{"id":38134,"date":"2019-11-09T09:54:38","date_gmt":"2019-11-09T17:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=38134"},"modified":"2019-11-09T20:38:50","modified_gmt":"2019-11-10T04:38:50","slug":"everyday-erinyes-191","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/09\/everyday-erinyes-191\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyday Erinyes #191"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto<\/span><\/strong>, Megaera<\/span><\/strong>, and Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”<\/p>\n

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse …
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The forgotten mass destruction of Jewish homes during ‘Kristallnacht’<\/h1>\n
A looted Jewish shop in Aachen, Germany on the day after Kristallnacht, Nov. 10, 1938.
\nWolf Gruner and Armin Nolzen (eds.). ‘B\u00fcrokratien: Initiative und Effizienz,’ Berlin, 2001.<\/span>, Author provided<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wolf Gruner<\/a>, University of Southern California \u2013 Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Every November, communities around the world hold remembrances<\/a> on the anniversary of the Nazis\u2019 brutal assault on the Jews during \u201cKristallnacht.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also known as \u201cthe Night of Broken Glass,\u201d it\u2019s one of the most closely scrutinized events in the history of Nazi Germany. Dozens of books<\/a> have been published about the hours between Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, when Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decided to unleash violence against Jews across Germany and the annexed territory of Austria with the aim of driving them out of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n

Most accounts<\/a> tend to emphasize the attacks on synagogues and shops, along with the mass arrests of 30,000 men. A few note the destruction of Jewish schools and cemeteries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Attacks on Jewish homes, however, are barely mentioned<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an aspect of the story that has rarely been researched and written about \u2013 until now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A pattern emerges in survivor accounts<\/h2>\n

In 2008, when I arrived at the University of Southern California from Germany, I had been researching Nazi persecution of the German Jews for 20 years. I had published more than six books on the topic and thought I knew just about everything there was to know about Kristallnacht.<\/p>\n

The university happened to be the new home of the Shoah Foundation and its Visual History Archive<\/a>, which today includes over 55,000 survivor testimonies. When I started to watch interviews with German-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, I was surprised to hear many of them talk about the destruction of their homes during Kristallnacht.<\/p>\n

Details from their recollections sounded eerily similar: When Nazi paramilitary troops broke the doors of their homes, it sounded as though a bomb had gone off; then the men cut into the featherbeds, hacked the furniture into pieces and smashed everything inside.<\/p>\n