Johanna Neumann was 8 when she witnessed a mob of local citizens and Nazis vandalizing the Bornplatz Synagogue in Hamburg. They were “shouting and throwing stones at the marvelous glass windows,” as she later said in an oral history interview. Other students at the Jewish school nearby described a mountain of prayer books and Torah scrolls lying in the dirt on the street, desecrated and set aflame.
Kristallnacht’s legacy still haunts Hamburg, even as city rebuilds former synagogue burned in Nazi pogrom
