At 0945 on Monday morning November 7, 1938 a 17-year old German Jew of Polish descent, Herschel Grynszpan, appeared at the reception desk of the German Embassy at 78 Rue de Lille in Paris. He asked to see an Embassy official in order that he might hand-deliver an important document. Grynszpan was directed to the office of the most junior embassy official on duty that morning, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Entering vom Rath’s office, the diplomat rose and asked for the document. Grynszpan allegedly cried out, "You're a filthy boche and in the name of the 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document!" as he pulled a pistol and fired five shots at vom Rath.
One shot entered vom Rath’s shoulder and did little damage. But another struck him in the left side causing severe internal damage to his spleen, stomach, and pancreas. The German diplomat punched Grynszpan and staggered out of his office where he collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital but despite all of the efforts of French and German surgeons, the damage exceeded their skills. Ernst vom Rath died on Wednesday November 9.
That night and into the early hours of the next morning the sounds of breaking glass were heard throughout Germany and its territories as the storefronts of Jewish businesses were smashed. Fires consumed synagogues and Jewish institutions as gangs of Nazi storm troopers destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses and torched more than 900 synagogues. Over 90 Jews were killed, and 30,000 able-bodied Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, over 1,000 of whom would die from disease or beatings before their release.
History would remember this night as Kristallnacht – Crystal Night or the Night of the Broken Glass. Seventy-two years ago this week, Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
The national vandalism against Jewish businesses was not provoked by the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, but his death provided the Nazi government with the excuse needed to implement a policy that had been in the works since Hitler took power in 1933 – i.e. to expunge Jews from all public German life. Hitler ruled that the stores damaged on Kristallnacht could not reopen except under the management of non-Jews. Jews could not sell goods or services anywhere or manage a business or pursue any economic activity in Germany or its territories. Jewish children could not attend school.
The insurance proceeds from the damage of Kristallnacht – about 6 million marks or $30 million today – had to be turned over to the German state where it fueled German rearmament. For the death of vom Rath a 1 billion mark fine was imposed on the Jewish community, the equivalent of $5.5 billion today.
Grynszpan’s execution of vom Rath horrified the Jewish community, but they also condemned Kristallnacht and the expropriation of Jewish property. German Jews and the World Jewish Congress decried the denial of statehood because of the act of one apparently deranged teenager. News of Kristallnacht spread to the global community, which was nominally sympathetic to the plight of the German Jews but weren’t moved to action. The world still hoped that Hitler could be appeased, and so it was anxious not to provoke the Reich to move closer to the horrors of another world war.
In America President Roosevelt exclaimed, "The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States... I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization." Yet he was disinclined to accept any more European Jewish refugees. The 15,000 or so already in the US on temporary visas were granted permanent asylum but no more.
Anti-Semitism was rampant in that era and Roosevelt’s mother was an outspoken anti-Semite. But it is unlikely that he was. He had appointed a number of Jews to high public positions in his cabinet and one – Felix Frankfurter – to the Supreme Court. Yet when prominent Jews and liberals pressured Roosevelt to be more accommodating, he suggested resettling Jews in Africa or South America rather than the US because he feared it would stir up his political enemies like Charles Lindbergh, a white supremacist, anti-Semite, and Nazi sympathizer.
As Jews fled Germany ahead of the impending Holocaust, several boatloads of mostly Jews were denied disembarkation in ports around the world. The plight of the St. Louis off the coast of Florida in June 1939 was one such incident that remains a controversy in the Roosevelt administration to this day. Carrying a thousand Jews fleeing the Nazis, the St. Louis’ captain, a sympathetic German, had first attempted port in Cuba and was refused. Sailing toward the US, the State Department refused landing rights and Roosevelt refused to respond to telegrams from passengers aboard who asked for asylum. Canada also refused to let the St. Louis dock and it returned to Europe where its German captain was determined to beach the ship off England to force it to accept the passengers. A compromise was reached which distributed the Jews to England and Free Europe, but when Hitler overran the Continent, half of the Jews who returned there died in concentration camps. The odyssey of the St. Louis became the basis for the historical novel The Voyage of the Damned.
