Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht and “The Night of Broken Glass”, was a massive nation-wide pogrom in Germany on the night of November 9, 1938 including the early hours of the following day and was directed at Jewish citizens throughout Germany, the newly acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland.

Germans freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. On those two days, this pogrom damaged, and in many cases destroyed, about 1574 synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had), many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps; a few were beaten to death with others forced to watch. The number of Jewish Germans killed is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 36 to about 200 over two days of rioting. The number of Jews killed is most often cited as 91.

For the first time, tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps simply because they were Jewish.  For more about Kristallnacht, click here.

Yad Vashem has produced a special online exhibition regarding the events surrounding Kristallnacht.

It Came From Within… provides an informative and experiential context to the events surrounding Kristallnacht.

All photos Copyright © 2008 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority Yad Vashem:

More photos from Yad Vashem here.

Via Yahoo News:

Yaron Svoray scrapes caked layers of dirt from a shard of glass, revealing a sunflower at the heart of a Star of David. He carefully turns it, speculating it may have been a bowl used for Passover ceremonies in pre-World War II German Jewish homes.

The fragment is one of a handful of artifacts Svoray has pulled from mounds of debris in this former dump about an hour north of Berlin that locals say was used by the Nazis to deposit rejected loot from the 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass.”

“Most of the people in Israel I know who went through the Holocaust, if I take this to Israel, to Yad Vashem, you’ll get every visitor who is a Jew will say: ‘Oh this is what was in our house 50 or 60 years ago,’” Svoray said recently at the site.

Svoray was hunting for a downed Nazi plane in the area’s vast stretches of woods when a former forester tipped him off to the dump, used from 1935 to 1945, outside the village of Klandorf in the largely rural eastern state of Brandenburg.

After two hours of digging with his bare hands and a rusty spade found among the refuse, Svoray had unearthed what appeared to be a beer bottle stamped with a Star of David and a plate-sized alloyed metal swastika. Several weeks later he returned and found the jagged shard of the bowl.

“I don’t claim to say this is from Kristallnacht, I claim there is enough evidence here to provoke a further investigation,” said Svoray, 54, an Israeli journalist who made his name infiltrating German neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s. He would like to see the dump excavated.

Thomas Kersting, an archaeologist employed by the state of Brandenburg to care for buried memorials and archaeological sites, said Svoray’s finds — which he has yet to examine — may give the area historical value.

“A place like this where we have objects with a Star of David directly next to a Nazi swastika, that is of course meaningful … that gives it a certain quality of a memorial,” Kersting said.

But Kersting played down the likelihood of an archaeological dig, citing a lack of funds and arguing that such a disruption would be in direct opposition to his bureau’s aim to maintain the sanctity of such sites.

Arno Gielsdorf, who owns the strip of land where the dump sits, said his father told stories the arrival of “garbage” trains after Kristallnacht.

Since the collapse of communism in 1989, he said, bands of scavengers have picked over the area, selling their finds at weekly flea markets in Berlin. But he is convinced the dump holds valuable artifacts.

“The things from Kristallnacht were buried in the deepest places,” Gielsdorf said. “They are still there.”

Retracing the Nazi Book theft.  Via Spiegel Online:

Hundreds of thousands of book stolen by the Nazis are still in German libraries. A few librarians are acting like detectives, searching for the books and hoping to return them to the former owners or their families. However, many libraries have shown little interest in the troubling legacy tucked away on their shelves. Click here to read the full article.

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