Trier During the Third Reich

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Trier’s Jewish community totalled around 800 people. In centuries past, they had repeatedly been the targets of pogroms, such as the one in 1349, when they were blamed for the outbreak of the plague. Many people died at the time, and very few returned to Trier over the following decades. But even these medieval atrocities had little in common with what played out in Trier from the late 1930s onwards. Their daily harassment and deprivation of rights reached a sad climax on Kristallnacht 1938, when the Jewish synagogue was defiled and many Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed and ransacked. The deportations began just two years later. Between 1941 and 1943, some 600 people were carted off to the east, most of them dying.