On November 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and 2,000 compatriots attempted unsuccessfully to overthrow the weak German democracy by staging a coup in Munich. The action earned Hitler five years in prison, where he dictated the first volume of his infamous manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”

Fifteen years later, on November 9, 1938, the Nazis staged the horrific Reichspogromnacht, euphemistically labeled Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass.” Over the course of that night, one of the darkest in German history, thousands of Jewish businesses across the country were vandalized and looted, 1,200 synagogues were burned, 97 German Jews were killed and 30,000 were deported to concentration camps.

The Berlin Wall fell on that same fateful date, November 9, 1989. The East German government had for months been under pressure from protesters seeking democratic rights and freedoms. When, on the afternoon of November 9, a spokesman for the East German Socialist Unity Party improvised an announcement that East Germany would lift travel restrictions to the West, no one could have guessed that the Berlin Wall would fall by evening’s end. Once the two Germanys were reunited, however, the terrible associations of the Nazis with November 9 made it impossible for that date to serve as a new national holiday.