Berlin shops ‘smash glass’ to mark pogrom

KaDeWe – Germany's equivalent of London's Harrods – will join around 100 Berlin businesses in using adhesive film on their windows to create the illusion of smashed glass to mark the attacks which took place on November 9th and 10th, 1938, and "take a stand against intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism," according to the organisers.

Some 90 Jews were killed in the orgy of violence, also known as 'The Night of Broken Glass', saw Nazi thugs plunder Jewish businesses throughout Germany, torch some 300 synagogues and round up about 30,000 Jewish men for deportation to concentration camps.

Berlin had a "particular significance" in the pogroms, historians Christoph Kreutzmüller and Björn Weigel wrote in a new publication to accompany the remembrance event.

Violence in the capital city was fuelled by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister and the local Nazi party leader.

"There was so much to destroy, so the violence in Berlin was particularly long-lasting," write Kreutzmüller and Weigel in "Kristallnacht? Bilder der Novemberpogrome 1938 in Berlin" ("Kristallnacht? Pictures of the November Pogroms in 1938 in Berlin").

The store window stickers will be concentrated in areas in downtown Berlin targeted by the Nazi looters, including a major shopping street that was a centre of the arts and theatre during the Weimar Republic.

The installation is part of a year-long series of events in Berlin recognising the 80th anniversary of the Nazi party's accession to power and the 75th anniversary of the November pogroms which marked Germany's slide to mass murder and disaster.

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