Grynszpan (Gruenspan), Herschel

(1921–?)

   Assassin of a Nazi diplomat. On 28 October 1938, Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old youth, entered the German embassy in Paris and fired a pistol at the third secretary, Ernest von Rath. He then gave himself up to the French police. He had been driven to this act of desperation by a postcard from his elderly parents in Hanover, Germany, who had been rounded up with twelve thousand other Polish Jews, dumped across the border and left exposed and starving in a no-man’s-land because the Polish government refused to accept them. Herschel wanted to draw world attention to the persecution of the Jews by the HITLER regime.

   Two days later Ernst von Rath died of his wound. The Nazi authorities seized on this as a pretext to smash the German Jewish community by a ‘spontaneous’ nationwide pogrom that had been prepared for some time. This action became known as the Kristallnacht, from the broken glass that littered the ground wherever Jews were located in Germany. All the synagogues, nearly six hundred of them, were burnt or damaged. Everywhere Jews were killed or beaten up and their homes looted. Thirty thousand of them were flung into concentration camps. Businesses were confiscated and transferred to Aryans. The worldwide protests were brushed off by the German government. A shameless collective fine of a million marks was imposed on the German Jews, ostensibly to pay for the damage.

   On the capitulation of France in 1940, Grynszpan escaped to Vichy France but on returning to the Occupied Zone, he fell into the hands of the Gestapo and was never heard of again.