On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi Party officials set off a series of violent pogroms against Jews in Germany and Austria. This event came to be known as the "Night of Broken Glass."
![As the synagogue in Oberramstadt burns during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"), firefighters instead save a nearby house. [LCID: 04467]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/2a7235c5-0c62-4056-af3a-3e573acb0293.jpg "As the synagogue in Oberramstadt burns during Kristallnacht (the \"Night of Broken Glass\"), firefighters instead save a nearby house. [LCID: 04467]")
As the synagogue in Oberramstadt burns during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"), firefighters instead save a nearby house. Local residents watch as the synagogue is destroyed. Oberramstadt, Germany, November 9-10, 1938.
Item View![Shattered storefront of a Jewish-owned shop destroyed during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). [LCID: 86838]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/f70d5c80-f8a5-4a21-834b-4a1e5874ea9d.jpg "Shattered storefront of a Jewish-owned shop destroyed during Kristallnacht (the \"Night of Broken Glass\"). [LCID: 86838]")
Shattered storefront of a Jewish-owned shop destroyed during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). Berlin, Germany, November 10, 1938.
Item View![Roll call for newly arrived prisoners, mostly Jews arrested during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"), at the Buchenwald ... [LCID: 79914b]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/a4dfb283-6c09-45c5-9d79-471dc357ddaa.jpg "Roll call for newly arrived prisoners, mostly Jews arrested during Kristallnacht (the \"Night of Broken Glass\"), at the Buchenwald ... [LCID: 79914b]")
Roll call for newly arrived prisoners, mostly Jews arrested during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass" pogrom), at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald, Germany, 1938.
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These Torah scrolls, one from a synagogue in Vienna and the other from Marburg, were desecrated during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"), the violent anti-Jewish pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938. The pogrom occurred throughout Germany, which by then included both Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The scrolls pictured here were retrieved by German individuals and safeguarded until after the war.
Item ViewAmid intensifying anti-Jewish measures and the 1938 Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom, Johanna's family decided to leave Germany. They obtained visas for Albania, crossed into Italy, and sailed in 1939. They remained in Albania under the Italian occupation and, after Italy surrendered in 1943, under German occupation. The family was liberated after a battle between the Germans and Albanian partisans in December 1944.
Item View![Dora Unger [LCID: 1961]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/890dddb7-211a-4aa5-a02e-a91a6f8565d6.gif "Dora Unger [LCID: 1961]")
Dora, her parents, brother, aunt, uncle, and two cousins lived together in her grandfather's home in Essen, Germany. The Ungers were an observant Jewish family, and when Dora was 8, she began to regularly attend meetings of Brit HaNoar, a religious youth organization.
1933-39: In October 1938 a teacher, with tears in her eyes, came to Dora at the municipal pool, saying "Jews cannot swim here anymore." Just weeks later, on November 9, Jews were arrested and their property destroyed. A neighbor tried to protect Dora's family, but that night as her family huddled together, Nazis spotted their house. Suddenly, an axe flew through the window, landing by Dora's head. A few days later, they fled for the Netherlands.
1940-45: In Amsterdam, as refugees, her parents were not permitted to work and so they could not provide for Dora and her brother. Dora was sent by a Jewish aid organization to the Buergerweeshuis, an orphanage which had 80 Jewish refugee children. Just after the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, "Mama Wysmueller," a Dutch woman who worked to rescue thousands of children by arranging their passage to England, came and told all of them to get dressed. They were taken by bus to a pier and put on the Bodengraven, a boat.
Dora spent the remainder of the war in England. Her parents and brother perished at the camps of Sobibor and Auschwitz. Dora immigrated to Israel in 1946.
Item View![Inge Auerbacher [LCID: 2501]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/0f89e4dd-2962-4849-96dd-06ae5d9e743b.gif "Inge Auerbacher [LCID: 2501]")
Inge was the only child of Berthold and Regina Auerbacher, religious Jews living in Kippenheim, a village in southwestern Germany near the Black Forest. Her father was a textile merchant. The family lived in a large house with 17 rooms and had servants to help with the housework.
1933-39: On November 10, 1938, hoodlums threw rocks and broke all the windows of Inge's home. That same day police arrested her father and grandfather. Inge, her mother and grandmother managed to hide in a shed until it was quiet. When they came out, the town's Jewish men had been taken to the Dachau concentration camp. Her father and grandfather were allowed to return home a few weeks later, but that May her grandfather died of a heart attack.
1940-45: When Inge was 7, she was deported with her parents to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. When they arrived, everything was taken from them, except for the clothes they wore and Inge's doll, Marlene. Conditions in the camp were harsh. Potatoes were as valuable as diamonds. Inge was hungry, scared and sick most of the time. For her eighth birthday, her parents gave her a tiny potato cake with a hint of sugar; for her ninth birthday, an outfit sewn from rags for her doll; and for her tenth birthday, a poem written by her mother.
On May 8, 1945, Inge and her parents were liberated from the Theresienstadt ghetto where they had spent nearly three years. They immigrated to the United States in May 1946.
Item View!["Kristallnacht": nationwide pogrom [LCID: ger76080]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/e3709631-2b18-41c6-98fd-7f2b4d0d025e.gif "\"Kristallnacht\": nationwide pogrom [LCID: ger76080]")
Kristallnacht—literally, "Crystal Night"—is usually translated from German as the "Night of Broken Glass." It refers to the violent anti-Jewish pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938. The pogrom occurred throughout Germany, which by then included both Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Hundreds of synagogues and Jewish institutions all over the German Reich were attacked, vandalized, looted, and destroyed. Many were set ablaze. Firemen were instructed to let the synagogues burn but to prevent the flames from spreading to nearby structures. The shop windows of thousands of Jewish-owned stores were smashed and the wares within looted. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. Many Jews were attacked by mobs of Storm Troopers (SA). At least 91 Jews died in the pogrom.
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