IB History Experiences of Marginalized Groups Key Definitions

The "Night of Broken Glass," a nationwide pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938. Organized by the Nazi regime following the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish teenager, the pogrom destroyed around 7,500 Jewish businesses, burned over 1,400 synagogues, killed at least 91 Jews directly, and resulted in the arrest and deportation of around 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. The name refers to the broken glass from shop windows that covered the streets. Kristallnacht marked an escalation from legal persecution to open physical violence against Jews and is often cited as a key step toward the Holocaust.

Two laws passed at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in September 1935 that institutionalized racial antisemitism in German law. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of German citizenship, making them "subjects of the state" without political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. A supplementary decree defined who counted as Jewish: anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was fully Jewish; those with one or two Jewish grandparents were classified as "Mischlinge" (mixed-race). The laws affected around 500,000 German Jews directly and created a legal framework for systematic persecution.