Edited by: Fern Sidman
This past Wednesday and Thursday marked the 84th anniversary of the sadistic pogrom that heralded in the Nazi era of genocide targeting the Jewish people. The pogrom is referred to as Kristallnacht (night of broken glass) and it occurred on November 9 and 10, 1938 and occurred in such German cities as Nuremberg and Furth. It was there that Nazi barbarians, often accompanied by cheering civilians, viciously attacked the Jewish population and their homes, businesses and synagogues, in a coordinated assault that illustrates their intention to eradicate any vestige of Jews from Europe. The Nazi leadership, however, wanted the pogrom to appear spontaneous.
The New York Times reported that when the pogrom was over, 92 people had been killed, 30,000 had been sent to concentration camps, and 1,400 synagogues were destroyed, according to Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust which is located in Jerusalem.
Several days ago, the AP reported that harrowing, previously unseen images from 1938’s Kristallnacht pogrom against German and Austrian Jews have surfaced in a photograph collection donated to Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, the organization said Wednesday.
On Sunday, however, the AP reported that Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial acknowledged that the photos from Nazi Germany’s 1938 pogroms against Jews have been seen and published before, revising a claim it made when releasing the photos last week.
The photos, which were recently donated by a former U.S. serviceman’s family to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, show rare close-up images of Nazi officials carrying out looting and destruction of Jewish property in Nuremberg and a nearby town, the AP reported.
Yad Vashem said the photos were “never-before-seen,” but many in the collection had in fact been published on Twitter, in a research publication, and a recent PBS documentary. The group acknowledged the error in reply to a query from The Associated Press.
After the pictures released by Yad Vashem last week were published in the media, including by the AP, the serviceman’s granddaughter, Elisheva Avital, tweeted that Yad Vashem’s announcement was “inaccurate.”
The AP also reported that she had posted several photos in a Twitter thread in 2018 that went viral, and multiple shots were published in a book “ New Perspectives on Kristallnacht” by Purdue University Press in 2019, and more than a dozen appeared in the PBS series “The U.S. and the Holocaust” by documentarian Ken Burns.
Yad Vashem said that despite its error, “the public remained mostly unaware of the collection’s existence and value” and that the organization’s announcement was “newsworthy regardless of previous partial exposure,” according to the AP report.
One shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-age German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a storefront window. In another, brownshirts carry heaps of Jewish books, presumably for burning. Another image shows a Nazi officer splashing gasoline on the pews of a synagogue before it’s set alight, according to a report on the AP.
In one picture, a uniformed Nazi is seen destroying a display window while a crowd looks on, seemingly in approval, according to the NYT report. In another, uniformed Nazis pour gas on a rug in a synagogue. In a third, a terrorized woman in a housecoat is seen on a bed.
The pictures, taken in the Bavarian cities of Fürth and Nuremberg, were in an album that had been secreted away by a former American soldier and then donated to Yad Vashem after his death, as was reported by the NYT. Although the pictures were published on Twitter by the soldier’s granddaughter four years ago, their distribution by Yad Vashem served to refocus attention on both the images and the night itself.
Jonathan Matthews, head of Yad Vashem’s photo archive, said the photos dispel a Nazi myth that the attacks were “a spontaneous outburst of violence” rather than a pogrom orchestrated by the state. Firefighters, SS special police officers and members of the general public are all seen in the photos participating in the Kristallnacht, according to the AP. The photographers themselves were an integral part of the events.
Matthews said these were the first photos he was aware of depicting actions taking place indoors, as “most of the images we have of Kristallnacht are images from outside.” Altogether, he said, the photos “give you a much more intimate image of what’s happening,” as was reported by the AP. The photos were taken by Nazi photographers during the pogrom and were discovered by the family of an American Jewish man who served in the U.S. Army counterintelligence department during the war, the NYT reported. The family does not know how the soldier came into possession of the photos, but his daughter and granddaughters decided to donate the album to Yad Vashem upon finding them after he passed away, the NYT reported.
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, according to the AP report. They even brought in photographers to document the atrocities.
The opening pages of the donated album show what appear to be Jewish victims of the pogrom, the NYT reported. Hastily dressed in overcoats and housecoats, a group of older people look at the photographer, and at least one man has lacerations on his face.
“We can see from the extreme close-up nature of these photos that the photographers were an integral part of the event depicted,” Matthews said, the NYT reported. “The angles and proximity to the perpetrators seem to indicate a clear goal, to document the events that took place.”
The AP reported that Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan said the photos will “serve as everlasting witnesses long after the survivors are no longer here to bear testimony to their own experiences.”
Despite Nazi censorship, The Associated Press was able to send pictures from Kristallnacht when it happened that were widely used in the U.S. The images included a burning synagogue, a youth preparing to clean up glass from a Jewish shop that had been vandalized, and people standing outside damaged shops in the aftermath of the attacks.
The new attention on the photos came as politicians in Berlin commemorated the anniversary in the shadow of an alarming escalation in anti-Semitic crimes, the NYT reported.
“The night of Nov. 9, 1938, will forever remain a night of shame for our country,” Nancy Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, said in Parliament on Wednesday, the report indicated.
The NYT also reported that Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said Nov. 9, which is also the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, would forever be associated with the “break in civilization of the Holocaust.”
“Nov. 9 will always call us to fight against anti-Semitism,” he said in a speech on Wednesday.