Shocking images from the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews of Germany and Austria are being published for the first time in a collection of photographs donated to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, the organization announced Wednesday.
One of them shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-aged German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a shop window. In another, officers carry stacks of Jewish books, apparently to be burned. Another image shows a Nazi officer pouring gasoline on the pews of a synagogue before setting it on fire.
Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial center, released the photos on the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
That night, Germans and Austrians attacked, looted and burned Jewish shops and homes, destroyed 1.400 synagogues, killed 92 Jews, and summarily sent 30.000 Jews to concentration camps.
That violent night is widely regarded as the beginning of the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews.
Jonathan Matthews, head of Yad Vashem's photo archive, said the photos debunk the Nazi myth that the attacks were "a spontaneous outburst of violence" and not a state-orchestrated pogrom.
The photos show firefighters, special SS police officers and civilians taking part in Kristallnacht. The photographers themselves were an integral part of the events.
Matthews stated that these are the first photos he has in mind to depict action taking place indoors, as "most of the images we have of Kristallnacht are outdoor images."
Overall, the photos "give us a much more direct picture of what was going on," he commented.
The photos were taken by Nazi photographers during the pogrom in the city of Nuremberg and the nearby city of Fürth. They ended up in the possession of a Jewish-American serviceman who was stationed in Germany during World War II. How he got the photos is unclear - he never told his family about them.
His descendants, who declined to be named, donated the album to Yad Vashem in support of the foundation's effort to collect Holocaust-era artifacts kept by survivors and their families.
Yad Vashem said the photos help show how German society knew what was happening and that the violence was part of a meticulously coordinated pogrom carried out by Nazi authorities who had even secured photographers to document the atrocities.
Yad Vashem president Dani Dayan said the photographs will serve as indelible testimonies "even when the survivors are no longer here long after the survivors are no longer here to record their own experiences."
Despite Nazi censorship at the time, the Associated Press had managed to send pictures of Kristallnacht when it happened, and the footage was widely circulated in the US. Images included a burning synagogue and people cleaning glasses from vandalized Jewish shops.
SOURCE: LIFO, 10.11.2022