If Euphemisms Could Kill...

Oh wait, they can. The name Kristallnacht is basically a euphemism for the ransacking and slaughtering of Jewish homes, and Jews themselves (and by that I don't mean that they ransacked Jews, or slaughtered Jewish homes. I could have made the grammar a bit better there). There are some other ways of putting this subject into other terms, such as putting a frog in a pot of boiling water (it's not as fun as it sounds). For instance, when using this metaphor, the boiling water would be Kristallnacht. This is because (quite obviously) the frog would be the Jewish people. The boiling water is what would have killed the frog, so Kristallnacht is what would have been harmful to the Jews. To answer the second question, they didn't fight because they didn't realize what would happen to them if they didn't fight. The euphemistic name shows it to be the boiling point because the fact that the event was given a euphemism by the Nazis shows how little they care about the Jews.