AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

In early November, 1938, thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany w ere expelled from the Reich. Denied entry into Poland, the exiles found themselves in a make-shift refugee camp near the border. Among them were the parents of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who was living illegally in Paris. Distraught at the precarious condition of his family, he sought revenge by appearing at the German Embassy and shooting the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. On November 9th at a meeting of the Nazi Party leadership in Munich, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels suggested that “World Jewry” was responsible for the assassination and announced that the Führer had decided that the “demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” Immediately after the speech, Party leaders instructed their local offices to avenge the murder of vam Rath by attacking Jewish owned businesses, homes, places of worship, and other institutions. The violence began later that evening. 

 

In the early hours of November 10th, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police sent telegrams to the district headquarters and stations of the State Police and the Storm Troopers with specific directives for the riots including the engagement of Hitler Youth, the wearing of civilian clothes, and most importantly for our discussion, to remove and transfer all synagogue and Jewish community archives to the Nazi Security Service. The pogrom, now known as Kristallnacht or Night of the Broken Glass, was a well-planned attack designed to assert domination over the Jewish minority population through the destruction of the cultural and economic fabric of the community.

 

The state-sponsored activities of Kristallnacht served as a template for the continued attacks on the population and as the Nazi’s advanced across Europe. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has many examples of the damaged and fragmentary survivors of these campaigns. The collections contain a wide variety of objects and materials, so for clarity I will focus on a few that share the common characteristic of having come from synagogues that were vandalized and looted. They are also all displayed in the Permanent Exhibition which over the years, has necessitated a collaborative approach to their care and display across several museum departments. The Torah Ark from the synagogue in the small village of Nentershausen, Germany has hatch marks from an axe, primarily on the lintel of the painted wooden frame. It is placed in front of a case containing fragments of desecrated Torah scrolls gathered from different sites. In another area a heavily damaged stained-glass window that survived the burning of the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow is displayed. Each of these objects challenge the balance between conservation interventions and preserving the ability of the object to tell its story while ensuring appropriate display methodologies.