For decades, German and anglophone historians have widely explored the Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,” the most common name for the pogrom against German Jews in November 1938. Steinweis's small book does not add new knowledge to this scholarship. Focusing on the Nazi perpetrators and the many German bystanders, he provides a well-written, vivid, and reliable narrative of the political decisions, the main events, the social dimensions, and the aftermath of the pogrom. Steinweis examines testimonies given by German Jews immediately after the pogrom in late 1938 or early 1939 as well as German trials of Kristallnacht perpetrators prosecuted mostly in the early years after 1945. He also takes up more recent German scholarship (by Wolf-Arno Kropat, Michael Wildt, and others) that stresses grassroots anti-Semitic violence in order to question, more decisively than before, top-down explanations of Nazi terror.

The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter one analyzes the acceleration of anti-Semitic violence from 1933 onward. The second chapter, the immediate prehistory of the events of November 9 and 10, shows how the nation-wide pogrom was not simply initiated by Goebbels, Hitler, or other parts of the Nazi elite. In the rural region around Kassel in northern Hesse, which had a relatively high percentage of Jews and strong anti-Semitic traditions since the nineteenth century, anti-Semitic riots started on the evening of November 7 as a response to Herschel Grynszpan's shooting of the German diplomat Hermann vom Rath in Paris. These riots were not orchestrated by Goebbels or any section of the Nazi terror machine but were started and carried out by local SA thugs and broadly supported by ordinary townspeople with no direct connection to the Nazi Party. Only now the Nazi leadership took action—after realizing “how easy it would be to mobilize popular antisemitism on short notice” (p. 35). Chapter three explores the unfolding decision-making process within the Nazi elite, above all among Goebbels, Hitler, Goering, and Himmler. At that moment, they were meeting in Munich for the annual commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923. They now merged the most basic myth of Nazi martyrdom “with a propaganda campaign targeting ‘World Jewry's’ alleged responsibility for the shooting of Ernst vom Rath” (p. 40), and launched an otherwise unplanned nationwide pogrom that included the arrest of up to 30,000 Jews. The fact that the Hesse riots had started spontaneously was a gift for Goebbels's machinations.

Chapter four, the longest and most crucial of the book, describes in detail the smooth interaction between central and local party authorities, SA branches, and ordinary Germans in carrying out the pogrom. While anti-Semitism was always in play, ordinary Germans' readiness to join in and the pleasure they took from humiliating and torturing Jews, often their neighbors or colleagues, was embedded in the desire and the chance to settle old scores—a consumer who felt betrayed by a Jewish merchant, a divorced husband who felt betrayed by the Jewish lawyer of his ex-wife, and so on. And greed was never missing; looting was forbidden but practiced and later pardoned if tried at all. One of Steinweis's foci is the central role that German youth played in the Kristallnacht violence. They were driven not so much by greed but by peer-group pressure and the guidance of the Hitler Youth leaders. Indeed, the degree of participation of German youth indicates how far moral conventions and restrictions had already been overthrown in pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany. Although neither Goebbels nor Hitler wanted the pogrom to transgress into murder, miscommunicated or misunderstood orders from above and the SA's “masculine culture of beer-hall hooliganism” (p. 59) facilitated exactly this radicalization.

Chapter five tracks down the fate of those roughly 30,000 Jews who were sent to concentration camps—from the regime's point of view a blackmail action to leverage the “Aryanization” of Jewish property and to accelerate Jews' “voluntary” emigration. Chapter six touches on some minor cases of German disapproval of the pogroms and the huge Nazi propaganda efforts to justify them. Chapter seven looks briefly at the vague ways both German states commemorated the pogrom after 1945: it was never denied, but almost always, even in the 1990s, it was remembered in ways that obfuscated the broad popular support it had enjoyed in Nazi Germany. As Steinweis points out in the introduction, although Kristallnacht was initiated locally mostly by SA men, “ordinary” Germans not affiliated with the NSDAP readily joined in torture, humiliation, looting, and even murder. And many more stood by in approval or even applauded it.

Readers interested in a broader view of Kristallnacht may be better served by Martin Gilbert's 2006 Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction. Unlike Gilbert, Steinweis doesn't examine international relations or the voices (and the silence) of the victims. His book, however, is currently the most reliable and best written account on the political and social machinery of the perpetrators. It is highly recommended for both undergraduate and graduate classes on Nazi Germany and the prehistory of the Holocaust.