The name Kristallnacht sounds almost poetic, but the events of November 9 and 10, 1938, were a centrally orchestrated campaign of state terror against Jews across Germany, annexed Austria, and the Sudetenland. This episode uses Gestapo reports and demographic scholarship to trace the mechanics: five years of legal exclusion from the 1933 civil service law to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, a world that closed its borders at the 1938 Evian Conference, the expulsion of 12,000 Polish Jews to a freezing no man's land in October 1938, and the desperate postcard from that border camp that led 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan to shoot a German diplomat in Paris.

The episode reconstructs how the violence was ordered rather than spontaneous: Hitler's whispered conversation with Goebbels at the Beer Hall Putsch anniversary dinner in Munich, regional party lea ...