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The head of Germany's Jewish community revealed yesterday that she received death threats which made her fear for her life in an interview given to mark the 70th anniversary of the infamous Nazi "Kristallnacht" pogrom that paved the way for the Holocaust.
Charlotte Knobloch, the president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, issued a dire warning against the rise of neo-Nazi parties and said she often received death threats.
"There are people out there who would rather see me in a cemetery," said Knobloch, 76, who experienced Kristallnacht as a 6-year-old when she fled on to the streets of Munich with her father after his shop was attacked by Nazis.
"Sometimes I fear for my life," she added.
Knobloch called for a government ban on the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) which has made a series of sweeping gains in regional state elections in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Her remarks coincided with ceremonies across Germany marking the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, which lasted through November 9 and 10, 1938.
At an anniversary ceremony at east Berlin's Rykestrasse synagogue, which was only restored to its pre-pogrom glory last year, the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, joined Jewish leaders to urge Germans to take a stand against racism.
"Indifference is the first step towards endangering essential values," she said.
"Xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism must never be given an opportunity in Europe again," she added.
Fresh evidence of Kristallnacht surfaced last month after an Israeli journalist discovered a vast rubbish dump outside a village north of Berlin in which items stolen from looted and sacked Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were dumped.
Residents in the village of Klandorf some 55km north-east of Berlin said that the site was chosen by the regime because it was next to the local "Heather railway" line which links the German capital to an idyllic area of lakes and woods outside the city.
Gielsdorf family members, who own part of the land, said that for years after the fall of the Berlin Wall the dump was visited by treasure hunters. They combed the site looking for anything to sell in the flea markets of Berlin and Leipzig and used shovels to threaten anyone who tried to stop them.
Yesterday several family members and a handful of other villagers held a small ceremony on the rubbish tip to commemorate the Kristallnacht anniversary.
THE NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS
Adolf Hitler's brownshirts and thousands of sympathisers ransacked Jewish homes and businesses throughout the country. Scores of synagogues were burnt and looted while police and firemen looked on. More than 90 Jewish people were murdered and some 30,000 Jewish men were dispatched to concentration camps. The pogrom marked a turning point and was the precursor of the systematic persecution of the Jews that followed almost immediately afterwards and led to the death camps of the Holocaust in which six million were murdered.
- INDEPENDENT
