The November Pogrom

On the night of 9 November, organised mobs burned or wrecked more than a thousand synagogues and some 7,500 Jewish shops across Germany, Austria and the annexed Sudetenland. At least ninety-one people were killed and thirty thousand men were taken to concentration camps. The Jewish community was then fined a billion marks for the damage done to it.

At the New Synagogue in Berlin a police officer, Wilhelm Krützfeld, faced down the arsonists and called the fire brigade, and the building survived that night. Its dome, rebuilt, still stands over the street.