This street violence had begun with riots in Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria in March. In practice, though, street violence against Jews was tolerated and even encouraged at certain periods when Nazi leaders calculated that the violence would “prepare” the German population for harsh antisemitic legal and administrative measures implemented ostensibly “to restore order.” For example, the orchestrated nationwide campaign of street violence known as Kristallnacht of November 9-10, 1938, was the culmination of a longer period of more sporadic street violence against Jews. This served as a pretext for pogroms.Īfter the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler publicly discouraged 'disorder' and acts of violence. In Germany and eastern Europe during the era of the Holocaust, as in Tsarist Russia, economic, social, and political resentment of Jews reinforced traditional religious antisemitism. During the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Ukrainian nationalists, Polish officials, and Red Army soldiers all engaged in pogrom-like violence in western Belorussia (Belarus) and Poland's Galicia province (now West Ukraine), killing tens of thousands of Jews between 19.

They raped and murdered their Jewish victims and looted their property. The perpetrators of pogroms organized locally, sometimes with government and police encouragement. As a descriptive term, “pogrom” came into common usage with extensive anti-Jewish riots that swept the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire in 1881–1884, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The first such incident to be labeled a pogrom is believed to be anti-Jewish rioting in Odessa in 1821. Pogroms Pogrom is a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries.

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