Play video
Johanna Gerechter Neumann
Describes Kristallnacht in Hamburg
[1991 interview].
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The interior of the Hechingen synagogue, destroyed during Kristallnacht. Germany, November 10, 1938.
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM #87449
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"Kristallnacht": nationwide pogrom
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SS men vandalize the Hof synagogue during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). Germany, November 1938.
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM #87458
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Synagogues
occupy a central place in Jewish religious and communal life. To the Nazis, however, they served as a powerful physical reminder of the Jewish presence in Germany. In the months before Kristallnacht, synagogues in Munich, Nuremberg, Dortmund, and Kaiserslautern were demolished on the orders of local Nazi party officials; in other German towns, anti–Jewish vandalism was common. On the night of November 9, the violence became nationwide. During Kristallnacht, more than 1,000 synagogues across Germany were burned and vandalized.
Recently,
German architecture students have realized virtual reconstructions of some of the destroyed synagogues using computer technology. Their efforts to memorialize the Jewish communities of Germany pay tribute to the contributions of Jews in Germany and encourage Germans to remember the past.
memo38 group
During
1998, the memo38 group, a team of students and professors at the University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany, created a virtual reconstruction of the Wiesbaden synagogue. By 1950, nothing remained of the original synagogue, and in 1970, a highway overpass was built across the site. Because no plans or drawings of the Wiesbaden synagogue survived, the group’s research depended on photographs and conversations with local townspeople as well as archival research at local institutions. In commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1998, the memo38 group presented their final project to the public, a video of the computer-generated reconstruction, on a 30x30 foot screen at the site of the original synagogue.
View
a series of still images from memo38 project.
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Background photo: A man in front of the broken window of a Jewish-owned business, the day after Kristallnacht. Berlin, Germany, November 10, 1938.
USHMM photo # 04317, courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
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Museum