Varian Fry, a 32-year old Harvard-educated classicist with no training in undercover work, was untroubled by his country’s diplomatic sensibilities. Working under the nose of the Nazis as a representative of a private American relief organization, Fry went to France to rescue Jewish intellectuals who had been ordered to surrender themselves to the Nazis after France fell to Germany. Using illegal means and a black market network, he managed to smuggle about 4,000 Jews out of Vichy France before the Vichy government threw him out of the country. Those rescued from the Holocaust represented the best and brightest minds in philosophy, music, art, literature, and the sciences. They included pianist Wanda Landowska, painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, writer Hannah Arendt, and sculptor Jacques Lipchiptz. Writer Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler also escaped the Gestapo with Fry’s help. She brought with her the original scores composed by her first husband, Gustav Mahler, and manuscript symphonies by Georg Bruckner.
Varian Fry – essentially an American Schindler – was reprimanded by the US government for his actions and died in obscurity. But in 1995 he became the first American to be given Israel’s honorific, “Righteous among the Nations,” at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial. It was the same honorific bestowed on Oskar Schindler.
The motives of Herschel Grynszpan have never been revealed but they were probably driven by despair. Grynszpan was in France illegally living with an aunt and uncle. Because of his status, Grynszpan could not work and had no money. After two years in country he could speak little French. Because he had entered France illegally, he had no way to return to Germany legally or to legally enter Belgium or Poland. In short, he was trapped.
In March 1938, Poland passed a law to become effective October 31 which revoked the citizenship of Poles who had been living abroad for more than five years. The purpose of this edict was to prevent the 70,000 Poles who had been living in Austria and Germany from returning to Poland. Although Grynszpan was born in Germany and was thus a German citizen, he was also a Polish citizen – until the edict which made him stateless.
In August 1938 the German government canceled all residence permits for foreigners living in Germany and told them to leave. This was specifically directed at the Jews. In an attempt to beat the Polish edict which would become law on October 31, the Gestapo arrested 12,000 Polish Jews, packed them on trains, and started them toward the Polish border. Among them were the Herschel Grynszpan’s parents and sister. The Jews were permitted only one suitcase and all other property and possessions were to be left behind to become property of the state.
As the train approached the Polish border, for some unknown reason it stopped two kilometers short, forcing the 12,000 deportees to walk the rest of the way to the border town of Zbaszyn. They were refused entry into the country and the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organizations were ill-equipped to feed and nurture so many people in so small a town. From Zbaszyn, Herschel’s sister wrote a post card to him reporting what had happened and asking for money – which he didn’t have.
Ernst vom Rast was obviously selected randomly to be the victim of Herschel Grynszpan’s despair. Ironically, the young German diplomat was known to have expressed anti-Nazi sympathies because he opposed the persecution of the Jews. That had put him under Gestapo scrutiny for his views.
After the shooting, Grynszpan remained in his victim’s office awaiting the arrival of the French police. He cooperated with them freely and gave his correct name. Confessing his act he said: “Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth. Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal.”
In his pocket was a photograph of him, taken by a street photographer as was common in that day. On the back, addressed to his parents in care of his uncle, he had written a final note dated November 7, 1938:
"With God's help.[in Hebrew]My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me, the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do. Forgive me. – Hermann [his German name]
From November 1938 to June 1940 Grynszpan was imprisoned in the juvenile section of the Fresnes Prison in Paris from the date of his arrest to June 1940 while his French lawyer and the prosecutor (who consulted with a German lawyer to placate Hitler) argued about trial procedures for 18 months. But Germany invaded France in May 1940. As they approached the outskirts of Paris in June, prison inmates including Grynszpan were sent south away from the advancing army.
En route south, the prison bus was strafed by a German plane, killing several prisoners and allowing others to escape in the confusion. Grynszpan was one of them. But instead of making good his escape, he continued to walk south to the original destination – to the prison at Bourges – where he dutifully turned himself in to the French police. They sent him on foot and without guard to the prison at Toulouse thinking he would attempt to escape the Nazis. But with no money, no knowledge of the country, and poor French speaking skills, this naïve, if not immature, boy turned himself over to the officials in Toulouse.
