The Strange Story of Herschel Grynszpan

MICHAEL R. MARRUS

HERSCHEL, FEIBEL GRYNSZPAN'S harried, furtive existence as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany ended abruptly on November 7, 1938, when he shot the third Seeretary of the German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. The diplomat died two days later. Only seventeen years old, vom Rath's assassin then entered a judicial, diplomatiec, and political maze from which he probably never emerged. Although we remain unclear about the death of Herschel Grynszpan, we know that vom Rath's murder was the pretext for the furious anti Jewish riots of Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, that rumbied across Germany under the orders of Joseph Goebbels and lesser Nazi zealots. We know that Grynszpan's assassination of vom Rath provoked trouble between France and Germany on the eve of the Second World War. And we also know that Grynszpan was never tried for his offense, despite elaborate preparations that had been made, both by the French before the war and by top Nazi officials once the hapless defendant fell into their hands in 1940. Grynszpan's desperate gesture has its place in the annals of Nazi persecution and in the register of those futile but symbolic acts of resistance against unspeakable tyranny. The rest of Grynszpan's story remains obscure, however, and deserves to be better known.

Born in Hanover, Germany, in 1921, Grynszpan, like his immigrant parents, was of Polish nationality, and from them he learned something about his jewish heritage. For about a year he attended a yeshiva, or rabbinical seminary, in Frankfurt am Main. The Crynszpan family was quite poor; Herschel's father was unemployed in the early years of the depression. As outsiders, the Crynszpans stiffered acutely from the first wave of Nazi anti Jewish laws and the efforts to rid the Reich of so called "Jewish domination." In public school in the years immediately after Hitler becaine chancellor of Gerrnany, Herschel had to sit at the back of his class and was treated as an outcast. A slight and apparently impressionable youth, Gnynszpan managed to leave Germany in 1936 when he was only fifteen. He went first to an uncle, who was living in Brussels, and then crossed illegally into France. He was unable to afford the small cost of a visa and thus took advantage of the easy passage, at that time, across the frontier between the two countries. Sheltered in Paris by another uncle and an aunt, he worked at odd jobs, learned some French, and went often to the cinema. Preoccupied with his private troubles and with the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews in Germany, Grynszpan attended a Polish jewish sports club in Paris and pored voraciously over Yiddish language newspapers.

Although he attempted to regularize his status in France, Grynszpan never succeeded. Somehow he could never assemble the doctuments necessary to satisfy the authorities and establish his right to remain where he was. Grynszpan's face, it has been said, never lost the expression of a hunted animal. Despite frequent interventions by bis uncle on his behalf, and despite repeated applications to police and consular authorities, the young refugee gradually became what the French called a clandestin an illegal resident ever in danger of being expelled. On July, 8, 1938, the French ordered him to leave France in a matter of weeks.

Where could he go? His Polish passport authorizing residency in Germany had expired more than a year before. His parents remained in Hanover, and while he had a few relatives in Poland, he knew nothing of that country or its language. Grynszpan, like many others in his difficult situation, went underground. Tracked by the police, he slept in a tiny maid's room on the sixth floor of a building near his uncle's home. During the day Grynszpan avoided the streets. He contemplated joining the foreign legion and may have thought of suicide. By autumn he was desperate.

At the end of October, Grynszpan learned that his entire family had been expelled from Germany as a result of a clash between Poland and the Reich over Polish expatriates. At issue were some fifty thousand Polish Jews living in Germany and its newly absorbed Austrian territory. Warsaw announced that it would soon revoke the citizenship of all Polish citizens who had been living abroad for more than five years. Faced with having to "absorb" these soon to be stateless Jews, the Germans began, on October 26, to round up Polish Jews and ship them to the frontier. The Gestapo did the job with stunning brutality, eager to bundle their victims aeross the border before the Poles could block their entry.

Grynszpan's sister Berta sent Herschel a postcard that reached him on Novernber 3, four days before the assassination. She deseribed the arrest of an entire neighborhood of Polish Jews in Hanover: "We were not permitted to return to our homes. I begged to be allowed to return home to get at least a few essential things. So I left with a Shupo accompanying me and I packed a valise with the most necessary clothes.

