Reporter Tours Berlin Day After Kristallnacht
BERLIN, Nov. 10 (AP) - In a tour of Berlin this afternoon, this correspondent saw few Jewish stores or synagogues that escaped damage in 12 hours of anti-Jewish violence. Many buildings were destroyed.
The rioting reached a high point at the center of Berlin, where, at noon, thousands gathered in the streets to watch gangs pound to bits dozens of stores.
This correspondent saw dozens of men and women rush into a toy shop in the arcade between Unter den Linden and Friederichstrasse and scoop up what they could get.
They went in after gangs of youths smashed the Plateglass windows. Inside, counters, partitions and everything breakable or loose was thrown to the floor and smashed.
Five other stores in the arcade, a favorite shopping place of tourists, also were plundered. Few police were visible.
A short distance away, at the corner of Jaegerstrasse and Friederichstrasse, a second-story pawn shop came in for vengeance.
Youths with lead pipes broke windows, then threw fur coats from the racks down onto the heads of several thousands watching in the street below.
Around another corner in the center of the city, a tailor shop was looted. In the doorway, a tailor's dummy with a hat on its head hung with a rope around its neck.
Further down Friederichstrasse, a noonday crowd smashed the mystery around the city's best-known black magic store.
Here, as elsewhere, the crowd used iron pipes, sticks and whatever implements were available.
The mobs worked throughout the day in various sections of the city, seemingly according to plan.
The swank Kurfuerstendamm quarter, which suffered earlier in the morning, was revisited later by gangs who went inside shops and completed the demolition.
The outbreak appeared by far the worst anti-Semitic demonstration Nazi Germany has seen. The worst previous was in June, 1935.
This correspondent started out at daybreak on the tour. The first damage seen was the destruction by fire of the wealthy synagogue in Friederichstrasse, near the zoo railway station.
Clouds of smoke rose from three domes of the stone building. The interior was a furnace, with the tile roof about to collapse as the fire ate at rafters. Worship benches, books and other inflammable materials had been piled in the center.
During the morning this smoking synagogue could be seen by passengers on international trains arriving from the West. This temple, with the city's newest one on Prinzregentranstrasse, both huge structures, were virtually destroyed by fire.
Hundreds of stores gaped open when workmen passed them in the morning. Near Alexander Square, some 20 workers from the city market were helping themselves at a shoe store.
When this correspondent got there, they were sitting on the curbs, laughing and trying on pair after pair of shoes in a hunt for pairs to fit them.
In front of other stores, goods and furniture - including pianos - were piled high. Three boys sat on one piano, kicking the keys with their feet.
Six large Plateglass windows in the capital's best-known children's furniture store, on Leipzigerstrasse, were caved in.
This afternoon, the optimistic proprietors took measurements for replacement.
all this was reported today . . . back in 1938 (source: The AP Archive)
[thanks to my brother Tony who sent this in . . . good stuff brother]