In the night of 9th to 10th November 1938, violent riots against the Jewish population took place in the German Reich, incited and directed by the Nazi regime. The assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, was used as a pretext for the anti-Jewish acts. On 7th November 1938 in Paris, a youth from Hanover, whose parents had been affected by the violent mass deportations of Jews with Polish citizenship, had shot the diplomat vom Rath. When he died of his injuries two days later, groups ready for violence marched through villages and towns across the entire German Reich, looted and destroyed Jewish shops and homes, and set synagogues on fire. Jewish people were mistreated, tortured, dragged off to concentration camps and murdered. The rioting groups were often led by members of the SS and the SA.

The violence surrounding the November pogroms represented a decisive step in the National Socialists' antisemitic policy: having already been discriminated against and increasingly marginalised since 1933, the systematic persecution and extermination of Jews was now heralded.