Events

Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the German throne on November 9, 1918, ending the Hohenzollern dynasty's 500-year rule and four years of catastrophic war that had killed roughly two million German soldiers. Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic from a window of the Reichstag, racing to preempt Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht, who was preparing to declare a socialist republic from the Berlin Palace. The abdication was forced by military collapse and domestic revolution. Germany's Spring Offensive of 1918 had failed to break the Western Front, and by September, Field Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff privately admitted the war was lost. Ludendorff suddenly demanded the government seek an armistice and establish parliamentary democracy, a cynical maneuver to shift blame for defeat onto civilian politicians. Revolution erupted from below. Sailors at Wilhelmshaven mutinied on October 29 rather than carry out a suicidal sortie against the British fleet. The mutiny spread to Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Munich, where workers' and soldiers' councils seized government buildings. By November 9, revolution had reached Berlin. Prince Max von Baden announced the Kaiser's abdication without Wilhelm's consent, then handed power to Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democrats. Wilhelm fled to the Netherlands, where Queen Wilhelmina granted asylum. The Allies demanded extradition for war crimes but the Dutch refused. He lived in exile at Huis Doorn until his death in 1941. The republic proclaimed in his absence inherited a devastated economy, a humiliated military, and a population that had never voted for democratic government. The Weimar Republic survived just fourteen years before Hitler dismantled it, building a dictatorship on the myth that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the civilians who signed the armistice.

Nazi stormtroopers and civilian mobs rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods across Germany and Austria on the night of November 9, 1938, smashing the windows of over 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, burning more than 1,000 synagogues, and murdering Jewish men, women, and children in a coordinated pogrom that marked the point where Nazi persecution crossed from legal discrimination into organized mass violence. The shattered glass that littered the streets gave the night its name: Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The pretext was the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish-German Jew whose parents had been among 17,000 Polish Jews expelled from Germany in October and left stranded at the border. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used vom Rath's death to incite violence, delivering a speech to Nazi Party leaders understood as authorization for a nationwide pogrom. The attack was neither spontaneous nor random. SA and SS units received detailed instructions to destroy Jewish property while avoiding damage to German-owned businesses. Fire departments were told to protect neighboring buildings but let synagogues burn. Police arrested Jewish men rather than protecting them. Over 30,000 Jewish men were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, where hundreds died. The aftermath was calculated cruelty. The regime fined the Jewish community one billion Reichsmarks as collective punishment, then confiscated insurance payouts for destroyed property. New laws barred Jews from owning businesses, attending schools, and entering public spaces. Foreign journalists reported the violence in detail, sending shock waves through the international community. Kristallnacht was not the beginning of Nazi antisemitism, but it was the unmistakable announcement that the regime's intentions were exterminatory.