Since arriving in Paris, the Nazis had been on Grynszpan’s trail, and with the fall of France, they caught up with him in Toulouse where he was taken into German custody and flown to Berlin. Shuttled between concentration camps, Grynszpan was treated relatively well because Goebbels intended to make him the object of a show trial in which it would be alleged that vom Rath’s death was the result of a conspiracy of international Jewry, not the random act of a distraught young man.
But Goebbels found that it was no easier to proceed with a trial in Germany than it had been in France. He got caught in a bureaucratic crossfire between the German Justice Ministry, which asserted its independence from the Nazi political apparatus, insisting that Grynszpan was not now a German citizen and therefore could not be tried in a German court for a crime committed outside of Germany. It was textbook German bureaucratic paralysis, and the pulling and tugging continued into 1941.
Goebbels’ solution was to charge Grynszpan with high treason for which he could be tried regardless of citizenship – at least so he thought. But the internecine legal wrangling continued until October 1941 when an indictment was finally handed down. However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December brought the US into the war with a formal declaration against Germany and the Axis on December 11, and the Grynszpan trial never took place.
What happened to Grynszpan after that is not fully known. Many Nazi documents remain unread. But there remained hope among German authorities that they could charge international Jewry with causing World War II. Thus it is likely that Grynszpan continued to be treated well during the war in order to make him the key actor in a trial. He was still alive in late 1943 or early 1944 because Adolf Eichmann testified in his own trial in Israel that he remembers interrogating Grynszpan in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin around that period.
After the war – which all of Herschel’s family survived – there were rumors that he was living under an assumed name in Paris. One rumor wag said he was married and had two children. This is unlikely. His parents and siblings moved to Israel and made it known through Jewish networks that they were alive and were looking for him. While it is possible that his German captors killed him, it is more likely that he died of disease, since his value as a trial witness and Hitler’s interest in him would have provided an extraordinary degree of political protection.
On June 1, 1960, the Amtsgericht (Lower Court) of Hanover declared Herschel Grynszpan deceased. The date of death was fixed as May 8, 1945. The decree became official on July 24, 1960.
Zendel Grynszpan, Herschel's father, was present at the Israeli premiere in 1952 of Sir Michael Tippett's oratorio, A Child of Our Time, based on Herschel Grynszpan.
Of the eleven million pre-war European Jews, six million were consumed in the Holocaust. The Nazi plan had been to kill them all.
One shot entered vom Rath’s shoulder and did little damage. But another struck him in the left side causing severe internal damage to his spleen, stomach, and pancreas. The German diplomat punched Grynszpan and staggered out of his office where he collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital but despite all of the efforts of French and German surgeons, the damage exceeded their skills. Ernst vom Rath died on Wednesday November 9.
That night and into the early hours of the next morning the sounds of breaking glass were heard throughout Germany and its territories as the storefronts of Jewish businesses were smashed. Fires consumed synagogues and Jewish institutions as gangs of Nazi storm troopers destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses and torched more than 900 synagogues. Over 90 Jews were killed, and 30,000 able-bodied Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, over 1,000 of whom would die from disease or beatings before their release.
History would remember this night as Kristallnacht – Crystal Night or the Night of the Broken Glass. Seventy-two years ago this week, Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
The national vandalism against Jewish businesses was not provoked by the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, but his death provided the Nazi government with the excuse needed to implement a policy that had been in the works since Hitler took power in 1933 – i.e. to expunge Jews from all public German life. Hitler ruled that the stores damaged on Kristallnacht could not reopen except under the management of non-Jews. Jews could not sell goods or services anywhere or manage a business or pursue any economic activity in Germany or its territories. Jewish children could not attend school.
The insurance proceeds from the damage of Kristallnacht – about 6 million marks or $30 million today – had to be turned over to the German state where it fueled German rearmament. For the death of vom Rath a 1 billion mark fine was imposed on the Jewish community, the equivalent of $5.5 billion today.
Grynszpan’s execution of vom Rath horrified the Jewish community, but they also condemned Kristallnacht and the expropriation of Jewish property. German Jews and the World Jewish Congress decried the denial of statehood because of the act of one apparently deranged teenager. News of Kristallnacht spread to the global community, which was nominally sympathetic to the plight of the German Jews but weren’t moved to action. The world still hoped that Hitler could be appeased, and so it was anxious not to provoke the Reich to move closer to the horrors of another world war.
