Grynszpan's attack

Late in the morning of 7 November 1938, a slight seventeen-year-old with a Polish passport walked into the German embassy on the rue de Lille in Paris. His name was Herschel Grynszpan; he had been born and brought up in Hanover and for two years had been hiding in Paris as an illegal immigrant. That morning he had bought a 6.35 mm revolver in a shop on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. At the embassy he said he had an important document to deliver and asked to speak to a member of the diplomatic staff. He was sent to the legation secretary Ernst vom Rath, a 29-year-old diplomat and member of the NSDAP since 1932. Once they were alone in the office, Grynszpan drew his weapon and fired five shots. Two hit vom Rath in the abdomen. The assailant made no attempt to flee; he gave himself up to the French police and declared at once that he had acted on behalf of the persecuted Jews.

The shots in Paris were neither a conspiracy nor the start of a “Jewish war on Germany”, as Nazi propaganda immediately proclaimed. They were the desperate, solitary act of a teenager whose family had been thrown out of Germany onto the Polish border ten days earlier. For the authorities of the Third Reich, however, they became the pretext they had been waiting for.

A family from Hanover

Herschel’s parents, the tailor Sendel (Zindel) Grynszpan and Ryfka, née Silberberg, were Jews from Radomsko in the Kingdom of Poland. In 1911 they moved to Hanover, where they raised their children. After the First World War the family received Polish citizenship; German citizenship was out of reach, because the German law of 1913 based citizenship on descent rather than place of birth. There were many such families in the Reich: in 1938 some 70,000 Jews with Polish citizenship lived in Germany and in newly annexed Austria.

After the Nazis came to power, after the boycott of Jewish shops and the Nuremberg Laws, Herschel had no future in Germany. In 1935 he left school without a certificate and spent almost a year at a yeshiva in Frankfurt; his attempt to emigrate to Palestine ended in refusal, as he was too young. In the summer of 1936 he went legally to an uncle in Brussels, and in September smugglers took him across the border into France, to another uncle, Abraham, in Paris. For two years he tried in vain to obtain a residence permit. His Polish passport expired at the beginning of 1938, the German authorities would not let him return to Hanover, and in August 1938 France ordered him to leave the country. His uncle hid him in an attic. Without work, papers or prospects, Herschel lived in constant fear of the police.

The Polenaktion

His family’s fate was decided by a dispute between Berlin and Warsaw. On 31 March 1938, a few weeks after the Anschluss of Austria, the Sejm passed a law allowing citizenship to be withdrawn from Poles who had lived abroad for more than five years and had “lost contact with the Polish state”. The Polish government feared that Germany would drive tens of thousands of Jews with Polish passports into Poland and wanted to prevent it. In October the Polish authorities announced that from 30 October passports issued abroad would entitle the holder to return only if a consulate had added a special inspection stamp. In practice, Jews from the Reich did not get such stamps. The Germans concluded that they would be saddled with tens of thousands of stateless people.

The response was an operation carried out on Heinrich Himmler’s orders by the Gestapo and police under Reinhard Heydrich. On the evening of 27 October and over the next two days, at least 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship were detained throughout the Reich – mostly men, but in many cities whole families. They were allowed to take only a little food and the barest essentials, loaded onto special trains and taken to the border near Zbąszyń, Chojnice and Bytom. There they were driven at bayonet point across the strip of no man’s land to the Polish side. The operation was halted on 29 October, when the Polish government threatened retaliatory expulsions of German citizens. Some of the deportees were able to travel on into Poland to relatives; several thousand others were stranded in Zbąszyń, where they lived for months in mills, stables and barracks, supported by the Polish Red Cross and Jewish organisations. The Zbąszyń camp was not closed until the summer of 1939.

Among those expelled from Hanover on the night of 27–28 October were Herschel’s parents, his sister Berta and his brother Mordechai. His father described it in 1961 in Jerusalem, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann: the police took them by lorry to the station, and the streets were full of a crowd shouting “Jews out, to Palestine!” On 31 October Berta wrote a postcard to her brother from Zbąszyń. It reached Paris on 3 November. Herschel was also reading ever more harrowing reports from the border in the Yiddish press of Paris. On 6 November he quarrelled with his uncle, who would not or could not send money to the family, left the house and spent the night in a cheap hotel.

