Germany has marked the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938 with solemn ceremonies and celebrations of the rebirth of Jewish life in the country. Chancellor Angela Merkel and Jewish leaders gathered at Germany's biggest synagogue in Berlin to pay tribute to the victims of Kristallnacht and to the revival of a Jewish community against all odds. Merkel said that "Indifference is the first step towards endangering essential values.”
The president of the Central Council of Jews, Charlotte Knobloch, expressed hope that remembering the atrocities would rekindle Germans' commitment to tolerance in the face of a resurgent far-right. "It is our responsibility to keep the memories alive," Knobloch, who witnessed Kristallnacht as a six-year-old in Munich, told the congregation at Berlin's Rykestrasse Synagogue. "Six million children, women and men must never be degraded to a footnote of history," she said, referring to those slaughtered in the Nazis' bid to wipe out European Jewry.
The pogrom, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, saw Nazi thugs plunder Jewish businesses throughout Germany, torch some 300 synagogues and round up some 30,000 Jewish men for deportation to concentration camps. Some 90 Jews were killed in the orgy of violence, whose pretext was the murder of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a student, Herschel Grynspan, who sought revenge for the expulsion of his family from Germany with about 15,000 other Polish Jews.
