Kristallnacht: The Beginning of Hitlers Final Solution

Akhil Kesaraju Bobby Bose Rohith Kesaraju

Junior Division Group Website

Topic Selection
We got the idea to pick Kristallnacht as our NHD topic after reading the book, Daniels story by Carol Matas. This book is about Daniel and his memories of Hitlers reign of terror. After reading this book we wondered what event was the turning point causing the mass murders of Jews in millions.

Research
We wanted to find out what led to Kristallnacht including: 1. How the situation in Germany was before Kristallnacht and what made the Germans start their final solution 2. What happened in the days leading to Kristallnacht and what happened that night? 3. What happened following the Kristallnacht and how the Jewish people, German people and the world reacted to this? 4. Primary source interviews and their accounts on how was social and political situation leading to Kristallnacht and their plight following the night of Kristallnacht. We started our research from internet searching and the United States Holocaust memorial museum (USHMM) website. We then visited USHMM in Washington D.C where we interviewed some holocaust survivors and historians. We have gathered a lot of information from the museum exhibits, photo collections and historic documents. We visited the Library of Congress and collected information from news paper archives. We had more interviews on phone and email. We then visited the Kentucky Historical Society and collected more information. We collected the information on each of these questions and then grouped them in to different categories such as news articles, videos, pictures, books, museum exhibits, and interviews. We analyzed all the information we collected and categorized them in to several topics such as Historical Context, Death of Vom Rath and the responses, Kristallnacht, and Turning point in History.

Creating Our Project

We realized that there is a lot of information on this topic. We thought that a website is the best way to present different types of media we have. We have made tabs on the webpage of all the categories. We wrote up details under each tab and added related photos and media.

Relation to the Theme

The NHD theme this year is, Turning Points in History: People, Ideas, and Events. Our topic is how Kristallnacht was a turning point in history. Leading up to November 9, 1938, the Nazis made several laws to cut down Jews personal and public status and segregated them from general public. They arrested and imprisoned Jews in concentration camps. They seized

properties using the Nuremberg laws. They forcibly expelled Jews knowing emigration is hard. On November 7th, one of the Jewish men who suffered pain from Nazis shot a German Official, Vom Rath, who died on November 9th. As a result of the murder of Vom Rath, Hitler and Nazi leaders planned the beginning of their final solution to persecute and eradicate Jews. Kristallnacht began the widespread persecution and growing acceptance of violence towards Jews. Kristallnacht is certainly a turning point in history that began the persecution and the mass murder of Jews of what we now know as the Holocaust.