October 27, 2016 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Kristallnacht November 9, 1938
Kristallnacht November 9, 1938
The rioting that was unleashed on the night of November 9 and
carried till the dawn of November 10 goes by the epithet of Kristallnacht, a
very apt sobriquet.
The dogs of war were released in waves starting first with the
Gauleiters (essentially Nazi party henchmen) followed later by the SA
(Sturmabteilung = Storm Detachment) the paramilitary force of the party.
To finish off the carnage came the deadly SS Schutzstaffel run by
the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
SS grew from a small elite and fiercely loyal (to Hitler) force of
8 (the Führer did not even trust the SA, the Brownshirts) to become the most
powerful and lethal organization of the Nazi Germany.
It was this Schutzstaffel that instilled fear and terror in the
heart of Europeans and was most responsible for carrying out “the Final
Solution to the Jewish Question”.
You should be quite aghast to know that the subject of the “Jewish
Question” was first raised in Great Britain somewhere in mid 1700s.
Later it was a matter of discussion in France after its revolution
and enlightenment and finally Germany decided to settle it once and for all
with their perfect solution.
That night, all over Germany and Austria (recently run over by the
Germans), Jewish businesses, homes, synagogues and Jews themselves were
systematically targeted, destroyed and killed.
The numbers to me seem pointless, but beside all the havoc,
destruction and killings, that night some 30,000 young Jewish men were rounded
up and taken to concentration camps.
This was the beginning of the end.
While the pogrom in the nation ended on November 11, the beatings
of the men in the concentration camps begun.
“They were beaten so bad that their skulls had smashed, eyes
knocked out, faces flattened shapeless” as reported in the News Chronicle of
London.
A Daily Telegraph correspondent wrote:
“Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken a complete hold
of otherwise decent people.
“I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming
with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see
the fun.”
Of course, not all Germans conducted themselves this cruelly and
diabolically.
Yet as the saying goes,
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do
nothing” as often happens in most cases.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an IIT graduate and
a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, may I
suggest this large collection of Kids Songs:
Heinrich Himmler - the man behind the dreaded Schutzstaffel and the Einsatzgruppen or the Task Forces...In short, the human killing machines
A member of Einsatzgruppen operating under Schutzstaffel on his way to killing a mother who is shielding her child at Ivangorod in Ukraine of 1942. Human bestiality is never too far deep under the skin. An iconic image that we all must keep in our drawing rooms to remind us that we are all capable of barbaric atrocities.
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