Why Did Kristallnacht Take Place.

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Assignment 2: Why Did Kristallnacht Take Place

A)

        On the 7th of November 1938 Ernst von Roth a Nazi official was shot dead by a polish Jew who was seeking revenge for the mistreatment of his parents. The events after this took place was called Kristallnacht. On the 9th November Jewish homes businesses and synagogues were attacked all over Germany. There was a lot of controversy over who organised the attacks or if anyone organised the attacks at all.

        These two sources A and B would both be very useful for a historian writing about kristallnacht. They both give details on what happened but they are very contrasting.

        Source A is a summary of an account of Fritz Hesse’s account of a dinner on the evening of 9th of November. Source A is a summary so you might not get all the detail of the actual account so the source could be missing some key facts. Hesse wrote this account in 1954 which was quite a while after the event took place. So Hesse memory of the event might not have been that clear when he wrote the account. But on the other hand this would be quite a big event in Hesse’s life so he might be able to remember it exactly. Another fact is that Hesse wrote this after Hitler and his regime had ended so Hesse would not be afraid of writing the truth, a thing that he could have been killed for if he had done it in the time of Hitler.

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        Source B does not seem to be very reliable because in the provenance it says that the report is secret and that it was prepared by the Nazi Party Supreme Court after the events of Kristallnacht. The source tells us that Goebbels said attacks ‘had’ taken place which seems strange since we know the attacks went on well into the morning. This makes the source seem a little less reliable. The Nazi party would have had time to learn that the action had not been popular with the German people so they could have changed the story so it seems ...

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