What happened
Across Germany and annexed Austria, Nazi activists and state authorities carried out coordinated attacks on synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and people, while mass arrests sent thousands of Jewish men to concentration camps.
Why it matters
Kristallnacht is a key interwar event because it made the regime's antisemitic violence unmistakably public and demonstrated how far Nazi radicalization had advanced before the outbreak of general war. It belongs in this timeline as a warning that the collapse of the interwar order was also a moral and social catastrophe, not only a diplomatic one.
Notes
Use this as the clearest prewar mass-violence marker inside Nazi Germany before the transition to wartime genocide.