The Night of Broken Glass

Seraphina Choi Priya Manjaly Senior Division Group Website

We originally wanted to do the entire Holocaust as a turning point in the worlds history. When we presented this idea to our former history teacher, he told us to narrow our topic because it would be difficult to condense so much information into our website. He suggested the Night of Broken Glass, also known as the Kristallnacht, to us as a turning point in World War II. We looked up some background information on the Kristallnacht and decided that the topic was interesting and contributed greatly to the outcome of the Holocaust and World War II. We split up the research evenly. We each did half of the research. We looked up articles about what happened on the Kristallnacht to supply us with significant background information before we delved into the details of what happened, why it happened, what consequences came from it. We both watched videos with interviews of people that were there that night to witness the events so we could try to comprehend the magnitude of what happened that night. Then we researched visuals of newspapers and pictures of the events to help support our thesis. We also looked up how the Nazis used the lack of reaction to the Kristallnacht to propel the events of the Holocaust. Finally we looked up quotes from actual people of the time try to see the events through the eyes of the civilians and officials to see how their lives changed as a result of the Kristallnacht. For the last three years we participated in NHD, we have made displays. Each time we made a display, we found ourselves struggling to fit the information into the word limit so we decided to make a website to increase the number of words. We also thought it would be much cheaper and less of a hassle to decorate. First, we did some research on our topic, The Kristallnacht. Then, we broke down the topic into several sections to help make it easier to understand and created pages on our website for those sections. After, we assigned parts for each person to do and created the thesis statement. Seraphina was responsible for the Background and

Visuals tabs and Priya was responsible for Consequences, Interview Transcripts, and Conclusions tabs. Once each person finished their task, the other person would proofread their work. We completed the annotated bibliography and process paper together. Our project relates to the NHD theme because it explains how The Kristallnacht was a turning point in history that ignited the Holocaust. It includes many examples of consequences that culminated to become the mass genocide we call the Holocaust. Our project includes people who have impacted The Kristallnacht, such as Herschel Grynszpan. It also highlights some of the ideas expressed by the Nazis and their hatred for the Jews. These ideas all revolve around the event of the Kristallnacht.