three weeks after Truman Smith’s letter, came the catastrophic news of Kristallnacht. On the night of 9 November Jewish shops across Germany were smashed to pieces, a hundred Jews murdered and countless more beaten and humiliated. Thousands were subsequently rounded up and sent to concentration camps. For foreigners who had put their money on Hitler’s Germany, Kristallnacht came as a shocking revelation. It destroyed any residual argument for appeasement and made plain that the Munich agreement – signed only six weeks earlier – had been a mirage.
