Like many other German and Austrian cities, Innsbruck was also the scene of the events that took place on the night of 9 to 10 November 1938 and was known as the Reichskristallnacht and November pogroms form one of the saddest parts of recent history. The Nazi regime took the assassination attempt by a Polish-Jewish student on the German ambassador in Paris as an opportunity to organise pogroms. Starting from the party leadership around Adolf Hitler, orders were given to the local representatives in the cities of the German Reich to accelerate the de-Jewification of Germany and the Aryanisation, the expropriation of the Jewish population.

In contrast to the Jewish population and culture, anti-Semitism was a common tradition in Tyrol. Innsbruck was the centre of Jewish life in western Austria, but there was never a significant number of Jewish citizens. The first immigrants of the Jewish faith came to the city in the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Jewish cemetery at the Judenbühel first mentioned in St Nicholas. In 1864, the burial place had to be moved to the western cemetery after it had been damaged several times. In 1880, there were only 109 Jews registered in Innsbruck. In the days before the First World War, in which Jewish soldiers served regularly as subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy, Innsbruck had 500 Jewish citizens.

Political groups based their programmes on anti-Semitism long before the rise of the National Socialists. The Christian Mittelstand party warned its voters of the "harmful Jews" in a leaflet ahead of the 1889 elections. In the churches, anti-Semitic sermons and the legend of the ritual murder in Tyrolean garb of the Anderle von Rinn the order of the day. Josef Seeber, a popular theologian in Tyrol, wrote his version of the Eternal Jews an epic, anti-Semitic ballad.

What was new in 1938 was the open violence. On 9 November, a celebration was held in the city theatre to commemorate the National Socialist coup attempt of 1923 in Munich. The audience was entertained with performances by the Hitler Youth and Richard Wagner's Lohengrin to the swearing-in of the SS members on Adolf Hitler Square in front of the theatre.

After midnight, Gauleiter Hofer and high-ranking members of the SS gathered to discuss the details of the "spontaneous uprising of the German people against the Jews" to go through. Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed. Jewish citizens were abused and beaten up. Richard Berger, Wilhelm Bauer and Richard Graubart were killed. More or less the entire Jewish population was murdered in the days following the Reichspogromnacht forcibly relocated to Vienna.

Considering the ratio of the small Jewish population to the number of victims, Innsbruck was one of the most brutal cities in the German Reich during the November pogroms. The murder of Richard Graubart is well documented. He ran a shoe shop in Museumstraße. He lived with his family in a villa in Gänsbacherstraße in the Saggen district. Under the direction of SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Aichinger, his murderers, some of whom he knew personally, forced their way into the family home. Graubart was stabbed to death, and the doctor who arrived an hour later could only confirm his death. The villa had already been given to a Nazi party functionary before the crime, as had the rest of the Graubart family's property. In the Newest newspaper of 10 November:

"Synagogue in Innsbruck is destroyed... Similar to all cities in Germany, such protests also took place in Innsbruck.... With their anger, the crowd demonstrated their outrage at the cruel bloodshed and called for action against Jews.... To avoid further unrest, many Jews were arrested... Incidentally, the city of Innsbruck and our Gau are looking forward to being freed from the Jewish burden fairly soon, as a process of Aryanisation is being set in motion en masse."

When the riots were brought to trial before the People's Court at Innsbruck Provincial Court after the war, none of the defendants were convicted of murder. Rudolf Schwarz and Robert Huttig, two of the men who had murdered Richard Graubart, were sentenced to 11 and 10 years' imprisonment respectively in 1947, but were pardoned and released from prison in 1951.

It was not until 1981 that the city of Innsbruck erected a memorial plaque at the site of the synagogue destroyed in 1938. In 1993, the new synagogue was opened on the same site in Sillgasse in the presence of Innsbruck's Bishop Reinhold Stecher (1921 - 2013). The small Jewish community of Tyrol and Vorarlberg received a special gift for the inauguration. In November 1938, the neighbours at the time had removed and kept the key to the destroyed door of the old synagogue, which was returned on this day.