Yad Vashem Kristallnacht Photograph Memorial #announcements #holocaust #israel #photographs
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Jan Meisels Allen
November 9-10 is the anniversary of Kristallnacht “the Night of Broken Glass”, pogrom against German and Austrian Jews when 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 has displayed previously unseen photos from the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. The photos were recently donated to the museum. These were the first photos the museum spokesperson was aware of depicting actions taking place indoors, as “most of the images we have of Kristallnacht are images from outside.”
Yad Vashem’s photo archive head, 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. The photographers themselves were an integral part of the events.
The photos were taken were taken by Nazi photographers during the pogrom in the city of Nuremberg and the nearby town of Fuerth. They wound up in the possession of a Jewish American serviceman who served in Germany during World War II. His descendants, donated the album to Yad Vashem, as part of the institution's effort to collect Holocaust-era objects kept by survivors and their families.
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.
To see more of the photos and read more see: https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/kristallnacht/index.asp#section-overview
To read more see:
Jan Meisels Allen Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee
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