< ! --- The Dresden synagogue , which was burned during '' Kristallnacht '' on 9 November 1938 , was rebuilt in 2001 and opened for worship on 9 November and is called the New Synagogue . The original synagogue 's Star of David was installed above the entrance of the new building — Alfred Neugebauer , a local firefighter , saved it from the fire and hid it in his home until the end of the war . Dresden 's Jewish population declined from 4675 in 1933 , to 1265 in 1941 ( the eve of the implementation of the Nazis ' extermination programme ) , to just a handful after almost all of those who had remained were forcibly sent to Riga Ghetto and Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps between 1941 and 1945 . On the morning of 13 February 1945 , the Jews remaining in Dresden were ordered to report for deportation on 16 February . But as one of them , Victor Klemperer , recorded in his diaries : " ... on the evening of this 13 February the catastrophe overtook Dresden : the bombs fell , the houses collapsed , the phosphorus flowed , the burning beams crashed on to the heads of Aryans and non-Aryans alike and Jew and Christian met death in the same firestorm ; whoever of the Jews was spared by this night was delivered , for in the general chaos he could escape the Gestapo " . But in recent years the Jewish population has increased in Dresden , as it has elsewhere in Germany . Paul Spiegel , the then head of Central Council of Jews in Germany , called the new synagogue a concrete expression of the Jewish community 's desire to stay
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Bombing of Dresden in World War II