20th+

Friday, May 23, 2014

38-11-9 Kristallnacht 38-11-10

Holocaust Survivors Remember Kristallnacht > .

Zones of Statelessness; Kristallnacht; etc | Timothy Snyder (2017) > .
Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) >> .

Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November Pogrom(s), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night") comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed.

Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany sent shockwaves around the world. The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."

The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered. Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much higher; when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll climbs into the hundreds, with Richard J. Evans estimating 638 suicide deaths. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

1938-10-30 War of the Worlds

.1938-10-30: The War of the Worlds radio play, Orson Welles → terror - HiPo > .

The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a series of weekly one-hour radio plays created by Welles and broadcast on the CBS Radio network. ‘The War of the Worlds’ was the seventeenth episode of the radio show, and was adapted by American playwright Howard E. Koch who is probably best known for later co-writing the film Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

For the radio play of ‘The War of the Worlds’ Koch took the general story arc from H. G. Wells’ original novel but substituted 19th Century Europe for 20th Century America by changing the names of locations and personalities to ones that were more familiar and contemporary. He was only asked to write the script a week before the broadcast and earned $50, but was permitted to keep the rights to the finished script.

Before the live broadcast had even finished on the night of 30 October, CBS began to receive telephone calls from concerned listeners. Announcements were made before, during and after the performance that the events were fictitious, but it was clear that these warnings went unheeded by many.

Although the listening figures were relatively small, news of the alien invasion spread through a country nervous about impending war. Within hours of the broadcast the billboards in New York’s Times Square flashed with reports of mass panic caused by the play, although most reports were based on anecdotal accounts from the Associated Press. Subsequent research suggests that the public response was nowhere near the scale claimed at the time.