Grynszpan : A little story of resistance Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (28 March 1921 — last known to be alive 1943-1944, declared dead 1960) was a Polish-Jewish refugee, born in Germany. His assassination of the Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris provided the Nazis with the pretext for the Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo after the German invasion of France and brought to Germany. Grynszpans fate is unknown. However, he most probably did not survive the war.] One report said he was executed in 1940 while Fritz Dahms, an official in the German Foreign Office, revealed that he had died just before the end of the World War II. In 1957 an article written by the German historian Helmut Heimer, claimed that he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and survived the war, while another one by Egon Larsen published two years later argued that Grynszpan had changed his name and was living in Paris and working as a garage mechanic. Herschel Grynszpan was born in Hanover, Germany. His parents, Sendel and Riva (sometimes called Berta), were Polish Jews who had emigrated from Poland in 1911 and settled in Hanover, where Sendel opened a tailors shop, from which the family made a modest living. They became Polish citizens after World War I, and retained that status during their years in Germany.[5] Herschel was the youngest of six children, only three of whom survived childhood. The first child was stillborn in 1912. The second child, daughter Sophie Helena, born in 1914, died in 1928 of scarlet fever. A daughter Esther was born on 31 January 1916, and a son, Mordechai, on 29 August 1919. A fifth child, Salomon, was born in 1920 and died in 1931 in a road accident. On 28 March 1921, Herschel was born. Herschel attended a state primary school until he was 14, in 1935. He later said that he left school because Jewish students were already facing discrimination. He was an intelligent, sensitive youth who had few close friends, although he was an active member of the Jewish youth sports club, Bar-Kochba Hanover. When he left school, his parents decided there was no future for him in Germany, and tried to arrange for him to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. With financial assistance from Hanovers Jewish community, Herschel was sent to a yeshiva (rabbinical seminary) in Frankfurt, where he studied Hebrew and the Torah: he was, by all accounts, more religious than his parents. After eleven months he left the yeshiva and returned to Hanover, where he applied to emigrate to Palestine. But the local Palestine emigration office told him he was too young, and would have to wait a year. Rather than wait, Herschel and his parents decided that he should go to live with his uncle and aunt, Abraham and Chawa Grynszpan, in Paris. He obtained a Polish passport and a German residence permit, and received permission to leave Germany for Belgium, where another uncle, Wolf Grynszpan, was living. He had no intention of staying in Belgium, however, and in September 1936 he entered France illegally. He was unable to enter France legally because he had no financial support, while Jews were not permitted to take money out of Germany. In Paris, Grynszpan lived in a small Yiddish-speaking enclave of Polish Orthodox Jews, and met few people outside it, learning only a few words of French in two years. He spent this period trying to get legal residence in France, without which he could not work or study legally, but was rejected by French officials. His re-entry permit for Germany expired in April 1937 and his Polish passport expired in January 1938, leaving him without legal papers. In July 1937, the Prefecture of Police ruled that Grynszpan had no basis for his request to stay in France, and in August he was ordered to leave the country. He had no re-entry permit for Germany and in any case had no desire to go there. In March 1938, Poland had passed a law depriving Polish citizens who had lived continuously abroad for more than five years of their citizenship. Grynszpan effectively became a stateless person as a result, and continued to live in Paris illegally. He was active in Jewish émigré circles and was a member of the Bundist youth movement Tsukunft. Meanwhile, the position of the Grynszpan family in Hanover was becoming increasingly precarious. Sendels business was declining, and Herschels siblings both lost their jobs. In August 1938 the German authorities announced that all residence permits for foreigners were being cancelled and would have to be renewed: it was obvious that Jews would not be given new permits. Polands government would not accept Jews of Polish origin, whom it no longer considered to be Polish citizens, after 31 October. On 26 October, to beat the deadline, the Gestapo was ordered to arrest and deport all Polish Jews residing in Germany immediately. The Grynszpan family was among the estimated 12,000 Polish Jews arrested, stripped of their property, and herded aboard trains headed for Poland. At the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Sendel Grynszpan recounted the events of their deportation on the night of 27 October 1938: Then they took us in police trucks, in prisoners’ lorries, about 20 men in each truck, and they took us to the railway station. The streets were full of people shouting: Juden raus! Aus nach Palästina! (Out with the Jews! Off to Palestine!). When they reached the border, they were forced to walk 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) to the Polish border town of Zbąszyń (Bentschen, in German). Poland refused to admit them at first, as they were effectively stateless. The Grynszpans and thousands of other Polish-Jewish deportees stranded at the border were fed by