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In the middle of the night on November 10, 1938, the Gestapo came to the home of Seligmann and Elsa Bamberger in Hamburg, Germany. It was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when anti-Jewish violence was unleashed by the Nazis in Germany, annexed Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia. Almost 30,000 Jewish men were arrested that night and sent to concentration camps and almost 100 Jews were killed.

In the video clip below, Joseph Bamberger describes where his father was when the Gestapo came looking for Seligmann, and the outcome of his father’s work on Kristallnacht.

Credit: Testimony of Joseph A. Bamberger and Dorothy Frank Bamberger (1990). Interviewed by Tobi Blum-Dobkin. Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.