Kristallnacht

About This Lesson

In the previous lessons, students explored the variety of methods the Nazis used to marginalize Jews and other supposedly inferior groups and to create a “national community” shaped according to Nazi racial ideals. In this lesson, students will continue this course’s historical case study by learning about a major escalation of the Nazi campaign against Jews, the violent pogroms of Kristallnacht on November 9–10, 1938. Students will learn about these events by watching a short documentary and examining a range of firsthand accounts. They will then look closely at the range of choices made by individuals, groups, and countries—to participate in the attacks, to oppose them, to help the victims, or to look the other way—and connect those choices to universal concepts about human behavior in times of crisis.

Course Essential Question

• How can learning about the choices people made during past episodes of injustice, mass violence, or genocide help guide our choices today?

Guiding Questions

• What do the variety of responses to Kristallnacht teach us about the ways that people respond in times of fear and crisis?

Learning Objectives

• Students will cite evidence from a mini-documentary to understand the historical significance of Kristallnacht as a major escalation of the Nazi campaign against Jews, and they will respond to the video testimony of a survivor of the pogroms to reflect on the personal impact of the violence and terror that occurred across Germany.
• Students will define the terms perpetrator, victim, bystander, and upstander and use first-person testimonies about Kristallnacht to demonstrate how these roles that people play in times of fear and crisis do not describe fixed identities; individuals move into and out of these roles depending on circumstances.

Lesson Plan

Day 1 

Activity 1: Discuss the Value of Studying Choices in a Time of Fear and Crisis

Tell students that in this lesson they will learn about an explosion of violence against Jews in Germany in November 1938, and they will examine the choices a variety of individuals made in response to these events. Then ask them to respond in their journals to the following prompt:

• What can we learn by thinking about the choices people make in times of fear and crisis?

After students have taken a few minutes to respond in writing, discuss their thoughts using the Think, Pair, Share teaching strategy. Alternatively, you might ask some students to share their ideas with the class, keeping a list of what they can learn on the board or chart paper to add to over the course of the lesson.

Activity 2: Introduce the Kristallnacht Pogroms

Students will initially learn about what happened on November 9 and 10, 1938, by watching two videos: one in which historians discuss the causes, events, and aftermath, and another in which a survivor whose family was targeted on Kristallnacht describes her experiences. Students will hear the word pogrom in this lesson, so if they have not yet learned it, provide the definition that was inspired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

• pogrom: an organized massacre of helpless people; specifically, a massacre of Jews; Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks and massacres against helpless people, usually planned, specifically in reference to massacres of Jewish people.

Pass out the handout “Kristallnacht”: The November 1938 Pogroms Viewing Guide and the handout Kristallnacht Testimony Viewing Guide. Then show the video ”Kristallnacht”: The November 1938 Pogroms (09:40). There are powerful images of destruction in this video, so it is important that your students are able to watch the film and not focus solely on their papers. You might ask students to read the questions in advance, and then pause the film a few times to allow them to record their reactions, or give them time to write after viewing the film.

After briefly discussing students’ responses to the first video, show the next one, Elsbeth Lewin Remembers Kristallnacht (09:43). Students will record on the handout a phrase or sentence from Lewin’s testimony that resonates with them. When the video is over, ask students to also write a word or phrase that describes their experiences of hearing her account.

Use the Wraparound teaching strategy to provide each student with the opportunity to share both the sentence from the video they recorded and the words they chose to describe their experiences. If you have the space in your classroom, you might ask students to form a circle and share their sentences in the first “wraparound” and their experiences of watching Elsbeth Lewin’s testimony in the second. Remind students that it is fine if multiple students chose similar sentences and used the same words to describe their personal responses.

Activity 3: Complete Exit Cards

So far in this lesson, students have encountered stories of escalating violence toward Jews in Nazi Germany in 1938 and a powerful firsthand account of Kristallnacht. Before ending the period, ask students to briefly respond to two prompts on exit cards to help you understand how they are processing what they have learned:

• Write down one thing you learned or observed in class today that you found surprising or troubling.

Record one question about history or human behavior that arose for you in response to what you learned about in class today.

