World

Kristallnacht remembered in Berlin

Monday 09 November 2009

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov and ex-Polish president Lech Walesa celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, more subdued tributes were held to mark the 71st anniversary of the nazis' Kristallnacht pogrom.

On Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - at least 99 German Jews were killed, 267 synagogues destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses vandalised and looted.

Up to 30,000 German Jews were arrested and placed in concentration camps.

The pogrom marked an intensification of the nazis' fascist policies that would eventually lead to the murder of some six million Jews.

In Berlin a special service was held at a memorial outside the Jewish Community of Berlin's building.

The event also paid tribute to Anne Frank, who would have turned 80 this year had she not died of typhus in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

Separately a candlelit service was held in the evening at Berlin's Grunewald train station, from which many of the city's Jews were deported.

The anniversary was also noted at services celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was known as the "anti-fascist protective rampart" in the former German Democratic Republic.

At an ecumenical service in Berlin Archbishop Robert Zollitsch said: "The memory of the horrible events of November 9 1938 no less than the memory of the November 9 1989 teach us unequivocally that walls, whether real or in the minds and hearts of the people, solve no problems."

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