Ruins Of Famous Building Missing Since WWII Found

No trace of it had been seen in over 80 years…

Construction workers in Munich made a startling discovery over the weekend.

While working at a dam on the Isar River, craftsmen uncovered dilapidated columns and a stone tablet commemorating the Ten Commandments from Munich's main synagogue.

That hadn't been seen in 85 years.

German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered the house of worship's demolition shortly before Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass. The November 9-10, 1938, pogrom, carried out by the Nazi Party's paramilitary groups and radicalized civilians while German authorities looked on, destroyed 267 synagogues and more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses.

The reign of terror likely resulted in hundreds of deaths, including suicides from Jews that felt they lost everything and deaths resulting from the maltreatment of imprisoned Jewish men.

BBC News has more on the reaction to the discovery:

“We never thought we would find anything from it,” said Bernhard Purin, head of Munich's Jewish museum.

There had been no sign of the building since it was torn down in June 1938, after Hitler demanded its removal as an “eyesore”. Five months later, Jews, synagogues and Jewish-run businesses were attacked across Nazi Germany in the deadly November pogrom widely known as Kristallnacht.

“Yesterday I saw [the remains] for the first time and it was one of the most moving moments in 30 years of working in Jewish museums, especially seeing the plaque of the Ten Commandments not seen since 1938,” Mr Purin told the BBC.

Remnants of the synagogue were reportedly held in storage by the demolition company tasked with razing it to the ground. Authorities appeared to have used building materials from it, other smashed synagogues and miscellaneous structures destroyed during the Second World War to shore up the damaged Grosshesselohe Dam after Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender.

Charlotte Knobloch, 90, the head of the local Jewish community and one of the synagogue's few surviving congregates, shared her jubilation with the local media:

“These stones are part of Munich's Jewish history,” she told the Münchner Merkur newspaper. “I really didn't expect fragments to survive, let alone that we would see them.”

Some historians view Kristallnacht as a forerunner to the Nazi's Final Solution, indicating to Hitler that Germans would either participate in or willingly ignore the horrors to come. The leadership of the Third Reich used the November 7, 1938, assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan as a pretext for the wave of violence two days later.

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