Has heroism died at Harvard? Could today’s students emulate what transpired at Harvard in 1938? In that year, there was an inspiring event that has been conveniently laid aside by the present faculty—and which deserves to be better known. It occurred on November 16, 1938. At noon that day, some 500 Harvard and Radcliffe students crowded into Emerson Hall to express their outrage at Hitler’s Kristallnacht.
And what was Kristallnacht? It was the Nazi “Night of Broken Glass.” Exactly a week earlier, on November 9, 1938, Hitler’s feared SS Blackshirts had launched his opening crusade against Jews in Germany, with a frightening terrorist act. Following his annexation of Austria and the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, Hitler had organized a looting and smashing of the glass windows of Jew-owned stores in Berlin and across Germany. It included the murder of several hundred Jews. Historians view it as a prelude to the Final Solution, the genocide that would claim the lives of six million Jews.