On November 11, 1938, the editors of the Scranton Tribune published an op-ed condemning the anti-Semitic violence in Germany following the murder of a German diplomat in Paris earlier that month.

In a wave of attacks on German Jews instigated and ordered by Germany’s fascist leaders on November 9-10, synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses were looted and burned in what became known as “Kristallnacht” or “The Night of Broken Glass.” More than 100 people were killed in the violence, with thousands more arrested and sent to concentration camps. All these events presaged more death and destruction to come.

The Tribune’s editors understood this and in their editorial, they opined that the events throughout Germany they had just reported signaled much worse to come.

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Fires of Destruction

The fires of racial hatred, assiduously cultivated by the Nazis, flared yesterday in Berlin, in the wake of the murder of Ernst vom Rath by a Polish Jew in Paris.

Ironical, indeed, is the sight of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels issuing a proclamation ordering the public in Berlin to cease its attacks on Jews – the same Goebbels who, with fiendish delight, has perfected the art of propaganda to a point where Nazis have been educated to look upon members of the Jewish race as ogres.

The murder of Vom Rath is a crime which no sane person will try to excuse, but the persecution of innocent persons in one country for the violent act of a mentally disturbed youth in another country is something which the outside world views with a sickening sense of revolt.

The systematic persecution by the Nazis of the Jewish minorities in Germany and Austria, and the Reich’s efforts to drive them, as Pope Pius has said, “from the human family,” constitutes one of the darkest and most inhuman chapters in the history of mankind.

Goebbels ranks with the foulest persecutors in history – one day he will find that he has sown more effectively than he realizes, and the hatred he engenders in the Nazis’ hearts will destroy that which he hopes to build.

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Read more about the events in Germany in November 1938

“The Night of Broken Glass, Never to Be Forgotten” from the National World War 2 Museum

“Kristallnacht” | America and the Holocaust

A 1938 editorial from the Coal Region urged loosening of immigration restrictions for refugees

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