JERUSALEM –
The organization said on Wednesday it said never-before-seen images from the 1938 Kristallnacht match against German and Austrian Jews appeared in a photo gallery donated to Yad Vashem’s memorial Israel.
One shows a crowd of well-dressed, smiling, middle-aged German men and women standing impassively as a Nazi officer smashes a shop front window. In another case, brown shirts carried a pile of Jewish books, presumably for burning. Another image shows a Nazi officer splashing gasoline on the bench of a synagogue before landing.
Yad Vashem – The World Massacre Memorial Center released photos on the 84th anniversary of the November massacre, also known as Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass”. German and Austrian mobs attacked, looted and burned Jewish shops and homes, destroyed 1,400 synagogues, killed 92 Jews, and sent another 30,000 to concentration camps central.
The violence is seen by many as the starting point for the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews.
Jonathan Matthews, head of Yad Vashem’s photo archive, said the pictures dispel a Nazi myth that the attacks were “a spontaneous outburst of violence” rather than a state-organized attack. Firefighters, SS police officers and members of the public are all seen in Kristallnacht engagement photos. The photographers themselves have been an integral part of the events.
Matthews says these are the first photos he knows of depicting the action taking place inside the house, as “most of the pictures we have of Kristallnacht are from the outside.” Overall, he says, the photos “give you a much closer picture of what’s going on.”
The photos were taken by Nazi photographers during the war in the city of Nuremberg and the nearby town of Fuerth. They were owned by a Jewish American soldier who served in Germany during the Second World War – exactly how is uncertain, he never talked about them to his family.
His descendants, who declined to give his name, donated the album to Yad Vashem as part of the organization’s efforts to collect Holocaust-era objects kept by survivors and their families.
Yad Vashem said the photos helped demonstrate how the German public was aware of what was going on and that the violence was part of a meticulously coordinated attack carried out by Nazi authorities. They even brought in photographers to document the atrocities.
Yad Vashem president Dani Dayan said the photos will “act as an eternal witness after survivors are no longer here to testify to their own experiences.”
