This riveting book prints a collection of 21 eyewitness accounts by German Jews of the terrible night of 9 November 1938, when, on the orders of Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, bands of stormtroopers all over Germany and Austria burned down more than 1,000 synagogues and smashed up some 7,500 Jewish-owned shops. The shards of shop windows that littered the streets on the morning of 10 November led Berliners, with typically bitter humour, to dub the events of the previous hours the "Reich Night of Broken Glass", satirically imitating such Nazi events as the "Reich Day of Labour".

Hitler had used the murder of a minor official in the German embassy in Paris by a Polish Jew protesting against the expulsion of his parents from Germany as an excuse for the pogrom. The stormtroopers were fuelled by anger as well as by alcohol, their antisemitic passions inflamed by lurid accounts of the killing in Goebbels's propaganda press. As the destruction proceeded, Jewish homes were broken into and the contents looted or smashed, the occupants manhandled, beaten up or, in a substantial number of cases, murdered. Hitler ordered 30,000 Jewish men to be arrested and taken to concentration camps; their release came only when they agreed to emigrate.

By the outbreak of the war in September 1939 the Jewish population of Germany was half what it had been when the Nazis came to power. After their arrival in England, America, Palestine, Shanghai or some other safe haven, the Jewish emigrants found an opportunity to recount their experiences when three Harvard academics, the historian Sidney Fay, the psychologist Gordon Allport and the sociologist Edward Hartshorne, offered a monetary reward (top prize $1,000) for "the best unpublished personal life histories of persons who have experienced the effects of National Socialism in Germany". The purpose, they said was "purely scientific". Two hundred and sixty-three essays came in, mostly though not exclusively from Jews who had emigrated after the pogrom.

Uta Gerhardt and Thomas Karlauf have selected for publication 21 of these accounts from a manuscript prepared by Hartshorne. Entitled Nazi Madness, it was never published. Hartshorne had edited his selected narratives and reorganised them to increase their impact.

The testimonies recount a wide variety of experiences. For Hugo Moses, a former bank official, the behaviour of the drunken mob of stormtroopers who broke into his apartment on the night of 9 November, overturning his furniture and smashing his ornaments and pictures, while an SS man held a loaded revolver to his head, contrasted with the policemen who came to inspect the damage and told him apologetically: "It's a disgrace to see all this." Public reaction in general, as reported in these memoirs, was mixed: some Germans gathered in jeering mobs, others stood by muttering disapproving comments. Nobody intervened.

Sofoni Herz, a teacher at a Jewish orphanage in Dinslaken, a mining town in the Ruhr, hurriedly took 32 children outside while a gang of 50 men systematically destroyed everything in the building, "shattering window panes, throwing books, chairs, beds, tables, linens, maps, valises, piano parts, etc out of the windows and doors" before setting the orphanage's synagogue on fire. A Nazi official announced "that we have ordered that the cow belonging to the orphanage, which is taken care of by a German farmer, will continue to be fed. Animals must not suffer on this day." The children and staff were imprisoned in a room in the city, where local policemen apologised to them: "we're all still good Social Democrats or Democrats. But what can we do in times like these?"

Some of these reminiscences tell other stories too. A Nazi teacher persecuted Hugo Moses's nine-year-old son in the classroom, making him sit on a bench on his own, refusing to correct his work and banning him from using the school swimming pool: "You are not allowed to contaminate German water." The boy later told his father he would have thrown himself under a train had this continued much longer. The head teacher, though sympathetic to the father's protests, confessed he could do nothing, because he would lose his job if he did.

But almost all the memoirs focus on the events of 9-10 November 1938. Particularly harrowing are the stories of what happened to the Jewish men arrested and taken off to the camps. The shopkeeper Karl Schwabe endured "a series of endless physical and mental sufferings" at Buchenwald. In the first days they were deprived of food and drink  "our mouths dried out completely, our throats burned". They were forced to stand outside in rows for hours, with the SS mercilessly hitting and kicking anyone who fell over. Many were beaten to death; others, unable to bear the torture, ran into the electrified barbed wire fences. Elderly men were forced to do squats until they dropped from exhaustion. "The sanitary conditions", Schwabe wrote, "defy description."

Karl Rosenthal, a reform rabbi in Berlin, recounted the repeated humiliations to which prisoners were subjected, as they were forced under blows to chant "we are the destroyers of German culture!" Social envy was behind many of the insults. "Your profession?" an SS man asked one of the prisoners. "Former lawyer." "Bullshit, you're a pimp! Repeat it!" Psychological torture accompanied the beatings, as the men were lined up and told "tonight 3,000 Jewish kids will be shot in Berlin".

The men were released on condition they emigrated. But this was far from easy. Hertha Nathorff, head physician at a major hospital in Berlin until September 1938, related her repeated attempts to gather the funds, documents and permissions to go with her husband to Cuba and thence to the US: bribery and extortion were part of the process, and by New Year's Eve 1938 she still had not got away: "I'm just counting the days until we can get out of this hell."

The value of these testimonies lies above all in their detail and immediacy. Mostly they confirm the picture we already have from other sources, though few are as vivid as these. Collecting the testimonies was, despite the assurances of the Harvard professors, by no means a "purely scientific" exercise. For Hartshorne in particular, the Third Reich was an abomination. In the mid-1930s he had lived in Berlin gathering material for his PhD on the destruction of the universities by National Socialism. Later, he urged the neutral US to mobilise against what he regarded as the rule of a criminal clique in Germany.

Nazi Madness was to have been a contribution to his campaign against American isolationism. It remained unpublished because Hartshorne was drafted into government service once the US entered the war, and lacked the time to see it through the press. In 1945 he was put in charge first of re-establishing German universities, and then of denazification in Bavaria, with further heavy demands on his time.

Hartshorne's anti-Nazi convictions aroused the hostility of the US military government's Counter-Intelligence Corps, the CIC, which was smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Soviet-occupied Austria and eastern Europe to Italy and thence South America, to be questioned about their knowledge of the Soviets for use in the looming cold war. Informed of these activities, Hartshorne was outraged and passed on information about this "ratline" to Moscow. He had become a serious inconvenience to the CIC. On 28 August 1946, on the Munich-to-Erlangen autobahn, his car was overtaken by a Jeep, which suddenly slowed down in front of him, forcing him to overtake it in turn. As he passed, a single shot was fired from the jeep, hitting him in the head. He died two days later. The murderer was never identified.

 Richard J Evans's The Third Reich at War is published by Penguin.