Гершель Гриншпан: Убийца и Kristallnacht

Polish Jew, confessed killer of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (Yiddish: הערשל פײַבל גרינשפּאן; German: Hermann Grünspan; 28 March 1921 – last rumoured to be alive 1945, declared dead 1960) was a Polish Jewish expatriate born and raised in Weimar Germany who shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris. The Nazis used this assassination as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo after the Fall of France and brought to Germany; his further fate remains unknown. It is generally assumed that Grynszpan did not survive World War II, and he was declared dead in absentia by the West German government in 1960. This was done at the request of his parents, who said they had not heard anything from him in over 15 years, which was out of character for him. However, this remains a matter of dispute: Kurt Grossman claimed in 1957 that Grynszpan lived in Paris under another identity. A photograph of a man resembling Grynszpan was cited in 2016 as evidence to support the claim that he was still alive in Bamberg, Germany, on 3 July 1946.

Grynszpan was born on 28 March 1921 in Hanover, Germany. His parents, Zindel and Rivka, were Polish Jews who had emigrated in 1911 and settled in Hanover. Zindel opened a tailor's shop, from which he earned a modest living. Because of the German Citizenship Law of 1913, based on the principles of jus sanguinis, Grynszpan was never a German citizen despite his birth in Germany. The family became Polish citizens after the First World War and retained that status during their years in Germany. Grynszpan was the youngest of six children, only three of whom survived childhood. His parents' first child was stillborn in 1912. Their second child, daughter Sophie Helena (born in 1914), died of scarlet fever in 1928. A daughter (Esther, also known as "Berta") was born on 31 January 1916 (she was murdered by the Nazis in 1942 or 1943), and a son (Mordechai) on 29 August 1919. A fifth child, Salomone, was born in 1920 and died in 1931 in a road accident. The Grynszpan family was known as Ostjuden ("Eastern Jews") by the Germans and many West European Jews. The "Ostjuden" usually spoke Yiddish and tended to be more religiously observant, impoverished, and less educated. Herschel dropped out of school at age 14. Grynszpan was considered by his teachers to be intelligent, if rather lazy, a student who never seemed to try to excel at his studies. In Paris, he lived in a small Yiddish speaking enclave of Polish Orthodox Jews. Grynszpan met few people outside it, learning only a few words of French in two years. He initially lived a carefree, bohemian life as a "poet of the streets", spending his days aimlessly wandering and reciting Yiddish poems to himself. Grynszpan's two greatest interests, other than exploring Paris, were spending time in coffeehouses and going to the cinema. He spent this period unsuccessfully trying to become a legal resident of France, because he could not work nor study legally. Grynszpan's German re entry permit expired in April 1937 and his Polish passport expired in January 1938, leaving him without papers. The Paris Police Prefecture ruled in July 1937 that he had no basis for remaining in France, and he was ordered to leave the following month. Grynszpan had no desire to return to Germany. In March 1938, Poland passed a law depriving Polish citizens who had lived continuously abroad for more than five years of their citizenship. Grynszpan became a stateless person as a result, and continued to live illegally in Paris. Lonely and living in poverty on the margins of French life as an illegal immigrant, with no real skills, he grew increasingly desperate and angry as his situation worsened. When the deportees reached the border, they were forced to walk to the Polish town of Zbąszyń (Bentschen in German). Poland refused to admit them at first, since the Sanation regime had no intention of accepting those whom it had just stripped of Polish citizenship. The "Polish operation" (German: die Polenaktion) ended on 29 October, when the Polish government threatened to begin expelling German nationals from Poland. Conditions for the refugees, trapped in the open on the German Polish frontier, were extremely poor; according to a British woman who worked with the Red Cross, "I found thousands crowded together in pigsties. The old, the sick and children herded together in the most inhumane conditions some actually tried to escape back to Germany and were shot". On 3 November, Grynszpan received a postcard from his sister in Zbąszyn dated 31 October recounting what had happened and (in a line which was crossed out) apparently pleading for help. On 6 November 1938, Grynszpan asked his uncle Abraham to send money to his family. Abraham said he had little to spare and was incurring financial costs and legal risks by harbouring his nephew, an