This is the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, also known as the "Night of Broken Glass." Kristallnacht actually took place on two days: November 9th and 10th, of 1938. It was a brutal and widespread pogrom, organized by the Nazis, taking place in Germany, and elsewhere.
As noted on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and
the Sudetenland. Many synagogues burned throughout the night, in full
view of the public and of local firefighters, who had received orders to
intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. SA
[Storm Troopers] and Hitler Youth members across the country shattered the shop windows
of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial establishments, and looted
their wares. Jewish cemeteries became a particular object of
desecration in many regions.
The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home
to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. Mobs of SA
men roamed the streets, attacking Jews in their houses and forcing Jews
they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation. Although murder
did not figure in the central directives, Kristallnacht claimed
the lives of at least 91 Jews between 9 and 10 November. Police records
of the period document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the
aftermath of the violence.
As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo (Secret State
Police), following [head of the Security Police Reinhard] Heydrich's instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish
males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks
the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a
massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity. Hundreds died in
the camps as a result of the brutal treatment they endured; most
obtained release over the next three months on the condition that they
begin the process of emigration from Germany. Indeed, the effects of Kristallnacht would serve as a spur to the emigration of Jews from Germany in the months to come.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005201
http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/kristallnacht
