THE 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht was marked today by a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors.

Walter Bingham was 14 years old when Nazis plundered Jewish businesses and places of worship across Germany and Austria in what became known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass).

The November 9 1938 attack was a stark turning point in the escalating persecution that led to the killing of six million European Jews by the Nazis and their supporters during the Holocaust.

The recent attacks against Jewish symbols across the world, including synagogues in Australia, worry the survivors.

“We live in an era equivalent to 1938, where synagogues are burned and people in the street are attacked,” said Mr Bingham, now aged 101.

During the Kristallnacht riots, the Nazis killed at least 91 people, vandalised 7,500 Jewish businesses and set fire to more than 1,400 synagogues, according to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

Up to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many taken to concentration camps such as Dachau or Buchenwald. Hundreds more died from mistreatment or killed themselves in the camps, years before official mass deportations began.

Though his memory sometimes fails, Mr Bingham said he could remember every detail of the aftermath of the Kristallnacht attack 87 years ago.

He was walking to school in Mannheim, south of Frankfurt, the morning after the riots, he said. When he got to the synagogue where his classes were held, it was a smouldering ruin. 

Months later, he was put on a kindertransport from Germany to Britain, becoming one of the nearly 10,000 children in Nazi-occupied Europe who were brought to safety by the 1938-39 rescue mission. 

“Anti-semitism, I don’t think, will ever fully disappear,” Mr Bingham said. But he believes that educating younger generations can help fight intolerance, even amid the wave of right-wing politics now sweeping across the world.