illegal immigrant and unemployed youth. After an argument, Grynszpan walked out of his uncle's house with about 300 francs (an average day's wage in Paris at the time) and spent the night in a cheap hotel. On the morning of 7 November, he wrote a farewell postcard to his parents and put it in his pocket. Grynszpan went to a gun shop 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. It is generally believed that Grynszpan wanted to assassinate Johannes von Welczeck, the German ambassador to France. As he entered the embassy Grynszpan walked past von Welczeck, who was leaving for his daily morning walk. At 9:45 am, Grynszpan identified himself as a German resident at the reception desk and asked to see an embassy official; he did not ask for anyone by name. He claimed to be a spy with important intelligence which he had to give to the most senior diplomat available, preferably the ambassador. Unaware that he had just walked past von Welczeck, Grynszpan asked if he could see "His Excellency, the ambassador" to hand over the "most important document" he claimed to have. The clerk on duty asked Ernst vom Rath, the junior of the two embassy officials available, to see him. When Grynszpan entered vom Rath's office, vom Rath asked to see the "most important document". Grynszpan pulled out his gun, and shot him five times in the abdomen. According to the French police account, he shouted right before pulling out his gun: "You're a filthy boche! In the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document!" Grynszpan made no attempt to resist or escape, and identified himself truthfully to the French police. He confessed to shooting vom Rath (who was in critical condition in a hospital), and repeated that his motive was to avenge the persecuted Jews. In his pocket was the postcard to his parents; it read, "With God's 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 Hitler's personal physician, Karl Brandt), the 29 year old vom Rath died on 9 November. On 17 November, he received a much publicized state funeral in Düsseldorf which was attended by Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. In his eulogy, Ribbentrop called the shooting as an attack by Jews on the German people: "We understand the challenge, and we accept it". Vom Rath's assassination was used to justify antisemitic pogroms in Germany. Vom Rath died on the fifteenth anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, the greatest holiday of the Nazi calendar. That evening, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbelsafter consulting with Hitlermade an inflammatory speech at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich (where the putsch had been organised) to an audience of veteran Nazis from throughout Germany. It would not be surprising, Goebbels 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" should not be openly organised by the Nazi Party or the SA, but should not be opposed or prevented either. That vom Rath's death was a pretext was indicated by Goebbels' diary entry for that day: "In the afternoon the death of the German diplomat vom Rath is announced. That's good I go to the Party reception in the old Rathaus. Terrific activity. I brief Hitler on the affair. He decides: allow the demonstrations to go on. Withdraw the police. The Jews should feel the people's fury. That's right. I issue appropriate instructions to the police and party. Then I give a brief speech on the subject to the Party's leadership. Thunderous applause. Everyone dashed to the telephone. Now the people will act". Within hours, Nazis began a pogrom against Jewish communities throughout Germany which became known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) and lasted all night and into the following day. More than 90 Jews were killed; over 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps (where over a thousand died before the remainder were released, several months later), and thousands of Jewish shops, homes, offices and more than 200 synagogues were smashed or burned. More than one billion Reichsmark in property damage (about US$400 million at the time, or $6.7 billion in 2015 dollars) was reported. Although Jews were able to file insurance claims for their property losses, Hermann Göring (in charge of German economic planning) ruled that the claims would not be paid. Kristallnacht shocked the world, and helped end the climate of support for the appeasement of Hitler in Britain, France and the United States. It also triggered a new wave of Jewish emigration from Germany. Grynszpan was distraught when he learned that his action was used by the Nazis to justify further violent assaults on German Jews, although his family (having been deported to the Polish border) was safe from that particular manifestation of Nazi antisemitism. The Nazi government had been planning violence against the Jews for some time, and was waiting for a suitable pretext.