Day 2 

Activity 1: Acknowledge Exit Cards

Begin the second day of this lesson by acknowledging the exit cards that students completed at the end of the previous day. Point out any patterns that you noticed. It can be helpful for students to know that others had similar responses to emotionally challenging material they encountered. Hearing some of their peers’ questions can also help to promote more thoughtful and sensitive contributions from students as they proceed together into lessons about violence, war, and mass murder that will likely challenge them both emotionally and intellectually.

Activity 2: Analyze Responses to Kristallnacht

Students will now read about a variety of experiences and choices that people made in response to the pogroms that occurred on Kristallnacht. If necessary, remind students of their opening journal reflections about what we can learn about human behavior from reflecting on the choices people make in times of fear and crisis.

Remind the class that in the last class period, they heard Elsbeth Lewin’s testimony of surviving Kristallnacht and the deep impact that night had on her family. Explain that her story is just one example of how personal testimonies from those who lived through particular moments in history can help us understand more than simply what happened; they can help us consider the complexity of the dilemmas that individuals faced along with the deep emotional impact that can be felt over the course of a lifetime.

Tell students that today, they will be reading and analyzing a testimony about Kristallnacht with a group and then reporting on what they learned to the rest of the class.

Give each student a copy of the handout Decision-Making in Times of Fear and Crisis to record their notes. For now, they should only complete the first three columns of the handout. Because each reading includes information about the choices of more than one person or group, they should use as many rows of the grid on the handout as necessary to capture the choices they discussed.

Divide the class into small groups and assign each group one of the following readings:

• The Night of the Pogrom
• Opportunism during Kristallnacht
• A Family Responds to Kristallnacht
• Thoroughly Reprehensible Behavior
• A Visitor’s Perspective on Kristallnacht
• World Responses to Kristallnacht

After groups have completed their charts and the discussion question, have a spokesperson for each group report to the class about one of the choices made in the reading that the group discussed, the reasons the individual made that choice, the role that the choice played in perpetuating or preventing injustice, and what this source suggests about human behavior in times of fear and crisis.

After each spokesperson’s report, ask the class to respond by briefly discussing how each individual they learned about seems to define his or her universe of obligation and how that individual’s sense of responsibility toward others influenced his or her actions.

Activity 3: Consider the Range of Human Behavior

Studying Kristallnacht and the responses from individuals and nations to that event provides an opportunity to introduce students to terms that describe a range of human behavior in response to unjust and troubling actions. For the final activity of this lesson, students will use context clues to help establish the definitions of four concepts that can be used to describe this range of behavior. Pass out the handout The Range of Human Behavior Vocabulary Terms and instruct students to use the context clues in the sentences of the first column to predict the definition of the underlined words.

After asking a few students to share their predicted meanings of each word and how they came to that conclusion, you can share the definitions and have students record the information in the third column of the chart.

• perpetrator: a person or group who commits crimes or other acts of injustice or violence
• victim: a person or group who has been oppressed and/or attacked, verbally and/or physically
• bystander: a person or a group of people who, through their inaction in the face of unacceptable behavior, can contribute to its perpetuation 
• upstander: an individual, group, or nation who witnesses injustice and takes steps to stop or prevent it

Invite students to critique the dictionary definitions. Do they have any questions about these definitions? How are they similar to or different from the students’ own definitions? Are the dictionary definitions adequate, or do they need to be further revised?

You might point out to students that these dictionary definitions are written in the present tense (“carrying out” and “being targeted”) and ask them to consider the fact that a person may act as a perpetrator or bystander at one moment in time and be targeted as a victim at another moment in time. Therefore, these are roles that people play rather than permanent identities.

Then ask students to return to the handout Decision-Making in Times of Fear and Crisis  from the previous activity and complete the fourth column by labeling the actions they identified as victim, perpetrator, bystander, and/or upstander behavior.

Finally, lead a discussion in which students reflect on the task of using these terms to label specific actions in the readings about Kristallnacht:

• Which terms were hardest to define?
• Which actions were most difficult to label?
• What has analyzing the variety of responses to Kristallnacht suggested to you about the ways people often respond to episodes of violence and terror?
• What roles can people who are not targeted by violence and terror play in perpetuating or preventing injustice?