That is all I could save. We don't have a cent. To be continued when next I write. Warm greetings and kisses from us all. Berta."

Years later, at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the elderly father Herschel Grynszpan described the familiy's deportation this way:

The SS men used whips to hurry us across fields to the [Polish] frontier line. Those who faltered were struck, blood spurted, bundles were grabbed from people's hands. It was the first time I had seen the barbaric behavior of Gemans. They told us to run. I was struck and fell into a ditch.

Then the elder Grynszpan told how they were forced across the border, with the women first, so that the Polish guards would not shoot. "Rain was falling hard. There was no bread. People were fainting - some suffered heart attacks and on all sides one saw old men and old women. Our suffering was great."

Together with more than eight thousand others, the Grynszpans first arrived in Zbaszyn, a froutier town of about six thousand people on the Polish German border, in a kind of no man's land where many of the expellees languished for many months, while the Germans and Poles quarreled over their fate. Essentially, Poland refused to admit them, and the Germans would not take them back. Grynszpan received only fragmentary news about his family. But newspapers carried full accounts; from the start the attention of the international and the Jewish press was riveted on the deportations, reminiscent of the expulsions of Jews in the Middle Ages. While the young Grynszpan in Paris had only sketchy information from the Polish border, he clearly had grounds to believe the worst.

Distraught and fearful, Herschel broke with his only benefactors in Paris, his uncle and aunt. On Sunday, November 6, the, day before the assassination, Grynszpan argued furiously with them at dinner, probably over money. Just as the world of his family in Hanover collapsed in ruins, Grynszpan seems to have undermined his only refuge and regular social contact. That night he slept badly in a hotel near his former home and seems to have determined to make a dramatic publie statement. The next morning he wrote to his uncle, on a postcard found in his wallet at the time of his arrest:

With God's help (Written in Hebrew] ... I couldn't do otherwise. My heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I have to protest in a way that the whole world hears my protest, and this I intend to do. I beg your forgiveness. Herman.

He then entered a gunsmith's shop nearby, purchased a pistol and amunition, and took the Metro to the German Embassy on the rue de Lille.

Accounts of the assassination differ slightly, but the basic facts are simple enough: Grynszpan asked a receptionist at the German embassy if he could see an official; he probably hoped to assassinate the Ambassador. Instead, Grynszpan was shown into the office of Ernst vom Rath, whom he promptly shot. Subdued without difficulty by embassy personnel, he was then turned over to the local police, who took him to the Fresnes prison and began lengthy interrogations.

Ernst vom Rath died shortly after 4:00 p.m. on November 9. Although by some testimony a gentle, cultivated scion of the German aristocracy, possibly even a lukewarm or unenthusiastic Nazi, vom Rath immediately became a martyr for the cause of the Third Reich. "In response to the assassination of Legationstrat vom Rath," Nazi police boss Reinhard Heydrich told bis subordinates, "during the Night of November 9 to 10 there should be demonstrations against the Jews." Within hours, Nazi party activists and brown shirted storm troopers launched attacks on Jews throughout Germany. Instigated by propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who portrayed the riots as a spontaneous uprising of the German people, the orgy of destruction and violence was in fact carefully planned and orchestrated. Gangs of Nazis assaulted Jews, burned synagogues, and destroyed the property in scores of towns and cities throughout the Reich. Everywhere in Germany organized mobs shattered windows leaving the streets full of broken glass, which gave the riots their name. Ninety one Jews were dead the next morning, and twenty to thirty thousand were interned and sent to prisons or concentration camps.

Assessing the damage in the office of Hermann Göring a few days later, Nazi leaders decided that the destruction had been costly and even harmful to German interests. Göring insisted that the insurance companies fulfill their obligations but made sure that no Jew should receive payment. To cover the damages, Berlin imposed a one billion mark fine on the Jews of the Reich. A series of harsh decrees now rained down on the victims of Kristallnacht, who were held to be responsible for what had happened. New laws excluded Jews from the German economy and confiscated what remained of their property. The Nazi leadership, moreover, evinced a certain dissatisfaction with the riotous outburst, preferring instead a more concerted anti Jewish policy. Henceforth, by direction of the Führer himself, "the Jewish question [was to] be now, once and for all, coordinated or solved in one way or another." Göring was put in charge. He, in turn, more sharply defined the German policy, which was to drive the Jews out of the country. Göring designated Heydrich and the SS to speed Jewish emigration, if necessary by expulsions the very policy in reaction to which Herschel Grynszpan had struck on November 7. Clearly, the only immediate result of his act, apart from the wave of violence, was to bring matters to a head.

Undoubtedly it was a chastened and unhappy seventeen year old who now faced the lengthy pre trial investigation in Paris, conducted by judge Jean Tesnière, a specialist in juvenile delinquency cases. But Grynszpan remained firm in his convictions. Despite shifts in the nature of his defense and in his accounts of the details of the assassination, Grynszpan persistently maintained the explanation he had declared during his first interrogation: "I acted . . . because of love for my parents and for my people who were subjected unjustly to outrageous treatment.... 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."

Accompanying this anguished appeal, other voices sounded over the vom Rath assassination. From Berlin, Joseph Goebbels fulminated against the Jews, and by implication the French state that harbored so many of them. "This odions attack," he declared, "once again deprives our people from attaining the peace and quiet they have so deserved. The murder of a German diplomat was carried out in order to provoke trouble between Germany and the other great European powers.... It was a shot in the back." At the elaborate state funeral for vom Rath, Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who delayed a planned trip to Paris for one month as a result of the assassination, rattled the German saber: "No terror exists which can stop the rise of Germany. lf today, a new wave of hate breaks out against us, if once again there is an attempt to profane the memory of our dead, then a storm of indignation will sweep across Germany." And he ended darkly, "We understand this challenge and will know how to answer it."

To watch over German interests in the prosecution of Grynszpan, the Führer dispatched to Paris an associate from Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry, Professor Friedrich Grimm. Grimm and bis elaborate staff, together with French lawyers hired to represent them, thereafter lurked in the background of the case, constantly nudging the judicial proceedings along paths that would avoid the charges against the Reich leveled by the youthful assassin.

In America, meanwhile, opinion mobilized on Grynszpan's behalf. A famous journalist at the New York Herald Tribune, Dorothy Thompson, took up his cause and appealed for help. Telegrams, letters, and donations for the defense flooded back in response. Representatives of the World Jewish Congress and the Federation of Jewish Societies in France also joined the fray, alarmed about the anti Jewish backlash orchestrated in Germany and threatening elsewhere. Together these groups enlisted the aid of a famous anti fascist lawyer entrusted with Grynszpan's defense, Maitre Vincent de Moro Giafferi.

For the French government, the assassination could not have occurred at a worse moment. Coming in the wake of the crisis over Czechoslovakja and the Munich conference, it found Paris uncertain over the extent of German demands, nervous about worsening relations with the British, and worried about the crippling of its Czech ally. French diplomats were extremely concerned about the deteriorating diplomatic situation and actively sought a Franco German rapprochement preparatory to a general settlement in Europe. On November 5, just two days before the assassination of vom Rath, Ribbentrop had forwarded to Paris a draft agreement of a Franco German accord. French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, a champion of «appeasement," hoped to mollify die Germans over the issue of Jewish refugees, considered a minor, unnecessary irritant in relations between the two countries. When Bonnet finally met Ribbentrop in December, he told his German counterpart that there was great interest in France "in a solution to the Jewish question." "The French," according to Ribbentrop, "did not want to receive any more Jews from Germany" and sought German help in keeping them out. In a dangerous moment, Bonnet was doing his best to reach an understanding with Berlin. It was all the more important, therefore, to keep the Grynszpan affair at a low level. This is the likely reason that the trial did not take place before the outbreak of war the following year, despite the completion of the necessary paperwork.

Over the next months, the defenders of Grynszpan quarreled over the best strategy to adopt. Some favored a narrowly presented case, seeking to dampen the anti Jewish passions aroused by the assassination in order to secure the most lenient sentence for the accused. Appalled at the violence against the Jews of Germany, Moro Giafferi, and also the Grynszpan committee, adopted this view. Others sought to use the forthcoming trial as an occasion to document and denounce the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. Grynszpan himself seems to have favored the latter approach, persistently maintaining the account of the assassination he had first given to investigating officers.

Grynszpan remained in prison until the German invasion of France in May 1940. By then the government clearly had no interest in a trial and probably had no plans whatever to deal with Grynszpan. Swept along by administrative momentum, he was evacuated with other prisoners to Orléans, and then to the town of Bourges, about two hundred and twenty kilometers south of Paris. The prisoners' convoy broke apart after being strafed by German aircraft, but Grynszpan, apparently fearing that he would be taken by the Germans, preferred to remain in custody. There is some confusion about what happened next. Local authorities dispatched him further south, well into territory controlled by the Vichy government and known as the "free zone," likely not caring any longer whether he remained a prisoner or not. In a matter of days Grynszpan reached Toulouse, in the south of France, not far from the Pyrenees and the border with Spain. Alone and without resources, possibly hopeful that the French would care for hirm, Grynszpan turned himself over to the French police. This proved to be a fatal mistake.

What Grynszpan did not know was that the Germans were on his trail. The day after they entered Paris, in mid June, they sent an SS team to search the Paris prefecture for police files on several wanted émigrés, including the notorions young assassin Herschel Grynszpan. Two weeks later they arrested and interrogated the public prosecutor of Bourges, who had helped Grynszpan escape. Taking advantage of the Vichy government's eagerness to accede to German wishes, the Germans demanded that he be handed over. Vichy complied on July 18, without any formal extradition proceeding and before Grynszpan's attorney even had a chance to protest. Two days later, he was in Berlin.

What we know up to this point comes mainly from the extensive public discussion of the Grynszpan affair and evidence drawn from the elaborate French investigation of the assassination. Much of the French material was collected in the early 1960s by a French physician, Dr. Alain Cuenot, who tracked down several important witnesses. But from this point onward, as Grynszpan entered the maw of the Third Reich, the evidence becomes much thinner. Grynszpan, it seems likely, never emerged from the Nazi clutches. For a time, he fit the Germans' plans for an elaborate propaganda coup. When these plans were dashed, likely sabotaged by Grynszpan himself, the Germans' use for their captive seems to have waned. And with this, the German documentation on Grynszpan becomes more scarce, so that in the end we are not even certain how Herschel Grynszpan died.

Documents uncovered by the Allies at Nuremberg provide a crucial source for what happened to Grynszpan in Germany. The Nazis, these documents indicate, planned a fantastic show trial, not unlike those Europeans witnessed in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Their idea was to focus attention on Jewish terrorism and demonstrate nothing less than the Jews' responsibility for the outbreak of war in Europe. Roland Freisler, a former Communist turned Nazi and a high official in the Ministry of justice, was placed in charge.

Plans went forward for an elaborate public tribunal to begin work in February 1942. But before the trial could begin, several difficulties emerged that delayed the proceedings substantially. First, the various ministries supposed to be coordinating their efforts fell to quarreling with one another over the direction of the trial. The Propaganda Ministry, under Goebbels, wanted to heighten a campaign against "International Judaism" by stressing the pre war collusion by the Jews against Germany. The Foreign Ministry, under Ribbentrop, wanted the trial to accent the breakdown of relations with France. Representatives from the Ministry of Justice preferred a thorough, narrowly defined trial that would concentrate on the facts of the assassination. Hitler failed to resolve these disputes, but he intervened nevertheless, removing Freisler from the role of chief director and placing Otto Thierack, president of the Nazis' People's Court, in charge. The implication of this obscure move, apparently, was to tip the balance in Goebbels's favor.

Under Goebbels's direction, planning continued for a show trial to begin on May 10. A parade of witnesses would establish the circumstances of the crime, but the proceedings were to go much further than this. At the very center would be the Jewish question in its many guises, including the role of the Jews in foreign countries, the Jewish plans to sabotage Ribbentrop's visit to Paris in 1938, and the influence of Jews in the United States as exemplified in their rallying to support the assassin Grynszpan. State counselor Wolfgang Diewerge, a member of Goebbels's staff at the Propaganda Ministry, was to organize an entire day of testiniony on the preparations for war against the Reich by world Judaism.

One of the star witnesses, according to Goebbels, would be former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, reported by German contacts in Paris to be willing to take the stand on the side of the prosecution. Bonnet, Goebbels wrote, "is ready to testify that he opposed the declaration of war against Germany, but that the French govermnent was put under such heavy pressure by the Jews that it could not avoid declaring war." "This shows in what an irresponsible way this war was started," Goebbels added, "and how heavily those must be punished who acted so rashly." In fairness to Bonnet it must be added that, in 1964, he strenuously denied that he had had any intention of going to Germany. Bonnet said that Admiral Darlan, then head of government at Vichy, had nevertheless authorized both Bonnet and judicial officials who had been involved in the case to participate in the Berlin trial.

Unhappily for Goebbels, however, all of these plans came to naught. The probable reason was a coup de théâtre struck by the defendant himself. Having maintained up to this point that he shot vom Rath as a protest against the persecution of the Jews, Grynszpan now advanced what was to Goebbels an outrageous line of defense. Hitler's propaganda chief recorded the news in his diary: "Grynszpan has insolently invented a homosexual liaison with Embassy Counsellor vom Rath. It is nothing other than a shameless fabrication. But it is a lucky inspiration for him, since if it were brought to trial it would become a dominant theme in adverse propaganda."

According to a variety of sources, notably Grynszpan's French chronicler Dr. Cuenot and also an American investigator, Gerald Schwab, who researched the Grynszpan affair at the end of the war, the origin of the story of homosexuality was the defendant's French attorney, Maître Moro Giafferi. He claimed in 1947 that he simply invented the story as a possible line of defense, one that would put the affair in an entirely new light. In fact, however, rumors about vom Rath's homosexuality were in the air in Paris immediately after the assassination. Whatever the exact origins of the story, its utility was obvious: the murder could be presented not as a political act but as a cause passionelle a lover's quarrel, in which the German diplomat could be judged incidentally, as having seduced a minor. Moro Giafferi shared the fears of the Grynszpan committee at the time of Kristallnacht that a political trial would be a catastrophe for the Jews of Germany and elsewhere. By adopting this legal strategy, they hoped to defuse the affair and also reduce the penalty drastically, possibly even prompting a suspended sentence.

The Problem, however, was the boy himself. In 1939, Grynszpan adamantly refused to accept this defense and remained unbending in his original contention that he shot vom Rath in protest against Nazi Jewish policy. There the matter lay until 1942, when it surfaced once again as one of Goebbels's most vexing problems. On the basis of the available evidence, it seems that the propaganda chief in this case was right: the story was a simple fabrication, but it was a fabrication now seized by the defendant as his only hope to avoid a show trial. Taking this line, of course, was an act of extraordinary courage on Grynszpan's part: he almost certainly knew that he was only being kept alive for the purposes of a trial, and by subverting these plans, he might have been signing his own death warrant.

The trial organizers had real reason to worry. They had hoped to bring to the proceedings representatives from the European press, including newsmen from neutral countries. What they doubtless wanted was a pliant victim, the kind of cringing, docile accused that the Soviets had been so successful in producing during the Great Purges of the 1930s. Instead, Grynszpan likely reminded them of Marinus van der Lubbe, the bizarre Dutchman found half naked in the burning Reichstag building in 1933, who proved to be a most unsatisfactory defendant during his own trial, because he would not admit that he was part of a broad Communist conspiracy against the new Nazi government. Worse still, Grynszpan now threatened publicly to besmirch a martyred German diplomat with a charge of pederasty raising a question about which Nazi leaders were inordinately sensitive. Martin Bormann, Hitler's troubleshooter on sensitive internal matters, conveyed the bad news to the Führer. The Nazi dictator, who was revolted by sexual irregularities and who loathed being ridiculed, seems to have called a halt to Goebbels's venture. A few weeks later, with the agreement of Ribbentrop, the proceedings were postponed.

