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The story of Herschel Grynszpan

On the morning of 7 November 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy with German-Polish roots, Herschel Grynszpan (Grünspan) carried out an assassination attempt on Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris. Following vom Rath’s death two days later from his injuries, an unimaginable act of vengeance was unleashed on the Jewish community in Germany on a scale unknown until then. More than 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms, as well as thousands of shops and apartments owned by Jewish citizens, were destroyed, plundered or set on fire. Around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps, while hundreds more were maltreated and murdered in prison. While the National Socialists portrayed these events as an act of impulsive, spontaneous revenge by the German people for the assassination in Paris, playing down their brutality by describing them as “The Night of Broken Glass” (“Kristallnacht”), the reality was that they were wilfully instigated by the National Socialist leadership. Hitler and Goebbels exploited the assassination by Herschel Grynszpan as a welcome “justification” for the first extreme acts of violence that followed during the course of the Reich Pogrom Night, which marked the transition from the persecution of Jews by regulatory means to outright physical violence. As a result, Herschel Grynszpan became a tragic figure in world history.

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan bei seiner ersten polizeilichen Vernehmung, Paris 1938

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan during his first interrogation by the police, Paris 1938

Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1988-078-08

On survival, being forgotten and remembrance

Herschel’s sister Berta was murdered by the Nazis in Poland in 1943. His parents and his brother Markus survived the war and emigrated to Israel. Later, in 1961, his father, Sendel, gave a witness statement in the trial against the former SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, describing in detail the violent deportation of the Jews in 1938.[29] Herschel’s uncle Abraham, one of the 70,000 Jews delivered to Germany by the Vichy government, was murdered in Auschwitz. His aunt Chawa survived the Holocaust under unknown circumstances and returned to Paris.

Following the cancellation of the show trial, Herschel Grynszpan played no further role in the Third Reich, and was forgotten. After the war ended, no-one except his family gave any thought to the young boy who just a few years previously had caused such a surge of feeling among the general public. His relatives tried to find him, but their efforts were in vain. Herschel Grynszpan remained lost without trace, and in 1960, he was officially declared dead by the Hanover district court. Today, there are “stumbling stones” (Stolpersteine) in memory of Herschel and his sister Berta on the site in Hanover where the apartment block where the Grynszpans lived used to be. Herschel’s name is also included in the list of thousands of others engraved in the monument to the murdered Jews of Hanover on the Opernplatz in the centre of the city. Work continues on researching Herschel Grynszpan’s story and remembering his name.

Katarzyna Salski, April 2021

Literature:

Armin Fuhrer: Herschel. Das Attentat des Herschel Grynszpan am 7. November 1938 und der Beginn des Holocaust. Berlin 2013.

Dagi Knellessen: Novemberpogrome 1938. „Was unfassbar schien, ist Wirklichkeit“. Pädagogisches Zentrum des Fritz Bauer Instituts und des Jüdischen Museums (Hrsg.), Frankfurt am Main 2015.

Online:

https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/juedische-welt/ein-attentat-mit-folgen/

https://www.dubistanders.de/Herschel-Grynszpan

https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/herschel-grynszpan

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/judenverfolgung-europaeischer-antisemitismus-1880-1945.1310.de.html?dram:article_id=379815

https://www.bpb.de/geschichte/nationalsozialismus/gerettete-geschichten/149158/palaestina-als-zufluchtsort-der-europaeischen-juden

[29] See Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 207 f.