the Polish Red Cross. It was from Zbąszyn that his sister Berta sent a postcard to Herschel in Paris, recounting what had happened and, in a line that was crossed out, apparently pleading for help. The postcard was dated 31 October and reached Herschel on Thursday, 3 November. On the evening of Sunday, 6 November 1938, Grynszpan asked his uncle Abraham to send money to his family. Abraham said he had little to spare, and that he was incurring both financial cost and legal risks by harbouring his nephew, an undocumented alien and unemployed youth. There was a furious scene, and Herschel walked out of his uncles house carrying only about 300 francs. He spent the night in a cheap hotel. On the morning of 7 November, Grynszpan wrote a farewell postcard to his parents, which he put in a pocket. He went to a gunshop in the Rue du Faubourg St Martin, where he bought a 6.35mm revolver and a box of 25 bullets for 235 francs. He caught the metro to the Solférino station and walked to the German Embassy at 78 Rue de Lille. At 09:45 am at the Embassy reception desk, Grynszpan represented himself as a German resident and asked to see an Embassy official; he did not ask for anyone by name (an important point in the light of later events). The clerk on duty asked Ernst vom Rath, the more junior of the two Embassy officials available, to see him. When Grynszpan entered vom Raths office, he pulled out his gun and shot vom Rath, who was under Gestapo investigation for pro-Jewish activity, five times in the abdomen. According to the French police account, he shouted Youre a filthy boche and that he acted in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews. Grynszpan made no attempt to resist or escape, and identified himself correctly to the French police. He confessed to shooting vom Rath (who was in critical condition in a hospital), and again said that his motive for doing so was to avenge the persecuted German Jews. In his pocket was the postcard to his parents. It said: With Gods help. 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]. Despite the best efforts of French and German doctors, including Adolf Hitlers personal physician Karl Brandt, vom Rath died on 9 November, aged 29. On 17 November, vom Rath was given a state funeral in Düsseldorf, which was attended by Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop with considerable publicity. In his funeral oration, Ribbentrop described the shooting as an attack by the Jews on the German people: We understand the challenge, and we accept it, he said. Then, vom Raths assassination was used as a justification for planned anti-semitic atrocities and pogroms in Germany. The day of Raths death was the fifteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the Tag der Bewegung (Day of the Movement): the greatest day of the Nazi calendar. That evening Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, after consulting with Hitler, made an inflammatory speech at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich where the Putsch had been organised, in front of a crowd of veteran Nazis from all over Germany. It would not be surprising, he said, if the German people were so outraged by the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jew that they took the law into their own hands and attacked Jewish businesses, community centres and synagogues. Such spontaneous outbursts, he said, should not be openly organised by the Nazi Party or the SA but neither should they be opposed or prevented. Within hours, Nazis began a pogrom against Jewish communities throughout Germany, known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), which lasted all night and into the next day. More than 90 people were killed, more than 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps (where over a thousand died of mistreatment before the remainder were released some months later) and thousands of Jewish shops, homes, offices and more than 200 synagogues smashed up or burned. More than 1 billion Reichsmarks damage to property was reported. Though Jews were able to make insurance claims for their property losses, Herman Göring, in charge of German economic planning, ruled that the claims would not be paid in this instance. These events shocked and horrified world opinion and helped bring to an end the climate of support for appeasement of Hitler in Britain, France and the United States. They also caused a new wave of Jewish emigration from Germany. Grynszpan was distraught that his action was used by the Nazis as a justification for further violent assaults on the German Jews (although his own family, having already been deported to the Polish border, were safe from this particular manifestation of Nazi anti-Semitism). The assassination of vom Rath was a pretext for the launch of the pogrom. The Nazi government had been planning violence against the Jews for some time and were waiting for an appropriate pretext. The death of vom Rath and the horrors of the Kristallnacht pogroms brought Herschel Grynszpan international notoriety. On 14 November, Dorothy Thompson, who in 1934 had become the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, made an impassioned broadcast to an estimated 5 million listeners in defence of Grynszpan, pointing out that the Nazis themselves had made heroes of the assassins of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Liberal and left-wing newspapers and commentators in many countries echoed her sentiments. While deploring the assassination, they argued that Grynszpan had been driven to his act by the Nazi persecution of German Jews and of his family in particular. Jewish organisations were horrified by Grynszpans action, which they condemned more severely than most non-Jewish liberals, while echoing the plea