This photo shows an employee of a Jewish-owned shop clearing up broken glass from the shop windows on the morning of 10 November 1938. The night before, dozens of Jews were murdered and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested all over Nazi Germany. Synagogues, shops, schools and other "Jewish" buildings were also destroyed. The term Kristallnacht refers to the broken glass from the smashed windows of shops, homes and synagogues which littered the streets.

Hitler’s government made out that Kristallnacht was a spontaneous outburst of violence by the German people against the Jews. In reality Kristallnacht was organised by the Nazi government.

According to the German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, Kristallnacht was the German people’s way of taking revenge for the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris on 7 November 1938. The 17-year-old Polish-Jewish youth Herschel Grynszpan carried out the killing after his family and 15,000 other Polish Jews were expelled from Germany. Nazi propaganda said that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for the killing.

After Kristallnacht thousands of Jews tried to flee Nazi Germany. Many countries only allowed in a small number of refugees. The governments of these countries did not want to admit large numbers of refugees. They were afraid that this would harm their economies, and that anti-Semitism among their own citizens would grow. But they were also concerned about the reaction of Hitler’s government if they were too welcoming to Jewish refugees.