In certain ways, the autumn of 2025 in the United States has recalled the autumn of 1938 in Nazi Germany.

The mass deportation of undocumented people was one of Hitler’s largest coercive policies before the war. That fall, the German police and SS rounded up Jews who lacked German citizenship and dumped them on the Polish side of the German-Polish border. This set off a chain of events which can give us a useful perspective on where we are now. A family was deported; a provoked refugee took revenge; the government organized a pogrom and re-organized its police; the Second World War followed.

The family was the Grynszpans. The father and mother had moved to Germany in 1911 from the Russian Empire. Their children were born in Germany, spoke German, and saw themselves as Germans. The Grynszpans had sent their son Herschel to study in Paris. He faced a series of disappointments in his documentation, including the loss of his citizenship. Denied permanent residence in France in August 1938, he was hiding in an attic to avoid deportation when a postcard from his sister arrived: “everything is finished for us.” Herschel Grynszpan took revenge. On November 7, 1938, he walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. A policy of mass deportation had led to a reaction that, although unpredictable in its details, was not surprising.

In Berlin, Nazis saw an opportunity. Joseph Goebbels invoked a conspiracy and conflated the actions of one person with the responsibility of a group.

Hitler allowed Goebbels to plan a nationwide pogrom: Kristallnacht. On November 9, 1938, the SA and the SS and the Hitler youth, joined by many other Germans, destroyed Jewish businesses, burned Jewish books, desecrated Torah scrolls, and invaded Jewish homes. Some 91 Jews were killed and hundreds died by suicide. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.

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