Newly surfaced photos of the Nazi Kristallnacht have surfaced, giving historians a never before seen perspective on the pogrom commonly known as “The Night of Broken Windows.”
The six photos were donated to Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, the memorial’s organization revealed on Wednesday. Some of the six photos were taken inside damaged buildings, something previously not seen. They also show police officers, firefighters, and the general public standing near SS officers and other Nazis.
The Nazi Kristallnacht is often pointed to as the start of the holocaust, where more than 6 million Jews were murdered under Nazi orders. Thursday marks the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Jonathan Matthews, the head of the museum’s photo department says that the photos dispel the Nazi narrative that the night was the result of “spontaneous” violence and show it as an organized pogrom carried out by the Nazi state.
One photo shows three Nazis inside a synagogue, two of them pouring an accelerant, possibly gasoline, on pews. That synagogue, along with 1,400 others, was burned during the Nazi Kristallnacht.
Another photo shows a Nazi destroying a Jewish storefront while members of the public and police stand by, many of them smiling.
Matthews notes that the photographers were also Nazis, showing that the regime wanted to document the event. While German censorship did try to limit the photos' spread, some did reach the United States and the Associated Press published them at the time.
These new photos had never been published before. They were donated by the descendants of a Jewish-American serviceman who served in Germany during World War II. How he came into possession of the photos remains unknown, his family explaining that he had never spoken about them.
The photos appear to be from the city of Nuremberg and the nearby town of Fuerth.