Mass arrests after Kristallnacht

Approximately 30,000 Jews in Germany and Austria were deported within the region or the country after the Kristallnacht of 9/10 November 1938.^[1][2] They were deported to the concentration camps Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen by the NSDAP organizations and the police in the days after the pogrom. This put pressure on the deportees and their relatives in order to speed up the only seemingly voluntary emigration from their homeland and to "Aryanize" Jewish assets.^[3] The vast majority of the detainees were released by the beginning of 1939. Around 500 Jews were murdered, committed suicide or died as a result of ill-treatment and refused medical treatment in the concentration camps.

According to contemporary witnesses, the perpetrators' designation as Aktionsjuden was common at least in the Buchenwald concentration camp.^[4] Presumably the name was derived from Aktion Rath, as the pogrom was sometimes called.^[5]