Herschel Grynszpan

Herschel Grynszpan shot a German diplomat in Paris in November 1938, and the Nazi state used it as the pretext for Kristallnacht. He was seventeen, a Polish Jew born in Hanover, living illegally in Paris with an uncle after his residence permit expired. In late October his family were among some twelve thousand Polish Jews expelled from Germany at a few hours' notice and left in the open at the Polish border, where Poland refused to admit them; his sister sent a postcard describing it. On 7 November he bought a revolver, walked into the German embassy and shot Ernst vom Rath, who died two days later. Goebbels used the death to launch what was presented as spontaneous public anger: on 9 and 10 November some 267 synagogues were burned, thousands of businesses wrecked, at least ninety-one people killed and around thirty thousand Jewish men sent to camps, with the Jewish community then fined a billion Reichsmarks for the damage. Grynszpan was held by the French, handed to the Germans in 1940, and prepared for a show trial that was repeatedly postponed - reportedly because he threatened to claim a homosexual relationship with vom Rath. No trial was held. He disappears from the record in 1942 and was declared dead in 1960, backdated to 1945. Whether his act was a private response to his family's expulsion or something the Nazi leadership had been waiting for is not really a question: the pogrom's logistics were organised within hours, which no spontaneous outburst manages. His parents survived and reached Israel. A German court considered declaring him dead in the 1950s at his father's request, and a photograph apparently showing him alive in 1946 surfaced in 2016 without resolving anything.

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