When democracy had disappeared

#19

“Stolpersteine” photographed yesterday in Berlin: A Stolperstein is a ten-centimetre concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Literally, it means 'stumbling stone' and metaphorically 'stumbling block'.

Salute,

Democracy offers no guarantee, but it is the prerequisite for peaceful and just coexistence. This is for sure.

We, people from Germany, know a lot about what happens when a dictatorship ends democracy.

Exactly 85 years ago, on 9–10 November 1938, Jewish homes, hospitals and schools in Nazi Germany were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers.

Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered. Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much higher. What is known: 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.

The pretext for the so-called "Kristallnacht" (Night of Broken Glass) was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.

Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the “Final Solution” and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

Never again!

Johannes Eber