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Newly Discovered Photos Show Nazi Kristallnacht Up Close

(AP) Ilan Ben Zion - Previously unseen images from 1938's Kristallnacht pogrom against German and Austrian Jews have surfaced, Israel's Yad Vashem memorial said Wednesday. One shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-aged German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a storefront window. Another shows a Nazi officer splashing gasoline on the pews of a synagogue before it's set alight. Firefighters, SS special police officers and members of the general public are all seen in the photos participating. In the November pogrom, "The Night of Broken Glass," mobs of Germans and Austrians attacked, looted and burned Jewish shops and homes, destroyed 1,400 synagogues, killed 92 Jews, and sent another 30,000 to concentration camps. The violence is widely considered a starting point for the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews. Yad Vashem said the photos help demonstrate how the German public was aware of what was going on, and that the violence was part of a meticulously coordinated pogrom carried out by Nazi authorities. They even brought in photographers to document the atrocities.
2022-11-10 00:00:00
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