Never forget, never forgive!
On the night of November 9, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across Nazi Germany. It appeared to be unplanned, set off by Germans’ anger over the assassination of German embassy official Ernst vom Rath in Paris at the hands of Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan in revenge for the deportation of his family members who were living in Germany.
In fact, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis carefully organized the pogroms. In two days, over 250 synagogues were burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by. The pogroms became known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” for the shattered glass from the store windows that littered the streets.
The morning after the pogroms 30,000 German Jewish men were arrested for the “crime” of being Jewish and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them perished.
I would like to add: Using the term “Kristallnacht” in Germany today is considered a sign the speaker is a neonazi glorifying the pogroms. The Nazis used euphemisms to make their ideologies and actions seem less sinister. They created this term when referring to the night of Nov. 9. The term used today is Pogromnacht (pogrom night), the other term is always set in quotation marks in educational contexts and not otherwise used.
Also good to know: in many other countries in Europe ‘kristallnacht’ is the official name used in rememberence ceremonies etc. and use of the term does not indocate any political affiliation. So check what’s being used in the country you are in.
It does, however, indicate how efficient Nazi propaganda was, because using their words for the atrocities they committed… well, even if unintentional, I’d consider that a somewhat bleak legacy.
I don’t think it does. In these countries (the ones I’m familiar with anyway) everyone hears ‘kristallnacht’ and thinks ‘genocide’ and that makes it a word nazi’s can’t use for their propaganda purposes any more.
You can choose to change the word or you can choose to change the meaning of the word. You either say ‘this is bad, we need a new word full of bad’ or you say ‘this is bad, we’re going make sure everyone knows its bad’.
Both can be effective strategies. Which strategy is chosen depends on a lot of details of how a culture deals with language. In some cultures new words are the most obvious answer to a need to communicate how bad this was, in other cultures words tend to remain while their meaning is altered.
