Kristallnacht - "Crystal Night"

Kristallnacht / Crystal Night", also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, or Reichskristallnacht and Novemberpogrome was a pogrom (a series of coordinated attacks) against Jews throughout Nazi Germany andAustria on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians.

German authorities looked on without intervening. 

At least 91 Jews were killed in the attacks, and 30,000 were arrested and incarcerated inconcentration camps.[ Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Over 1,000 synagogues were burned (95 in Vienna alone) and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.

Martin Gilbert writes that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world.

The Times wrote at the time: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."

The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rathby by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. 

Kristallnacht was followed by additional economic and political persecution of Jews, and is viewed by historians as part of Nazi Germany's broader racial policy, and the beginning of the Final Solution and The Holocaust.