photos taken by the Nazis. Flipping the pages of this rare album, the viewer also encounters pictures of SS men gathering piles of books, both religious and secular. These books were presumably being collected in order to burn later on.
Head of the Photography Section of the Yad Vashem Archives Jonathan Matthews explains: "We can see from the extreme close-up nature of these photos that the photographers were an integral part of the event depicted. The angles and proximity to the perpetrators seem to indicate a clear goal, to document the events that took place. These are indeed rare photos that shed light on the November Pogrom events we did not have until today. We see SS men and SA actually carrying out the events – setting the fires, vandalizing homes and Jewish businesses and humiliating the Jewish population. All this serves as further proof that this was dictated from above and was not a spontaneous event of an enraged public, as they tried to make these pogroms appear."
The focus of these rare photos is the portrayal of the rioters in action and in the background, onlookers standing by, watching, and doing nothing to stop the violence or defend their Jewish neighbors.