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This weekend we mark the somber anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which took place 75 years ago. It was a history-changing event we cannot ignore and must never forget.

As put by Rita Kuhn, a survivor profiled in this week’s cover story, Kristallnacht was “the beginning of the Shoah.”

On Nov. 9, 1938, the Nazi regime unleashed an epic pogrom, torching synagogues, smashing and looting Jewish-owned shops across Germany and terrorizing the nation’s Jews.

It was the rollout of a government-designed persecution that led to the greatest mass murder in history.

The pain of that night has never receded for its surviving victims. What it must have been like to see your world turned upside down, to suddenly perceive that your government and your once-cordial neighbors now wanted you dead.

History teaches us that humankind has a brutal streak. Savagery, whether by terrorists or common street thugs, occurs daily around the world, no matter how hard the rest of us preach messages of tolerance.

Not as common is institutionalized brutality. Kristallnacht was no random, bottom-up revolt by angry Germans. Rather, it was an organized, preplanned event, coordinated by apparatchiks up and down the Nazi hierarchy. It was a culmination of the first years of Nazi rule, which gradually prepared Germany for the normalization of mayhem.

We all know what happened afterward.

Thankfully, modern Germany seems to have learned the lessons of the past. The government has been a steadfast ally of Israel’s, it has outlawed anti-Semitism and Nazism and has paid out billions in reparations to Holocaust survivors.

It also marks the anniversary of Kristallnacht every year so that today’s Germans never forget the crimes of their forebears. Germany deserves credit for facing up to its past and doing what

it can to atone, feeble as any attempt could ever be.

Germany is no longer a trouble spot for Jews. But plenty of others abound. Openly anti-Semitic demagogues and political parties have gained ground in Hungary and Ukraine. Anti-Semitism disguised as rabid anti-Israel sentiment rages around the world. Much of the Muslim and Arab world is aflame with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hostility.

So what do we do? What we have always done in the years since the Holocaust: Remain ever watchful, shining a bright light on anti-Semitism wherever we find it.

Perhaps most important, as we do on this 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, we renew our vow to never, ever forget.