Herschel Grynszpan: The Avenger of Polish Jews

Have any of you heard about Herschel Grynszpan? I don't know. I heard of it myself only a few days ago. It is not very well-known. But it is a very poignant and sorrowful story.

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was born to Sendel and Rikva Grynszpan on the 28th of March, 1921. His parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated to Hannover, Germany, in 1911, from Poland. They settled in Hanover where Sendel started up a tailor's shop, where they were not rich, but had enough to support the family. They became Polish citizens after the Great War and kept that status during their time in Germany. Herschel, who was called Hermann in German, was the youngest of three surviving children: besides him, there was Esther- Berta in German - and Mordechai - Mordecai in German.

Herschel attended a state primary school until he was fourteen, in 1935. Jewish children were already being disciminated against, and, according to a statement he made later, he couldn't take it, and left school at fourteen. He was a young, sensitive, and intelligent youth, and he had few close friends, though he had an active role in the Jewish youth sports club, which was Bar-Kochba Hannover.

His parents decided that he was not safe anymore in Germany, once he had left school. They tried to arrange for him to immigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. With help finantially from various jewish people in Hannover, he was able to go to a yeshiva - a rabbinical seminary - in Frankfurt-am-Mein. He studied Hebrew and Torah there. He was more religious than his parents by all accounts, but left after eleven months. He returned to Hannover, where he applied to leave for Palestine - however, the local Palestine emmigration office told him that he was too young - he'd have to wait another year.

His parents scoffed at that idea, and arranged for him to instead live with his uncle and aunt, Abraham and Chawa Grynszpan, who lived in Paris, France. He obtained a Polish passport and a German residence permit, and received permission to leave Germany for Belgium. Another uncle was living there, a Wolfe Grynszpan. But, however, he had no intention of going to Belgium. He instead entered France illegally in September, 1936 - illegally, because he had no visible means of support as German Jews were not allowed to borrow money over ten Marks.

He only ever learned a few words of French, however, as he lived in a Yiddish-speaking community of Polish Orthodox Jews, for the two or so years he remained there. During those two years, he tried his best to get French legal residency, as he was very uncomfortable with going against the law.

However, he was rejected by French officials. His German re-entry permit had expired in April, 1937, and his Polish passport in January, 1938, so he couldn't provide those. In July of that year, the Perfecture of Police ruled that he had no grounds to stay there, and by August he was ordered to leave the country. He couldn't go to Germany again, however, and in any case had no desire whatsoever to go there. In March of '38, however, Poland had passed a law stating that Polish citizens who had lived for more than five years overseas would not be permitted into Germany. Poland was scared that Germany would dump all of its Polish Jews onto them.

In a state of tears, Grynszpan is quoted to have, here, exclaimed to the 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". He had been on the run for two years, and it was about to get far, far worse for this poor boy.

However, back in Hannover, things were getting very difficult for his family. Both Berta and Mordecai lost their jobs because of their Jewishness, and the tailoring shop was getting fewer and fewer customers. So, Sendel and his wife could not help their son in another country even if they were allowed to send money to other countries.

But, suddenly, things went from bad to far, far worse. The whole family, along with 12,000 other Polish Jews, were suddenly taken from their home by the Gestapo and taken to Zbaszyn, a small town on the rail line between Berlin and Warsaw, where they were not allowed in to Poland, nor back to Germany. With nowhere to go, this large group was literally trapped between two anti-Semistist countries.

Somehow through this mess, Berta was able to write a postcard to Herschel. He received it on the third of November, 1938, some five-six days after it was written. This postcard detailed their plight, and asking Herschel desperately to send money that he did not have. Herschel, who already kept up with the news via newspapers and the brief snatches from the radio that he could get when he was lucky enough to get a house for the night, was enraged beyond anger. It was that day that he decided to get revenge.

He walked into a gun shop, bought a cheap pistol, and, on the 7th of November, 1938, walked into the German Embassy and asked for a German officer. As he stated that he was a German resident, however, the secretary asked for an Ernst vom Rath to see him- as he was the junioir of the two officers available. Ernst vom Rath ushered him in, but Herschel quickly fired off five bullets into his abdomen. A French police officer has testified to hearing him shout, "You are a filthy boche, and here, in the name of twelve thousand Jews, is your document." Vom Rath was critically injured, of course, but could still call for help. Grynszpan was arreated, and pleaded guilty to the assassination. However, vom Rath died on the 9th, two days later, despite the best doctors treating him at orders from Hitler himself.

The news reached Hitler that he had died soon after the death, and Hitler has been reputed to have been murderously angry. Now, it seems that the Nazis had been looking for a way to massacre hundreds of Jews long before, but had not had a big enough pretext to do so. But the assassination seemed perfect. The Nazis, in a public speech, said, while they were a good people and that the Nazis didn't want to make Germany into a barbarous nation (rubbish), they still wouldn't hold it against Germany to take revenge against the Jews for this 'apparent conspiracy'. For they made it seem like this was a planned conspiracy on the part of the Jews.

