In the historical calendar of the Germans, the date November 9 has been a truly fateful date several times. Memories jump between nightmare and triumph, between the pogrom against the Jews in 1938 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Deutsche Welle recalls.
On November 9, the event that changed the world was on: the fall of the Berlin Wall. Less than a year later, on October 3, 1990, Germany was reunited after a 41-year rift. With the end of the second dictatorship on German soil, with the end of the GDR, the entire communist camp in Europe disappeared. This was also the end of the conflict between East and West.
The greatest catastrophe
But in the historical calendar of the Germans, November 9 was a fateful date several more times. In 1918, from the balcony of the Reichstag, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann announced the birth of the republic. But the fragile German democracy was not destined to survive. Both the left and the right wanted its abolition. On November 9, 1923, the Nazis held their first major rally in Munich. Ten years later, their leader Adolf Hitler would come to power and plunge the world into the greatest catastrophe of humanity - World War II.
Gradually along the way, the Jews in Germany were completely disenfranchised, and from 1942 their systematic extermination began. Even before the war began, on November 9, 1938, synagogues were burned throughout Germany, Jewish shops were looted, nearly 100 Jews were killed, and 26,000 were dragged to concentration camps. The so-called "Kristallnacht" was the dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi German Labor Front, declared: "Judas must and will be destroyed! This is our sacred conviction".
Day of Happiness
November 9, 1938 is the most terrible date in the series of fateful November days for Germany. A greater contrast than November 9, 1989, the fall of the Wall, is simply unthinkable. People stormed the border crossings in divided Berlin. The jubilation was boundless.
After that night there could be no return to the old conditions. The first breach in the Berlin Wall quickly led to the collapse of the communist system. Thus, for the fourth time, November 9 entered the historical calendar of the German nation - this time as a day of happiness.