From November 1938 to June 1940, Grynszpan was imprisoned in the Fresnes Prison in Paris while legal arguments continued over the conduct of his trial. His defence team attempted to delay the trial as long as possible on procedural grounds in the hope that the publicity surrounding the vom Rath murder would subside (making the trial less politicized), with no opposition from the prosecution. Goebbels sent Wolfgang Diewerge, a lawyer and journalist who had joined the NSDAP in 1930, to represent the German government in Paris. Friedrich Grimm (a prominent German lawyer and a professor of international law at the University of Münster) was also sent to Paris, ostensibly representing the vom Rath family, but was widely known to be an agent of Goebbels. Grimm tried to argue that Grynszpan should be extradited to Germany (although he was not a German citizen), but the French government would not agree to this. Grimm and Diewerge knew each other well, working closely together in the 1934 Cairo Jew Trial, and their efforts in Paris in 1938 39 largely repeated their work in Cairo. Their attempts to find the Hintermänner and link Grynszpan to Frankfurter slowed the case; neither man would accept the contentions of the Paris police that the Hintermänner did not exist and the killings of vom Rath and Gustloff were unrelated. According to American historian Alan Steinweis, the lack of evidence for these Hintermänner did not lead Grimm and Diewerge to the conclusion that they did not exist; instead, they believed that the Jewish conspiracy against Germany was more insidious than they had realized (erasing all evidence of its existence). He was delivered to Bömelburg (on the border of the occupied zone), driven to Paris, flown to Berlin and imprisoned at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse.

Grynszpan spent the rest of his life in German custody, at the Moabit prison in Berlin and in concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. At Sachsenhausen he was housed in the bunker reserved for special prisoners with Kurt Schuschnigg, the last pre Anschluss chancellor of Austria. Grynszpan received relatively mild treatment because Goebbels intended him to be the subject of a show trial proving the complicity of "international Jewry" in the vom Rath killing. Grimm and Wolfgang Diewerge (an official in Goebbels' ministry) were put in charge of trial preparations, using files seized from Moro Giafferi's Paris offices; Moro Giafferi had escaped to Switzerland. Goebbels found bringing Grynszpan to trial in Germany as difficult as it had been in France. Although the Nazis held unchallenged political power, the state bureaucracy retained its independence in many areas (and harboured the most effective networks of the German resistance). The Justice Ministry (still staffed by lawyers intent on upholding the letter of the law) argued that since Grynszpan was not a German citizen, he could not be tried in Germany for a murder he had committed outside Germany; a minor at the time, he could not face execution. Arguments dragged on through 1940 and into 1941. The solution was to charge Grynszpan with high treason, for which he could be tried and executed. Persuading everyone concerned of its legality took some time, and he was not indicted until October 1941. The indictment stated that Grynszpan's objective in shooting vom Rath was to "prevent through force of threats the Führer and Reichschancellor from the conduct of their constitutional functions" at the behest of international Jewry. In November, Goebbels saw Hitler and obtained his approval for a show trial which would put "World Jewry in the dock". The trial was set for January 1942, with former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet scheduled to testify that "World Jewry" was responsible for dragging France into a war with Germany (its supposed political objective). The trial did not begin in January 1942. The United States had entered the war the previous month, as German armies suffered a major setback on the Eastern Front before battling the Red Army near Moscow. The Riom Trial of Léon Blum and other French politicians was due to begin in February, and Goebbels did not want two show trials at once. There were also further legal difficulties; it was feared that Grynszpan would challenge the legality of his deportation from France, which the Justice Ministry officials felt had been "irregular". Most disturbing of all was the revelation that Grynszpan would claim that he had shot vom Rath because of a homosexual relationship. This was communicated to Grimm, Diewerge, and other officials by Justice Ministry state secretary Roland Freisler (later the head of the People's Court) on 22 January. Grynszpan, who had rejected the idea of using this defence when Moro Giafferi suggested it in 1938, had apparently changed his mind. He told Heinrich Jagusch (one of his Gestapo interrogators) in mid 1941 that he intended using this defence but the Justice Ministry did not inform Goebbels, who was furious. He wrote in his diary:

