It was on this day in 1938 that Nazi forces launched their vicious campaign of terror against the Jewish population in Austria and Germany. Set in motion by the murder of Ernst vom Rath, a low-level German diplomat by a teenage Polish Jew as revenge for the sudden deportation of his parents and ten thousand others, the Nazis used this incident as an excuse to carry out their heinous tirade later came to be known as ‘Kristallnacht’. A direct translation of ‘Night of Broken Glass’, this bench mark for horror was named so because of the countless number of windows smashed during the two day attack leaving over 100 Jews dead along with 7,500 Jewish  businesses, hundreds of homes, schools, graveyards and synagogues sabotaged. A precursor to the Holocaust and a terrifying indication of the lengths to which Adolf Hitler was willing and able to go to in his plans of annihilating Germany of its Jewish population, Kristallnacht is a truly dark day in the history of WWII.