In the night between November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi paramilitary brownshirts and German citizens went on a staged rampage destroying Jewish stores, homes and synagogues and killing Jews. At that time Austria had been annexed by the Third Reich. Today, on November 9, 2021, the president of Austria, members of the European Commission and EJC representatives gathered to commemorate the dead in Vienna.

On Thursday the Austrian capital will present two projects to mark the 80th anniversary of the violent attacks against Jewish homes, companies and houses of prayer. Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, is considered a milestone on Hitler’s path towards the total extermination of European Jewry. The names of 68 Jews murdered during the bloodletting will be projected every evening of the week at 7:38 P.M. local time till dawn every twelve minutes on the front of the building housing the Uniqa insurance agency in the center of Vienna.

“We want to preserve the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis,” Austrian Resistance Archive (DOW) director Gerhard Baugmartner said. The Tower of Names will likely be seen by tens of thousands of people.

In the other project the DOW revived their Memento-Vienna program for smart mobile telephones and tablet computers with GPS, allowing users to learn the names, addresses and biographies of victims.

The app was original released in 2016 with information on 5,000 victims who lived in central Vienna. Now the data base has been expanded to include 50,000 of the murdered who lived throughout the capital city.

“The Nazis didn’t just murder their victims, they also deprived them of their names, faces and context,” Thomas Stern, one of the project’s researchers, said.

Memento-Vienna was designed primarily for students, tourists and descendants and relatives of Holocaust victims who come to the city to find their roots and learn the fates of their families.