Kristallnacht: Pictures capture horrors of 1938 Nazi pogrom

Nazi officers carrying away books, presumably to be burned

Eighty-four years ago, an outbreak of mass violence against Jews in Germany and Austria marked a major escalation of the Nazis' persecution.

Thousands of Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues were attacked, and almost 100 Jews were killed during the violence. Some 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.

Now, a Holocaust memorial centre has released a collection of photos of the November pogrom of 1938 - or Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

WARNING: This article contains distressing images

People watch as a Nazi official attacks a Jewish business

Objects litter the floor at a ransacked Jewish business

The pictures were taken by two Nazi photographers in the German city of Nuremberg and nearby town of Fürth.

Those photographers were an integral part of the event, according to Jonathan Matthews, head of the photo archive at Yad Vashem, the Israeli centre which publicised the collection to mark the anniversary.

Pews overturned at a synagogue

Officers pouring petrol onto pews at a synagogue

The synagogue ablaze during the pogrom

The album - first published on social media in 2018 - was given to Yad Vashem by the family of a Jewish US soldier who served in Germany during World War Two.

According to the memorial centre, he never spoke about his experiences during the war.

When his granddaughter Elisheva Avital opened the album, she felt as if a "hole had been burned through [her] hands".

A destroyed shopfront with Nazi officers standing by

Officers tearing down literature from a bookshelf

The pogroms on 9 and 10 November 1938 are often regarded as the starting point of the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany killed six million Jews.

Mr Matthews said the pictures show the violence was organised by the state - and was not a "spontaneous event of an enraged public", as the official narrative at the time suggested.

• Update: This story has been changed to make clear the pictures were not previously unseen, as Yad Vashem believed, but have been used in other media since 2018