Shots at the embassy

On the morning of 7 November Herschel wrote a card to his parents and put it in his pocket. He wrote in German, with the Hebrew “With God’s help” at the top: “My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me. My heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and the tragedy of 12,000 Jews. I must protest in such a way that the whole world hears my protest, and I will do so.” He signed it with his German name, Hermann.

The ambassador, Johannes von Welczeck, had just gone out for his morning walk, and Grynszpan passed him in the doorway without knowing who he was. Since he did not know the name of any diplomat, the doorman sent him to whichever of the two duty secretaries happened to be present. According to the French police record, before firing Grynszpan shouted: “You are a filthy boche, and in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is your document!” The wounded vom Rath still managed to strike his attacker and run out of the room calling for help.

Most historians believe the victim was chosen at random: Grynszpan wanted to shoot “some” representative of the Reich, and vom Rath was simply the official on duty. Later rumours that the two knew each other from the Paris homosexual milieu rest on no solid evidence; Grynszpan put forward this version only in a German prison, as a line of defence. Nor is there any basis for the Nazi propaganda claim that a “world Jewish conspiracy” lay behind the attack. The French investigation established that the young man had acted alone.

Two days of propaganda

The German authorities realised at once what an opportunity they had been given. On 7 November itself the state news agency DNB instructed all newspapers to put the news of the attack on their front pages and to stress that “the attack must have the gravest consequences for the Jews in Germany”. On 8 November the Völkischer Beobachter declared in an editorial that the shots in Paris marked a new stage in the Jews’ struggle against Germany. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda pointed out that the attack had been carried out on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Adolf Hitler sent his personal physician Karl Brandt and the well-known surgeon Georg Magnus to Paris, and promoted the wounded vom Rath by several grades, to legation counsellor first class.

The violence began before the diplomat died. On the evening of 7 November in Kassel, SA and SS men in civilian clothes wrecked the synagogue and Jewish homes, and during the night and on 8 November similar attacks were repeated in nearby small towns in Hesse, including Bebra, Rotenburg and Eschwege. In Bad Hersfeld the synagogue was burned down, and in Felsberg the first Jewish man was killed. On the afternoon of 9 November the synagogue in Dessau was ablaze. Historians debate whether these were initiatives of local party activists who took the Berlin propaganda as a signal or actions planned higher up; there is no doubt that the press was deliberately inflaming feelings.

The press reported daily on the wounded man’s condition. Vom Rath died late in the afternoon of 9 November, around 5.30 p.m. according to most sources. The news reached Munich just as the NSDAP leaders were gathering in the Old Town Hall for their annual commemoration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The assassin’s fate

As a minor, Grynszpan was held in the juvenile prison at Fresnes near Paris. The investigation – first for attempted murder and, from 9 November, for premeditated murder – dragged on for months. His defence counsel, the well-known lawyer and anti-fascist Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, paid for by a fund organised in the United States by the journalist Dorothy Thompson, played for time. The Reich government sent the lawyer Friedrich Grimm to Paris to turn the trial into an indictment of “world Jewry”. The outbreak of war in 1939 meant that the trial never took place. In July 1940, after the fall of France, the Vichy authorities handed him over to the Germans. He most probably died in a German prison in 1942 or shortly afterwards.

Jewish organisations around the world condemned the attack, fearing Nazi revenge. They were right. The killing of vom Rath – the “first shot” in a supposed Jewish war on Germany – served as the pretext for the nationwide pogrom that began on the evening of 9 November.

The road to war

Grynszpan’s attack and the expulsion of the Polish Jews that preceded it show how the noose was tightening around the Jews of the Reich in 1938. Germany wanted to be rid of them, and the neighbouring states – from Switzerland, which pressed for the “J” stamp in passports, to Poland, which was stripping its own emigrants of citizenship – did not want to take them in. The Évian Conference in July had shown that the world had no room for them. At the same time Hitler was enjoying his greatest successes: a month earlier the Munich Agreement had handed him the Sudetenland without a shot being fired.

The Polenaktion was the first mass deportation of Jews carried out by the Third Reich: within two days, from lists drawn up by the police, by train under escort, to the border. It was carried out by Himmler’s and Heydrich’s apparatus – the same one that organised the deportations to the east during the war. For many of those driven out to Zbąszyń, safety proved temporary: in September 1939 the Germans caught up with them in Poland. The Grynszpan family survived because in 1939 they fled east to the Soviet Union; after the war they emigrated to Israel.