In America President Roosevelt exclaimed, "The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States... I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization." Yet he was disinclined to accept any more European Jewish refugees. The 15,000 or so already in the US on temporary visas were granted permanent asylum but no more.
Anti-Semitism was rampant in that era and Roosevelt’s mother was an outspoken anti-Semite. But it is unlikely that he was. He had appointed a number of Jews to high public positions in his cabinet and one – Felix Frankfurter – to the Supreme Court. Yet when prominent Jews and liberals pressured Roosevelt to be more accommodating, he suggested resettling Jews in Africa or South America rather than the US because he feared it would stir up his political enemies like Charles Lindbergh, a white supremacist, anti-Semite, and Nazi sympathizer.
As Jews fled Germany ahead of the impending Holocaust, several boatloads of mostly Jews were denied disembarkation in ports around the world. The plight of the St. Louis off the coast of Florida in June 1939 was one such incident that remains a controversy in the Roosevelt administration to this day. Carrying a thousand Jews fleeing the Nazis, the St. Louis’ captain, a sympathetic German, had first attempted port in Cuba and was refused. Sailing toward the US, the State Department refused landing rights and Roosevelt refused to respond to telegrams from passengers aboard who asked for asylum. Canada also refused to let the St. Louis dock and it returned to Europe where its German captain was determined to beach the ship off England to force it to accept the passengers. A compromise was reached which distributed the Jews to England and Free Europe, but when Hitler overran the Continent, half of the Jews who returned there died in concentration camps. The odyssey of the St. Louis became the basis for the historical novel The Voyage of the Damned.
Varian Fry, a 32-year old Harvard-educated classicist with no training in undercover work, was untroubled by his country’s diplomatic sensibilities. Working under the nose of the Nazis as a representative of a private American relief organization, Fry went to France to rescue Jewish intellectuals who had been ordered to surrender themselves to the Nazis after France fell to Germany. Using illegal means and a black market network, he managed to smuggle about 4,000 Jews out of Vichy France before the Vichy government threw him out of the country. Those rescued from the Holocaust represented the best and brightest minds in philosophy, music, art, literature, and the sciences. They included pianist Wanda Landowska, painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, writer Hannah Arendt, and sculptor Jacques Lipchiptz. Writer Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler also escaped the Gestapo with Fry’s help. She brought with her the original scores composed by her first husband, Gustav Mahler, and manuscript symphonies by Georg Bruckner.
Varian Fry – essentially an American Schindler – was reprimanded by the US government for his actions and died in obscurity. But in 1995 he became the first American to be given Israel’s honorific, “Righteous among the Nations,” at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial. It was the same honorific bestowed on Oskar Schindler.
The motives of Herschel Grynszpan have never been revealed but they were probably driven by despair. Grynszpan was in France illegally living with an aunt and uncle. Because of his status, Grynszpan could not work and had no money. After two years in country he could speak little French. Because he had entered France illegally, he had no way to return to Germany legally or to legally enter Belgium or Poland. In short, he was trapped.
In March 1938, Poland passed a law to become effective October 31 which revoked the citizenship of Poles who had been living abroad for more than five years. The purpose of this edict was to prevent the 70,000 Poles who had been living in Austria and Germany from returning to Poland. Although Grynszpan was born in Germany and was thus a German citizen, he was also a Polish citizen – until the edict which made him stateless.
In August 1938 the German government canceled all residence permits for foreigners living in Germany and told them to leave. This was specifically directed at the Jews. In an attempt to beat the Polish edict which would become law on October 31, the Gestapo arrested 12,000 Polish Jews, packed them on trains, and started them toward the Polish border. Among them were the Herschel Grynszpan’s parents and sister. The Jews were permitted only one suitcase and all other property and possessions were to be left behind to become property of the state.
As the train approached the Polish border, for some unknown reason it stopped two kilometers short, forcing the 12,000 deportees to walk the rest of the way to the border town of Zbaszyn. They were refused entry into the country and the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organizations were ill-equipped to feed and nurture so many people in so small a town. From Zbaszyn, Herschel’s sister wrote a post card to him reporting what had happened and asking for money – which he didn’t have.
