German SS and SA forces desecrating and pouring gasoline on furniture in a Synagogue in the area of Nuremberg during the Kristallnacht Pogrom (Yad Vashem)
On the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, has released a collection of never before seen photographs taken during what can best be described as the night when the Holocaust officially began. The pictures were taken by the perpetrators of Kristallnacht themselves.
Over the night between November 9 – 10, 1938, German and Austrian mobs conducted a pogrom against Jews and their property throughout Germany and Austria. (Germany and Austria had merged the previous March.) Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues were looted and burned down during the night. 1400 synagogues were destroyed, Jews were viciously attacked and publicly humiliated and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
The images, taken by Nazi photographers, were donated to Yad Vashem recently and feature rare, never-before-seen photos of the events of the November Pogrom of 1938, coined “Kristallnacht.”
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Yad Vashem explains that the photo album was kept for many years in the United States in the home of a Jewish US soldier, who served in the counter-intelligence department of the US Army in Germany during World War II. The former serviceman never spoke about his experiences during the war. After he passed away, his daughter, Ann Leifer, and her two daughters discovered the album while cleaning up her father’s house.
The Gold Family chose to donate the album to Yad Vashem as part of the “Gathering the Fragments” project, which collects Holocaust-era possessions kept by Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The album arrived in Israel thanks to the assistance of a family member, Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Nefesh B’Nefesh. The photographs were taken by two Nazi photographers during the pogroms in Nuremberg and the nearby town of Fürth.
Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan said, “Seeing these images of humiliation of Jews, and the destruction of their homes, businesses and even synagogues is extremely disturbing and difficult. But all these years later we must bear witness to the atrocities of the past. These photographs clearly show the true intention of the Nazis and the systematic and deliberate lengths they would go to in order to accomplish their murderous agenda. These photographs constitute important documentary evidence of the atrocities that were inflicted on the Jews of Europe. It is critical that these images and other documentation from the Holocaust be preserved and kept at Yad Vashem forever. They will serve as everlasting witnesses long after the survivors are no longer here to bear testimony to their own experiences and will convey for generations to come the individual stories and history of the Holocaust to everyone, in Israel and abroad.”
