On 9 and 10 November 1938, simultaneously in hundreds of towns and villages in Germany and Austria, thousands of Jews were terrorised, persecuted and victimised.
The November Pogrom, known alternatively as ‘Kristallnacht,’ also led to the desecration of over 1,200 synagogues and looting of thousands of Jewish businesses and homes.
Following the assassination of a junior diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew, the Nazi Party seized the opportunity to incite mass anti-Jewish violence, claiming it was a spontaneous popular ‘retaliation’ against the ‘enemy within’. As a result approximately 90 people were killed and over 25,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, leading to the deaths of hundreds more in the camps.
In the months following November 1938, Alfred Wiener and his colleagues at the JCIO in Amsterdam collected over 350 contemporary testimonies and reports of the November Pogrom in Germany and Austria.
These documents are now available here, for the first time in English.