Ernst vom Rast was obviously selected randomly to be the victim of Herschel Grynszpan’s despair. Ironically, the young German diplomat was known to have expressed anti-Nazi sympathies because he opposed the persecution of the Jews. That had put him under Gestapo scrutiny for his views.
After the shooting, Grynszpan remained in his victim’s office awaiting the arrival of the French police. He cooperated with them freely and gave his correct name. Confessing his act he said: “Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth. Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal.”
In his pocket was a photograph of him, taken by a street photographer as was common in that day. On the back, addressed to his parents in care of his uncle, he had written a final note dated November 7, 1938:
"With God's help.[in Hebrew]My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me, the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do. Forgive me. – Hermann [his German name]
From November 1938 to June 1940 Grynszpan was imprisoned in the juvenile section of the Fresnes Prison in Paris from the date of his arrest to June 1940 while his French lawyer and the prosecutor (who consulted with a German lawyer to placate Hitler) argued about trial procedures for 18 months. But Germany invaded France in May 1940. As they approached the outskirts of Paris in June, prison inmates including Grynszpan were sent south away from the advancing army.
En route south, the prison bus was strafed by a German plane, killing several prisoners and allowing others to escape in the confusion. Grynszpan was one of them. But instead of making good his escape, he continued to walk south to the original destination – to the prison at Bourges – where he dutifully turned himself in to the French police. They sent him on foot and without guard to the prison at Toulouse thinking he would attempt to escape the Nazis. But with no money, no knowledge of the country, and poor French speaking skills, this naïve, if not immature, boy turned himself over to the officials in Toulouse.
Since arriving in Paris, the Nazis had been on Grynszpan’s trail, and with the fall of France, they caught up with him in Toulouse where he was taken into German custody and flown to Berlin. Shuttled between concentration camps, Grynszpan was treated relatively well because Goebbels intended to make him the object of a show trial in which it would be alleged that vom Rath’s death was the result of a conspiracy of international Jewry, not the random act of a distraught young man.
But Goebbels found that it was no easier to proceed with a trial in Germany than it had been in France. He got caught in a bureaucratic crossfire between the German Justice Ministry, which asserted its independence from the Nazi political apparatus, insisting that Grynszpan was not now a German citizen and therefore could not be tried in a German court for a crime committed outside of Germany. It was textbook German bureaucratic paralysis, and the pulling and tugging continued into 1941.
Goebbels’ solution was to charge Grynszpan with high treason for which he could be tried regardless of citizenship – at least so he thought. But the internecine legal wrangling continued until October 1941 when an indictment was finally handed down. However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December brought the US into the war with a formal declaration against Germany and the Axis on December 11, and the Grynszpan trial never took place.
What happened to Grynszpan after that is not fully known. Many Nazi documents remain unread. But there remained hope among German authorities that they could charge international Jewry with causing World War II. Thus it is likely that Grynszpan continued to be treated well during the war in order to make him the key actor in a trial. He was still alive in late 1943 or early 1944 because Adolf Eichmann testified in his own trial in Israel that he remembers interrogating Grynszpan in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin around that period.
After the war – which all of Herschel’s family survived – there were rumors that he was living under an assumed name in Paris. One rumor wag said he was married and had two children. This is unlikely. His parents and siblings moved to Israel and made it known through Jewish networks that they were alive and were looking for him. While it is possible that his German captors killed him, it is more likely that he died of disease, since his value as a trial witness and Hitler’s interest in him would have provided an extraordinary degree of political protection.
On June 1, 1960, the Amtsgericht (Lower Court) of Hanover declared Herschel Grynszpan deceased. The date of death was fixed as May 8, 1945. The decree became official on July 24, 1960.
Zendel Grynszpan, Herschel's father, was present at the Israeli premiere in 1952 of Sir Michael Tippett's oratorio, A Child of Our Time, based on Herschel Grynszpan.
Of the eleven million pre-war European Jews, six million were consumed in the Holocaust. The Nazi plan had been to kill them all.
No comments:
Post a Comment