of extenuating circumstances, and condemning the subsequent victimization of all German Jews in response to the act of an isolated individual. The World Jewish Congress deplored the fatal shooting of an official of the German Embassy by a young Polish Jew of seventeen, but protested energetically against the violent attacks in the German press against the whole of Judaism because of this act and especially against the reprisals taken against the German Jews. The Alliance Israélite Universelle in France rejected all forms of violence, regardless of author or victim, but indignantly protested the barbarous treatment inflicted on an entire innocent population. Isidore Franckel wanted a well-known but non-Jewish lawyer as co-counsel and engaged Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, a flamboyant Corsican, leading anti-fascist activist, and a former Education Minister in the Radical government of Édouard Herriot, and a Yiddish-speaking lawyer, Serge Weill-Goudchaux, as his associate. Legal fees and costs were paid from Thompsons fundraising for Grynszpans defence. Until Franckel and Moro-Giafferi took over the defence, everybody had accepted that Grynszpan went to the Embassy in a rage and shot the first German he saw, as a political act to avenge the persecution of his family and German Jews in general. Grynszpans own statements after his arrest supported this: he reportedly said to the Paris police: 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. Franckel and Moro-Giafferi, however, took the view that if Grynszpan was allowed to claim that he had shot vom Rath with such a motive, this would result in his certain conviction and possibly take him to the guillotine (despite his being a minor), since French law took a severe view of political assassination. If, on the other hand, the crime could be shown to have had a non-political motive, this might lead to an acquittal, or at least to a lesser sentence, since French law traditionally took a lenient view of the crime passionel (crime of passion). His legal strategy was thus to depoliticize Grynszpans actions. The Nazis, however, were on Grynszpans trail. Grimm, by now an official of the German Foreign Ministry, and SS Sturmbannführer Karl Bömelburg arrived in Paris on 15 June with orders to find Grynszpan. They followed him to Orléans, then to Bourges, where they learned that he had been sent to Toulouse, which was in the Unoccupied Zone to be run by the authorities of Vichy France. France had surrendered on 22 June, and one of the terms of the armistice gave the Germans the right to demand that France surrender all Germans named by the German Government to the German occupation authorities. Although Grynszpan was not a German citizen, Germany had been his last place of legal residence, and the Vichy authorities made no objection to Grimms formal demand that he be handed over. On 18 July, Grynszpan was delivered to Karl Bömelburg at the border of the Occupied Zone. He was driven back to Paris, flown to Berlin, and locked up in the Gestapos headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Grynszpan spent the remainder of his life in German custody, being shuttled between Moabit Prison in Berlin and the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. At Sachsenhausen he was housed in the bunker reserved for special prisoners - he shared it with the last Chancellor of Austria, Kurt Schuschnigg. He received comparatively mild treatment because Goebbels intended that Grynszpan be the subject of a propaganda show trial, to prove the complicity of international Jewry in the vom Rath murder. Grimm and an official of Goebbelss ministry, Wolfgang Diewerge, were put in charge of the preparations, using the files which had been seized from Moro-Giafferis offices in Paris (Moro-Giafferi himself had escaped to Switzerland). Goebbels, however, found it just as difficult to bring Grynszpan to trial in Germany as he had done in France. The Nazis held unchallenged political power, but the state bureaucracy retained its independence in many areas (and in fact harboured the most effective networks of the German Resistance). The Justice Ministry, still staffed by lawyers concerned to uphold the letter of the law, argued correctly that since Grynszpan was not a German citizen, he could not be tried in Germany for a murder he had committed outside Germany, and since he had been a minor at the time he could not face the death penalty. In any event, by the beginning of May 1942 it was clear to all that Hitler did not favour a trial. The matter was raised on and off for several months more, but without Hitlers approval there could be no progress. In recognition of this, Grynszpan was moved in September to the prison at Magdeburg. Grynszpans fate after September 1942 is not known. Since his trial was never actually called off, merely postponed indefinitely, he was probably kept alive in case circumstances changed and a trial became possible. He was still alive in late 1943 or early 1944, when he was interrogated by Adolf Eichmann at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. The writer Ron Roizen reported rumours that Grynszpan was still alive in Magdeburg Prison in January 1945. There were also rumours after the war that he had survived and was living under another name in Paris, but there is no evidence for this. He was declared legally dead by the West German government in 1960. His parents, having sent him to safety in Paris while they and his siblings stayed in Germany, survived the war. Having been deported to Poland, they escaped in 1939 to the Soviet Union. After the war they emigrated to the Palestine Mandate, which became Israel. (text via Wikipedia)
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 18:04:29 +0000