as one "Night of the Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht) because Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels announced on the radio on Nov. 10 that the excesses had ended. Experts estimate that up to 1,500 people died in the days surrounding Nov. 9. It was the worst pogrom in Germany since the Middle Ages.Read the full story here.

Attack Against Caracas Synagogue 'Reminiscent of Kristallnacht'.

View of the destroyed interior of the Hechingen synagogue - Kristallnacht

Attack Against Caracas Synagogue 'Reminiscent of Kristallnacht'.(INN).The Simon Wiesenthal Center expressed harsh criticism of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for enabling the recent anti-Semitic attack that plagued the country’s largest synagogue, saying it was “reminiscent of Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.” An enraged mob, chanting anti-Israel slogans, launching firecrackers and burning Israeli flags, attacked the Maripérez Synagogue in Caracas on Thursday for the second time since January of 2009.
The crowd swept through the streets shouting “Jews are murderers, damn Jews, stop killing innocent people”, in the most recent hate crime to plague the Venezuelan capital. “Where was the police protection promised by Chavez?” demanded the Center’s Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels. “The circumstances are too reminiscent of Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.” Since Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took office at the beginning of 1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism throughout the country. As Travis Pantin of Commentary Magazine notes, “Government-owned media outlets have published anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chavez groups have publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the ‘Bolívarian’ cause, and ‘Semitic banks’ have been accused of plotting against the regime.” “Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary schools and other places of meeting,” explains Pantin. “The anti-Zionism expressed by the government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism, in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness never before seen in the country.”Hmmmm......Ahmadinejad...... Chavez.....Both would vote for Obama.Read the full story here.

In Egypt, Christians endure their ‘Kristallnacht’

In Egypt, Christians endure their ‘Kristallnacht’.(BigPeace).By Charles Jacobs.

Recently Jews in synagogues around the world heard an ancient prophesy about a time of tribulation for the Christians. In the haftarah, the Prophet Obadiah hears G-d warning the Edomites (traditionally a Jewish term for the people who eventually made up the Christian world): “Behold on that day… Your mighty ones to the South will be broken… every man will be cut off by the slaughter…”

How eerily reflective of the moment: Within just the last couple of weeks, the Washington-based Christian Solidarity International (CSI) issued a “Genocide Warning” for Christians and other religious minorities across the Middle East, and launched a petition urging President Barack Obama to speak up.
The “Arab Spring” seems to be rapidly springing shut on Middle East Christians, most clearly in Egypt where Islamists scored a landslide victory in the first of a three-stage parliamentary election there. The Muslim Brotherhood – whose goals include world conquest in the name of Allah, and whose motto is “Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope” – gained 40 percent of the vote, and the Salafists – who are said to be even more radical – garnered 25 percent. And that’s just in the big cities. As Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick surmises, the results will only get worse as results trickle in from the more religious hinterland.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s yuppies – the grand hope of dreamy Westerners – Twittered and Facebooked themselves a pathetic 15 percent of the vote. They will likely fade away, be absorbed or be wiped out.

While Israel fears for its peace treaty with the Arab world’s biggest country, Egypt’s Copts face a more immediate crisis. This Christian minority, which numbers some 11 million, was established in the land of the pharaohs long before the Islamic conquests. For the Copts, the “Arab Spring” is already a deep, deep, cold winter – and Obadiah’s words might seem a contemporary foreboding.

On December 7, Cynthia Farahat, a Coptic writer and human rights activist, testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission about the plight of her people. Farahat’s colleague Michael Mosad was one of the Christian men crushed by a military vehicle during the October 9 Maspero massacre, triggered by Copts protesting the burning of their churches by Islamist thugs. Farahat told the commission:

His legs were nearly severed from his body. As [Michael’s fiancée] sat next to him …soldiers gathered … brutally beating and kicking his motionless body. Vivian threw her body over his to protect him … but military officers beat and cursed her; they called her an infidel, ‘Christian sons of dogs,’ and worse–

Bothaina Kamel, a Muslim TV personality who hid inside a television station during the protests, heard the soldiers and the policemen yelling “Allahu Akbar” as they brutally beat the protestors.

Kamel told the commission she was able to get out of the building only by claiming she was a believing Muslim. She said that she had been warned that the military was inspecting people’s hands, as many Copts had tattoos of crosses. She said to leave the building, she had to trudge through the blood of Christians whom the soldiers had beaten to death.

Gordon College is a Christian school between Salem and Rockport. A few weeks ago I spoke there at a commemoration of Kristallnacht, Germany’s night of broken glass, the first mass assault on Europe’s Jews and the harbinger of the Shoah. I told the Christian audience how good it was to feel Christian support for Jews in these times, and that even some of the most stubborn of my people were now appreciating Evangelical support for Israel. I also said that we felt this blessed support came from a spirit of Christian altruism. But given the news from the Middle East, concern for others is surely not the only reason Christians need to support Israel.

I asked how many in the audience of 250 knew of Anne Frank. Almost every hand shot up. Then I asked how many had heard of Ayman Labib. I got a mass blank stare. Ayman was a 17-year-old Egyptian Christian who just weeks ago was beaten to death by his Muslim classmates as teachers watched because he refused their demand to remove his cross necklace.

I asked how many knew about the Maspero massacre, which had left at least 24 Copts dead and 270 injured. And whether they knew that since January, there had been more than 70 attacks on Christian churches or institutions in Egypt.

While tonight you commemorate a Jewish pogrom, I told them, Christianity has just suffered its own “Kristallnacht” … and I have yet to see much of a Christian response.

Christian persecution is spread throughout the Middle East, I told them. Christians are under siege in Iraq. In Syria, they are clasping tight to Bashir al Assad as a sort of protector, and will be completely vulnerable if – or when – he falls. The Lebanese Christians are threatened by Hezbollah, and the Sudanese Christians lost millions to the Jihad over the last two decades. Christians (and Jews) have been thoroughly “cleansed” from Saudi Arabia already.

In discussions that followed at Gordon, the Christians lamented that they lacked the sense of family that the Jewish people have. “Look at what you did for one Jew, Gilad Shalit. We don’t feel that way about other Christians.” The global jihad, I said, might change that.

Meanwhile, the group Children of Holocaust Survivors, I’m proud to report, is ringing the alarm bells – on Facebook and Twitter – echoing the Christian Solidarity International genocide warning. And I am hearing rumblings of Christians coming awake.

I urge my readers to respond to this real, mounting humanitarian crisis by visiting www.csi-usa.org.   Source