On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year old named Herschel Grynszpan entered the German embassy in Paris. Hidden within his three-piece suit was a gun he had purchased earlier that day; in his pocket was a postcard on which he had written an abbreviated Hebrew phrase invoking God's help and a message in German for his family:
My dear parents,
I could not do anything else, may God forgive me, my heart bleeds when I hear of the tragedy that befell you and 12,000 other Jews. I need to protest so that the entire world hears it, and this I will do. Forgive me.
At the embassy, Grynszpan asked to see an official, saying he had a document to submit that was too important to be left with a clerk. He was ushered into the office of a junior-level diplomat, twenty-nine-year-old Ernest vom Rath, who asked to inspect it. Drawing his gun, Grynszpan told him, “You're a filthy Kraut, and in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document.” He fired five shots at vom Rath, who died two days later.
Grynszpan's Orthodox familyhad lived for three decades in Germany, in a poor neighborhood of Hanover where his father worked as a tailor. But on October 28, 1938, they were among the more than 12,000 Jews summarily expelled from Germany in a Nazi campaign to send all Polish-born Jews back to Poland, before a new Polish law took effect barring their return. Both countries were seeking to rid themselves of their Jews.
Herschel was living in France because his parents had sent him there alone in 1936, at the age of fifteen, to escape Nazi Germany. While growing up in Hanover, he had joined a religious Zionist group at thirteen, studied Hebrew for a year in a yeshiva at fourteen, and hoped to emigrate to Palestine. But he was unable to obtain a visa. One day, at the local synagogue, he discussed his plight with “old Katz, the watchmaker,” who advised him to leave Germany, where “a Jew is not a man, but is treated like a dog,” and go to France. Herschel's father arranged for relatives in Paris to take him in.
Newspapers in Paris, including the Yiddish press that Herschel read regularly, carried the story of the expulsion from Germany of the Polish-born Jews, reporting that thousands had been rounded up and deported to a no-man's land between Germany and Poland, where they were living without shelter in disease-ridden conditions, with suicides reported. A postcard that Herschel's older sister Berta sent him in Paris, which he received on November 3, brought him the details of his family's trauma:
[A]t 9:00 p.m. Thursday, a Schupo [security policeman] came to our house and told us we had to go to the police headquarters with our passports. We went just as we were, all together. . . . There we found almost our entire neighborhood already assembled. . . . We had not yet been told what it was about, but we quickly realized that it was the end for us. An expulsion order was thrust into our hands. . . . We were not allowed to return to our homes. . . . We don't have a pfennig [penny].
As he learned of his family's sudden expulsion from Germany, Herschel himself stood on the brink of expulsion: his request for residency status in France had been rejected, and the police were after him. Hidden by his relatives, he was spending his nights in the attic of an abandoned apartment. He had no place to go: neither Germany nor Poland would have permitted him to enter.
On November 8,the day after the shooting and his arrest, Herschel Grynszpan told the investigating judge that he had sought to bring the world's attention to the suffering of his family and his people. It was “the constantly gnawing idea of the suffering of my race which obsessed me”:
For 28 years my parents resided in Hanover. They had set up a modest business which was destroyed overnight. They were stripped of everything and expelled. It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have the right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth. And yet everywhere they are hunted down like animals.
On the next day—November 9, 1938—vom Rath died from his wounds. The date happened to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of the Munich “beer-hall putsch”—Hitler's failed 1923 coup attempt. At a gathering to celebrate the day, Hitler and his veteran henchman Hermann Goering seized upon the news of vom Rath's demise as the pretext for a state-sponsored anti-Semitic pogrom, a massive orgy of destruction that would come to be known euphemistically as Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass.”
Orders went out from Nazi headquarters that night to destroy Jewish stores, disarm Jews, set fire to their synagogues, and post signs everywhere reading “Death to International Jewry.” Every police station received a written message from national headquarters, with this instruction:
[A]s many Jews in all districts, especially the rich, as can be accommodated in existing prisons are to be arrested. . . . After the detentions have been carried out, the appropriate concentration camps are to be contacted immediately for the prompt accommodation of the Jews in the camps.
The scope of the resulting carnage was staggering: more than 1,000 synagogues were burned; over 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were gutted; hundreds of Jews died; and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and elsewhere. It was an elaborate pre-planned operation, awaiting only a triggering event; vom Rath's death was the excuse.
In France, preparations immediately began for a trial of vom Rath's assassin. But it never took place—not in 1939 while Herschel was in French custody; not in 1940 when, after the invasion and conquest of France, he was turned over to the Nazis and transported to prison in Berlin; and not in 1941-42 when the Germans made extensive plans for a show trial blaming World War II on the Jews.
In preparing for the planned trial, the Third Reich intended, in the words of their internal guidelines, to claim that Herschel had acted as an agent of “world Jewry” in a “war against National Socialist Germany,” thereby making the “destruction of Jewry . . . a prerequisite for the coming European new order.” Hitler, who personally followed the trial preparations, was assured that Georges Bonnet, the former French foreign minister who while in office in 1938-39 had been a leading proponent of appeasement, was prepared to travel to Berlin to testify that “pressure was exerted by world Jewry on the French government in 1939 to enter the war.”
But both the trial in France and the one in Germany were stopped—by extraordinary acts of principle and courage by Herschel Grynszpan himself.
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