Jewish deportees march through the German town of Würzburg to the railroad station on April 25, 1942.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration
Wolf Gruner, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Holocaust scholars long relied on documents and survivor testimonies to help reconstruct the history of that tragic event. Now, they’re turning to wordless witnesses to learn more: pictures.
Father Coughlin’s bully pulpit.
Fotosearch/Getty Images
Broadcasters silenced Father Charles Coughlin in 1938, just as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have shut down pro-Trump incitements to violence in 2021.
A photo from Nov. 10, 1938, showing Jewish shops in Berlin destroyed by Nazis is placed at the same location 80 years later.
(AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
About 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps in the German Reich in the immediate aftermath after Kristallnacht, the night of the Broken Glass, in November 1938.
A looted Jewish shop in Aachen, Germany on the day after Kristallnacht, Nov. 10, 1938.
Wolf Gruner and Armin Nolzen (eds.). 'Bürokratien: Initiative und Effizienz,' Berlin, 2001.
Wolf Gruner, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Most histories highlight the shattered storefronts and synagogues set aflame. But it was the systematic ransacking of Jewish homes that extracted the greatest toll.
German citizens in Magdeburg the morning after Kristallnacht.
German Federal Archive
Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences