Background
Herschel Grynszpan was born in Hannover in 1921. His father Zindel Grynszpan had come to Germany from the East in 1911, ironically enough to escape anti-semitism.
Herschel Grynszpan was born in Hannover in 1921. His father Zindel Grynszpan had come to Germany from the East in 1911, ironically enough to escape anti-semitism.
He was one of eight children, who had left home in 1936 before finishing school and led a rootless existence in Brussels and Paris. Already emotionally disturbed, it appears that he intended to kill the German Ambassador in revenge for the expulsion of some 15,000 Polish Jews, including his own family, who at the end of October 1938 were unceremoniously dumped across the Silesian border at Zbaszyn. This brutal German action carried out without any warning had reduced the Grynszpan family to complete destitution.
On 7 November 1938 Grynszpan bought a revolver, went to the German embassy and shot the first diplomat who admitted him to his office - Ernst von Rath - the embassy Councillor who happened to be a known anti-Nazi, already under surveillance by the Gestapo.
A couple of days later Nazi Germany erupted in the Reichskristallnacht (Crystal Night), an orgy of mob violence against German Jewry, skilfully orchestrated by Hitler and incited by the rabble-rousing speeches of Joseph Goebbels. German cities were strewn with the broken glass of Jewish shops, engulfed in the smoke of synagogues set on fire, and Jewish houses were destroyed. The assault had been well prepared, for Jews were systematically expropriated and expelled, no less than twenty thousand were transported to concentration camps and a collective payment of a billion marks was imposed on the Jewish community, which was held responsible for the damage which Nazi hooligans inflicted on it! Grynszpan himself was charged with the murder of von Rath, but never tried before World War II. After the outbreak of the war and the collapse of France in June 1940, he was handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy authorities.
Goebbels evidently planned a gigantic show trial to be held in May 1942, which would blame Grynszpan and world Jewry for the outbreak of the war between France and Germany. The plans were dropped when rumours and an anonymous letter surfaced which claimed that von Rath had engaged in protracted, homosexual relations with Grynszpan. The mere suggestion of scandal and the change for the worse in Franco-German relations evidently persuaded the Nazis to postpone the trial indefinitely.
The fact that he faced criminal proceedings probably saved Grynszpan’s life, for instead of being sent to Auschwitz he was kept first in Sachsenhausen and then in Moabit prison in Berlin.
In 1957 it was revealed that he was alive and living under a false name in Paris. His father also survived and gave evidence at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.