Susanna Kokkonen from Christian Friends of Yad Vashem talks to Paul Calvert.

In October 1938 something else happens. Jews that had Polish citizenship, who were living in Germany, were evicted and it was the first time Jews were deported in larger numbers. Nobody wanted them so they were abandoned, they had nothing. There was a family there called Grynszpan from Hanover and the father manages to write a letter to his son Herschel Grynszpan, who was only 17 living in Paris, and he describes the terrible things that were happening in Germany and what was happening specifically to them. Herschel, that 17 year old boy, walked into the German embassy and shot a very low ranking diplomat. He was then arrested and interrogated. I want to read to you what Herschel said in response:

"It is not a crime to be Jewish, I am not a dog, I have the right to live and the Jewish people have the right to exist in this world, but everywhere I am persecuted like an animal."

The interesting thing is that most people think that because he shot the diplomat that the Kristallnacht happened, but actually we know that the Nazi leaders were gathered together at the time and they were already planning this action. It happened the night of November 9-10th 1938. But if you travelled in Germany and went to some of the places where the synagogues stood, the local people would have told you that in their village it already happened on the 8th. This means that the orders were already given and some of the people were so eager to do it that they started it on the 8th. This is what I have personally heard from people who were living there at the time.

About 1400 synagogues all across Germany were burned and what is important to realise is that there was a special aggression towards the Jewish prayer books, Torah scrolls. They wanted to shame the Jews, but they also wanted to do shameful things to these objects of prayer. I think that is very important. Torah scrolls contain God's law and that law is actually the basis of Western society today. Our law, our system of justice comes from God's commandments, so they had this aggression towards that law. They couldn't go against God so they went against the Jews and the things that represented something much higher. That is very interesting because, at the end of the war in the Nuremberg war trials, one of the chief prosecutors argued that although the Nazi criminals hadn't done anything illegal, because they were obeying the laws of the Nazi German state, he said that that didn't matter because that whole state had become an illegal state.

The Jewish owned shops and businesses of course became targets and about 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps. I would say that this is also an important time because people had been, to a certain extent, able to leave Germany and they had been trying to emigrate. The Western powers knew what was happening in Germany, but soon those doors that allowed Jews to be able to immigrate to other countries started closing.

It represents a very open violent action by the regime against the Jews. The only result was going to be violence towards people and their persons, taking their property from them completely and so that happened very soon after. It was a turning point and that is why historians call it the fateful year.

Paul: Do you think this was the catalyst that started the Holocaust?

Susanna: There are people who define the Holocaust from 1933 until 1945, but the period of mass murder we would define from 1941 to 45. Many historians would say that this is the point when you are driving a car and going very fast. At a certain point you aren't able to brake, you are going too fast so you can't stop, and before you know it the crash is going to happen. Politically, and in terms of the persecution, that is the point where it would have been very hard to change the direction that society had taken. That is very tragic, because it means that often people only see the direction clearly when it's already at a point where you can't change it anymore.