TRIUMPHALIST celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall drowned out commemorations of November 9’s other key anniversary, that of Kristallnacht, in Berlin on Saturday.

In 1938, Nazi thugs smashed Jewish shops and businesses across Germany and Austria, which it had recently annexed, torched synagogues and attacked and murdered Jews.

In a speech focusing on the fall of the wall, Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner said the lesson from the defeat of East Germany was that “without freedom, everything is nothing.” He did refer to Kristallnacht, saying “anti-semitism is still a reality today.”

In Vienna, Jewish students surrounded the Holocaust Memorial on Friday night and prevented Walter Rosenkranz, parliamentary leader of the far-right Freedom Party which is the largest in the legislature, from laying a wreath in memory of Kristallnacht’s victims.

Mr Rosenkranz is a member of a far-right pan-German student fraternity organisation and has previously expressed praise for Johann Stich, Nazi attorney-general. The students said they did not want him to “spit on our ancestors’ faces.”