Thereafter, the information about Grynszpan is sketchy, and one cannot be certain what happened next. Grynszpan was well treated, before his trial, for the Nazis wanted their victim to appear to the world in a healthy condition. When the proceedings were suspended in the spring of 1942, those officials in charge believed that the trial might well resume under better circumstances. In all likelihood, the Nazis wanted to keep Grynszpan alive, and he was not maltreated at least for a time.

One high ranking German foreign offiece official involved in the case later reported that Grynszpan died shortly before the end of the war but was unable to say how he perished. Another witness, himself an anti Nazi internee, declared in 1959 that he had seen Grynszpan in the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin and that he was later transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In this version, Grynszpan was later transferred to several other prisons and may have lived long enough to be liberated by the Americans in 1945. For a decade and a half after the end of the war, there were periodic reports that Grynszpan had survived the war and was living under an assumed name.

In Hanover, in 1958, Herschel Grynszpan's father, then living, in Israel, attempted to put the matter to rest by appealing to a German court for reparation payments from the Bonn government for his son's death. The court studied the evidence carefully and concluded that the boy was indeed dead. A death certificate for Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was issued on June 1, 1960. A researcher in Berkeley, California, Ron Roizen, has carefully gone over the ground again and has come to a similar conclusion:"CIaims for Grynszpan's survival were invariably based on a mix of rumor and chance sightings of the boy prior to the end of the war. Such claims invariably crumble before serious prodding."

Grynszpan probably died in a Nazi camp in the last phase of the war when hundreds of thousands of others were swept away by starvation, disease, maltreatment, and massacre. Unlike most prisoners, he escaped the terrible anonymity that has generally been the lot of Hitler's victims. We at least know something about his fate and can hear his voice of protest that cries out beyond the grave. His story should not be forgotten. lt has continuing dramatic appeal, of course, because of the the unusual juxtaposition of sub-themes - the Kristallnacht pogrom, French appeasernent policy, Nazi views of sexuality, and the propaganda strategies of the Third Reich. But the story is also compelling because of hints about the character of the boy himself. We do not know much about Herschel Grynszpan's personality, but scraps of information available suggest a quite ordinary youth who was driven to lash out against a ruthless tyranny. Grynszpan did more than suffer under Nazi oppression; he struck against it in the most radical way that occurred to him. Afterwards, despite the formidable forces mobilized against him, he held his ground on principle most likely at the cost of his life. Finally, by insight into a weakness at the core of the Third Reich, he may have sabotaged an elaborate Nazi propaganda enterprise.

Beyond this, the Grynszpan story highlights three important historical issues. First, the assassination of Ernst vom Rath raises the difficult question of strategies of opposition to persecution. Did the attack on vom Rath only worsen the conditions Jews faced at the end of 1938? This was argued by Dr. Alain Cuenot and many Jews at the time. In the end, I remain unconvinced, if only because what we know about Nazi policy suggests its implacable commitment to solve the Jewish question one way or another, sooner or later so oder so, as Hitler said. It remains true, nevertheless, that the Nazis seized upon the assassination to radicalize their persecution. They could doubtless have found another pretext, but Grynszpan certainly provided them with what they needed.

Second, the Grynszpan story elucidates the refugee crisis of the 1930s and the special agony of Jews cast adrift in a world that had no p!ace for them to land. Grynszpan's parents ended up in Zbaszyn, a special hell between two countries, Poland and Germany, that wanted to get rid of their Jews. Grynszpan himself was effectively stateless, caught in a legal limbo that allowed him no exit. Expelled from France, he had no country to which he could go. Frustrated and depressed, he sought a violent way out, and he was not the last person to find this kind of solution to an impossible problem.

Finally, Grynszpan's ordeal in Germany provides further insight into the dynamics of Nazism and suggests that on rare occasions the machinery of persecution was not as omnipotent as we sometimes think. In the preparation oft the Grynszpan trial, the varions Nazi agencies worked at cross purposes, each attempting to subvert the intentions of the other. Before the threat of scandal, in the end, Hitler beat a hasty and undignified retreat. In the orchestration of falsehood, we often consider Nazism as invinecible. We owe something to Herschel Feibel Grynszpan who showed us how, in this particular instance, it was not.