The Justice Ministry indicted Grynszpan under Paragraph 175, and the infuriated Goebbels said that the additional indictment implied that Grynszpan and vom Rath had had a homosexual relationship. Goebbels again saw Hitler in March, and assured him that the trial would begin in May (without warning him about the possibility of a crime of passion defence). In April, he was still grappling with the problem:

Acting Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger wrote to Goebbels on 10 April demanding to know whether Hitler, when he had authorized the trial, had been aware that Grynszpan was planning to use a homosexual defence. What troubled the Justice Ministry was not the allegation that vom Rath had had a sexual relationship with Grynszpan; they knew it was false, and Grynszpan had said as much to some of his fellow inmates at Sachsenhausen. The problem was their belief that vom Rath was homosexual; Grynszpan had been given details of his personal life by Moro Giafferi in Paris, and would reveal them in court. This would embarrass the vom Rath family and the Foreign Ministry; vom Rath's brother Gustav, a Wehrmacht officer, had been court martialed for homosexuality. Gustav's homosexuality suggested, given the science and social paradigms of the time, the possibility that his brother may have been homosexual as well. blockquote|I received an order that Grynszpan was in custody in Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8, and he had to be further examined concerning who was likely to have been behind the scenes. Accordingly I gave instructions to bring Grynszpan no, not this way – accordingly Krischak gave orders – Krischak was dealing with the matter – to bring Grynszpan and either way it would have been useless, I said to myself. I still remember exactly, for I was curious to see what Grynszpan looked like. Nothing, obviously, emerged from the whole thing and I merely said then to Krischak that if he had completed the interrogation, I wanted him to bring him to me upstairs, for I very much wanted – for once – to look at the man Grynszpan. I wanted to talk to him. And I did then, exchange a few words with Grynszpan I don't know what what happened to him. I did not hear anything more. I didn't hear anything more about it. Several authorities believe that, according to evidence, Grynszpan died at Sachsenhausen sometime in late 1942; the historical consensus is that he did not survive the war. Soltikow wrote that he was doing a service to "World Jewry" by "proving" that Grynszpan killed vom Rath as the result of a homosexual relationship gone sour, rather than as the product of a world Jewish conspiracy. That the Jew who had murdered a German was not prosecuted for his crime by the French, despite (supposedly) living openly in Paris, was used as argument for not prosecuting Germans who were involved in the murder of Jews during the Shoah. Soltikow was sued for defamation by the vom Rath family. In 2013, Dutch historian Sidney Smeets called Solitkow a con man whose allegations about Grynszpan and vom Rath were lies. During his trial in Munich, Soltikow claimed that Grynszpan was present during the previous day's court proceedings as a spectator. Heiber's article was unmasked as based entirely on rumours that Grynszpan was alive and well in Paris. Larsen's report was based on talks with people who claimed to have met people who knew that Grynszpan was living in Paris; despite their claims about his survival, no one had ever actually seen Grynszpan. Grynszpan was declared legally dead by the West German government in 1960 (with his date of death fixed as 8 May 1945). This declaration was at the request of his parents, who had emigrated to Israel in 1948 and said that they had heard nothing from him since the war. Grynszpan was widely shunned during his lifetime by Jewish communities around the world, who saw him as an irresponsible, immature teenager who (by recklessly killing a minor official like vom Rath) brought down the wrath of the Nazis in Kristallnacht. led to speculation that Grynszpan could have survived the war. The photograph, taken at a displaced persons camp in Bamberg, Bavaria on 3 July 1946, shows a man resembling Grynszpan participating in a demonstration by Holocaust survivors against British refusal to let them emigrate to the British mandate of Palestine. A facial recognition test indicated a 95% possibility, the highest possible score, that the man in the photo was Grynszpan.