36:1-12. Findings, declarations relative to Kristallnacht

1. The Legislature finds and declares:

a. On the night of November 9-10, 1938, organized gangs of Nazi Gestapo agents instigated a horrible wave of wanton destruction aimed at Jews, Jewish synagogues, homes and shops in almost every town and city in Germany;

b. That night, Kristallnacht - "The Night of Broken Glass," witnessed some of the most brutal acts of intentional savagery ever committed by a sovereign government against a religious minority;

c. This barbaric and unprecedented event was coordinated and stimulated by the Gestapo, the dreaded secret police of Adolph Hitler and his tyrannical Nazi government which ruled Germany, for the express purpose of burning Jewish synagogues, destroying Jewish property and arresting as many Jews as possible;

d. The gruesome pogrom resulted in the burning of 119 synagogues, of which 76 were completely destroyed; the destruction or looting of 7,500 Jewish shops and homes; and the death of at least 36 Jews and the serious injury of at least 36 more;

e. On that same night of horror, 20,000 Jews were systematically rounded up "for their own protection" and sent to the heinous concentration camps of Dachau, Oranienburg-Sachenhausen and Buchenwald where their heads were shaven and they were forced to wear coarse prison suits stamped with the yellow Star of David and where death was a frequent and brutal visitor;

f. To compound the senseless tribulations suffered by Jews on Kristallnacht, the Nazis forced them to pay 25 million marks for the destruction of their own property and levied an additional fine of one billion marks, supposedly for their "crimes" against the state;

g. Kristallnacht for the first time confirmed to the world the truly evil nature of the Nazis and the totalitarian German government of Hitler, and it served as a horrible and ominous omen of how that government was in later years to coldly murder six million Jews and others in a mindless attempt at the genocide of an entire religious minority; and

h. It is imperative for the current generation of Americans and residents of New Jersey to remember the brutality of Kristallnacht and its importance as a portent of the Holocaust which later destroyed six million Jews and millions of others.

L.1995,c.258,s.1.