Siegen, 10. November 1938

Crowds of onlookers in front of a burning synagogue

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The fire is fierce, but the crowds largely seem quite calm as they watch the flames. This scene was photographed in Siegen, a town in north-western Germany. When the synagogue there was set on fire on 10 November 1938, no one tried to put out the blaze.

The first deportations had taken place just under two weeks before – Polish Jews living in Germany were expelled to the no-man’s-land between Germany and Poland. When the news reached Herschel Grynszpan, a young man living in Paris, that his family had been deported as well, he shot one of the German embassy officials. The Nazi regime used this assassination as a justification for a long-planned campaign of anti-Semitic violence – a campaign which could now be painted as acts of revenge.

In the November Pogrom across Germany, hundreds of synagogues were set on fire and left to burn to the ground, and innumerable Jewish-owned business were plundered and looted. The SA and SS paramilitaries, party members and many Nazi sympathisers also attacked Jews in their apartments, maltreating and killing them and destroying and looting their possessions. In these pogroms, around 27,000 Jews were arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau on the orders of Heinrich Müller. Müller worked closely with Reinhard Heydrich and was also present at the Wannsee Conference. The prospect of release from the camps was offered to those who paid a fine – more precisely, a ransom – and promised to leave the German Reich permanently.

The aim of this policy was to force Jews to emigrate – a policy driven not just by the pogroms, but also a campaign of expropriation. Many German Jews who had trusted in their situation eventually improving now sought to leave Germany. Yet by late 1938, numerous countries had already placed severe restrictions on immigration or even closed their borders entirely.