All the Jew-haters needed no further encouragement. In a devastating night that was later called 'Kristallnacht' (Night of Glass), the Nazis and other nasty types destroyed over 200 synogogues, looted and destroyed more than a hundred Jewish businesses, and reeked havoc on as much of the German Jewish population as they could. But the most astounding thing of Kristallnacht was this: over 30,000 Jews were taken into concentration camps, where only a few lived to tell the tale. As well as this, a lot of Jews were killed that night, ewither in the fires, or by the hands of Nazi extremists.

Of course, Grynszpan was utterly horrified by the destruction his anger had caused to the very people he had tried to avenge. He, very shortly, turned himself in to the French police. There are two options that he could have had for doing this: 1. He could have thought that he was safer by doing this than walking the streets, or 2. He felt utterly guilty and wretched over causing his brethren pain, and turned himself in. I have reason to think that it was the latter - while he was very smart, he was also very sensitive to the sufferings of others, and this alone would have caused him unbearable pain to think that he caused that much pain. He was also most likely, from all accounts, to be Christian; a Christian with a very bad anger problem - and no wonder, from the time-frame he lived in. However, the assassination brought him to notoriety.

On the 14th, American journalist (also the first American journalist ever to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934) Dorothy Thompson, made an impassioned broadcast on the radio to an estimated 5 million listeners in his defence, pointing out that the Nazis had made heroes of the assasins of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. This is an excerpt of what she said that day:

"I am speaking of this boy, [she said]. Soon he will go on trial. The news is that on top of all this terror, this horror, one more must pay. They say he will go to the guillotine, without a trial by jury, with the rights that any common murderer has... Who is on trial in this case? I say we are all on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities. Whether Herschel Grynszpan lives or not won't matter much to Herschel. He was prepared to die when he fired those shots. His young life was already ruined. Since then, his heart has been broken into bits by the results of his deed.

"They say a man is entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers, and a man's kinsmen rally around him, when he is in trouble. But no kinsman of Herschel's can defend him. The Nazi government has announced that if any Jews, anywhere in the world, protest at anything that is happening, further oppressive measures will be taken. They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage. Therefore, we who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard. This boy has become a symbol, and the responsibility for his deed must be shared by those who caused it."

Meanwhile, Jewish organizations were horrified at what he'd done. 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."

It has also been said that he had a homosexual relationship with vom Rath prior to his killing, by some, in an effort to, either disprove the fact that Grynszpan's part in the assassination in Paris was not so much political as emotional (the French law system executes political killings, but takes a rather lenient view on killings based on emotion), or they were just trying to prove that he was like the gay people who were claiming this. You see, he had said that he had had a 'relationship' of that kind when he was at trial. This was false, however, as he told a prisoner at a concentration camp he presumably died in. But, however false it was, it put the Nazis, who'd been planning on blowing the whole thing up as an attempt by the whole Jewish people as a conspiracy - at an absolute standstill. They recognised that, if it were to blow up like they'd planned, it would also show that vom Rath was in fact a homosexual - which rumours had spread about before, but was uncertain. It is now assumed that vom Rath probably was, as it was later discovered that vom Rath had been treated for rectal gonorrhoea at the Berlin Institute of Radiology.

So, the trial was held off. This, of course, was after he'd turned himself in to the Fresnes Prison. He was still in the prison in June of 1940, however, which was when the German Amry began approaching Paris. When Paris was evacuated, he was somnehow left behind, when he was supposed to be taken to Orléans, then sent by bus to the prison at Bourges. This was the point when he turned himself in.

But France had made an aggreement with Germany to hand over everyone Germany asked for. So when Germany asked for Grynszpan, he was handed over. Taken to Bömelburg at the border of the Occupied Zone, he was also driven back to Paris, flown to Berlin and locked up in the Gestapo headquarters at Prince-Albrech-Strasse.

He spent the remainder of his life in German custody, being taken between the Moabit Prison in Berlin to the concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Flossenburg.

There are various beliefs on how he died. Some say that he died by execution in 1940; others say, and, indeed, a Nazin officer said this, that he died of unknown causes just before the war ended. But other views say that all this is wrong, that the officer only said this as a cover-up, and that he survived the war. A few people have said, in the late fifties, that he changed his name and worked as a garage mechanic in Paris, and that he had a wife and two kids. I am prone to hoping that it is this one, as, though there is no proof for any of the views - despite the killing committed by him, he was still a very nice - but a bit bitter by the hatred shown towards him and his race- boy, who directed his anger - maybe - the wrong way. This was the life of Herschel Grynszpan.

What of his family? Though they conducted searches for him, they never found him - maybe, if the survival theory is true, he didn't want to be found, as, even now, he could still be himself a victim of revenge.