Across Germany, in schools, city halls, synagogues, churches and parliament, people were coming together Thursday to commemorate the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht — or the “Night of Broken Glass” — in which the Nazis terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Germany’s main Jewish leader, Josef Schuster, were set to speak at an anniversary ceremony at a Berlin synagogue that was attacked with firebombs last month.
The commemoration of the pogrom comes at a time when Germany is again seeing a sharp rise in antisemitism following Hamas’ brutal attack that killed 1,400 people in Israel on Oct. 7 and triggered an ongoing war in Gaza.
“I was there during Kristallnacht. I was in Vienna back then,” Holocaust survivor Herbert Traube said at an event marking the anniversary in Paris on Wednesday.
“To me, it was often repeated: ‘Never again.’ It was a leitmotif in everything that was being said for decades,” Traube said, adding that he is upset both by the resurgence of antisemitism and the lack of a “massive popular reaction” against it.
On Nov. 9, 1938, the Nazis killed at least 91 people and vandalized 7,500 Jewish businesses. They also burned more than 1,400 synagogues, according to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Up to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many of them taken to concentration camps such as Dachau or Buchenwald. Hundreds more committed suicide or died as a result of mistreatment in the camps years before official mass deportations began.