Herschel Grynszpan and Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Herschel Grynszpan and Kristallnacht
On 7 November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee living in Paris, purchased a 6.35 mm revolver. He had recently received a distressing postcard from his sister, Berta, detailing how their family had been forcibly expelled from Germany during the Polenaktion. His parents and siblings were among thousands of Jews stranded in horrific conditions in the Polish border town of Zbąszyń.
Driven by anger over his family's treatment and a desperate desire to protest the Nazi regime, Herschel decided to seek revenge. That same morning, he went to the German Embassy at 78 Rue de Lille, Paris, and asked to see an official, carrying a final note in his pocket asking his parents for their forgiveness. He was eventually shown into the office of Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Once inside, Grynszpan reportedly shouted a protest on behalf of the thousands of persecuted Jews before firing five rounds, hitting the diplomat twice. While vom Rath was rushed to the Clinique d'Alma for emergency surgery, Herschel immediately surrendered to the French police outside.
On 9 November 1938, Ernst vom Rath succumbed to his wounds. Before he died, Hitler had symbolically promoted him to the rank of Legal Counsellor First Class, and he was later granted a massive state funeral attended by Hitler himself. The death of vom Rath was immediately seized upon by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, as the catalyst for a coordinated wave of violence. This resulted in a state-sponsored pogrom against the Jews of Germany and Austria that became known as Kristallnacht, or the 'Night of Broken Glass.
The instigators of the pogrom—specifically Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich—remained in the background to make the violence appear as a spontaneous outpouring of public grief and anger. To maintain this facade, many of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and SS members were ordered to wear civilian clothing while they rampaged through cities and towns. They targeted Jewish homes and businesses for destruction and set fire to hundreds of synagogues, all while the police were ordered not to intervene.
Thousands of Jewish men—approximately 30,000—were seized and sent to concentration camps, while hundreds were murdered or died from the brutal treatment that followed. Across the Reich, over 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked and more than 1,000 synagogues were torched. By the following morning, the streets were covered in shards of shattered windows that twinkled in the light, giving the atrocity its name: Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
The pogrom drew widespread international criticism, and even Hermann Göring—head of the Four-Year Plan—was appalled by the scale of the destruction. His concern was purely economic; he was frustrated by the loss of taxable property and the potential collapse of insurance companies. To alleviate these economic risks, the Nazi regime officially blamed the Jews for the violence. They were forced to forfeit all insurance claims to the state and, as a community, were compelled to pay a collective ‘atonement fine’ of one billion Reichsmarks for the very damage inflicted upon them.
When war broke out in September 1939, Herschel Grynszpan was being held in Fresnes Prison, south of Paris. In June 1940, as German forces broke through French defences and advanced rapidly toward the capital, he was moved to a prison in Toulouse. Following France’s capitulation, the country was divided into the Occupied Zone in the north and the 'Free Zone' in the south. The latter was governed by the new French state under Marshal Philippe Pétain, headquartered in the spa town of Vichy.
On 18 July 1940, the Vichy government illegally handed Grynszpan over to the Germans. He was transferred back to Paris and then to the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße in Berlin for interrogation. After being held at the Moabit prison, he was moved to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg and eventually to Sachsenhausen, where he was kept as a high-profile prisoner. The Nazis intended to use him for a major propaganda show trial, which never took place. During his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann testified that he had personally met and spoken with Grynszpan around 1943 or 1944 to ensure he was still alive and fit for trial.
Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had intended to put Grynszpan through a massive international show trial to justify Nazi aggression against the Jewish people. However, the plan was abandoned after Grynszpan—likely on the advice of his lawyers—altered his testimony. He claimed that the assassination was not political but a 'crime of passion' resulting from a homosexual relationship with Ernst vom Rath. Fearful that a public trial would humiliate the regime by exposing a German diplomat as a 'homosexual predator,' Goebbels and Hitler cancelled the proceedings to avoid a propaganda disaster.
There is no definitive record of what happened to Grynszpan after 1942; the paper trail vanished once the planned show trial was abandoned. While some theories suggest he may have survived the war under a false identity, it is more widely believed that he was executed by the Gestapo, as the Nazis often murdered high-profile prisoners to ensure they did not outlive the regime. Both of Herschel Grynszpan’s parents survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel. In 1960, they applied to a West German court to have their son officially declared dead, a request that was granted later that year."
On 1 June 1960, the Lower Court (Amtsgericht) in Hanover officially declared Herschel Grynszpan dead, fixing 8 May 1945—the end of the war in Europe—as his legal date of death. Despite this, rumours have persisted for decades that he survived his incarceration. In 2016, a photograph surfaced from July 1946 showing a young man in a displaced persons camp who bore a remarkable resemblance to Grynszpan. While facial recognition tests suggested a high probability of a match, historians remain cautious, as no concrete evidence has ever emerged to confirm that he lived to see the liberation.
While there is a slight resemblance, it remains highly dubious that the man in the photograph is actually Grynszpan. Given the history of the Nazi regime, very few high-profile prisoners escaped execution as the war drew to a close. Furthermore, during his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann—who had been tasked with tracking Grynszpan’s status—testified that he had heard nothing to suggest the young man had survived. To this day, the true fate of the teenager whose desperate act sparked a turning point in history remains one of the enduring mysteries of the Holocaust.
