By Tabitha Korol ——Bio and Archives--November 8, 2013
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’The Kristallnacht was started by one individual,’ she said, referring to Hershel Grynszpan, a 17-year old German-born Polish Jew who assassinated Ernst von Rath, a German diplomat stationed in Paris. “It shows how a minor event in history can lead to mass destruction.” Cleveland Jewish News, Nov. 1, 2013.
Ask any American to write the date, and he’ll write November 9 or 11/9. Ask any European to write the same date and he will write 9 November or 9/11. You see, the rest of the world always puts the day first, followed by the month; therefore, the date was 9/11. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was and Islamists are generally great admirers of Hitler and both cultures assign particular significance to special seasons and anniversaries. Kristallnacht began on November 9 (written as 9/11) and the World Trade Center was bombed by Islamists on 9/11. I suspect this was not a coincidence, but a deliberate choice.Yes, Grynszpan had been distressed over his parents’ and his own situation, but shooting von Rath was merely a pretext for the pogrom. While Berenson accepts the events as reported by the Nazi press, the reality is that the Nazis had entered a new radical level of violence, and the SS (Schutzstaffel) had been created explicitly, months before, as the primary organization to plan and carry out such a large-scale attack. The Holocaust Encyclopedia stipulates:
The Nazi Party leadership, assembled in Munich for the commemoration, chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of antisemitic excesses.Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a chief instigator of the pogrom, intimated to the convened Nazi 'Old Guard' that 'World Jewry' had conspired to commit the assassination and announced that, "the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered."The well-orchestrated, two-day pogrom took place throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and in areas of the German-occupied Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Nazi party officials, Storm Troopers (SS) and Hitler Youth (SA) now had their orders. Armed with weapons and sledgehammers, they flooded the streets on cue. They ransacked 1600 synagogues, setting some afire with their worshippers inside; broke windows and doors; and looted synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses – but with commands to support the fiction of outrage at the “assassination”; to remove archives and artifacts before vandalizing synagogues; safeguard non-Jewish German life and property and all foreigners; and arrest young, healthy Jewish men, of which 30,000 were sent to concentration camps in waiting trains. About 100 Jews were beaten to death in homes and on the streets. Thousands of Jewish homes and about 8,000 Jewish shops were vandalized and devastated. Jewish cemeteries were wrecked, tombstones smashed, and corpses unearthed and defiled. Women were raped; people committed suicide, and Jews were blamed for the pogrom and fined the equivalent of today’s $37 trillion for damage and $37 billion for clearing the wreckage. Another 100,000 victims were deported to death camps. German college students burned censored books written by all Jews, and Christians like Thomas Mann and Mark Twain. A century before, German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine had predicted, “Where they burns books, they will eventually burn people.” Grynszpan did not resist arrest and immediately confessed to the crime. He was not tried or put to death in a country where death was meted out for far smaller infractions, as a trial would have exposed the government’s collusion. Rather, he was imprisoned, and spent the rest of his life in German custody and declared dead by West German officials in 1960. Herschel Grynszpan was the patsy who took the blame for Kristallnacht. He was as much the justification for Kristallnacht as an Israeli apartment building is for Palestinian violence, and as a videotape was for the mayhem and slaughter in Benghazi.
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Tabitha Korol began her political writing letters to the editor after her retirement, and earned an award from CAMERA (Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) “in recognition of outstanding letter-writing in 2009 to promote fair and factual reporting about Israel.” She was cited as one of America’s modern-day, articulate, patriotic women in Frederick William Dame’s Three American Fur Hat Fighters for Freedom.
She revised David Silberman’s book of Holocaust survivors’ accounts for publication, and proofreads/edits for a monthly city newsletter.