(Author: Solly Kessler, Vol. 74, No. 1, Pesach 2019)
History tells of men who, for one brief moment of notoriety, rise from complete obscurity and by a single act spark off consequences for the world or for their people, the enormity of which they could never have contemplated. One such instance was the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip at Sarajevo on 28 June, 1914. Another, enacted on 7 November 1938, and yet almost forgotten today, was the Herschel Grynszpan affair.
Cast your mind back to the Europe of 1938. In a move intended to prevent Hitler from dumping Germany’s 60 000 Polish Jewish nationals back into Poland, the Polish government issued a decree invalidating the Polish passports of persons who had been living abroad unless they returned to the country by midnight on 28 October, 1938, to obtain a special endorsement on their passports. Failure to do this would render the persons concerned stateless.
At that stage, there were still high-ranking Nazis who thought in terms of forced Jewish emigration as a solution to “the Jewish Problem”. Using the Polish decree as a pretext, they conceived a plan to rid Germany of its Polish Jews – Jews who had hitherto enjoyed a measure of protection from the molestations of the Nazis merely because of Germany’s desire to maintain friendly relations with Poland as long as the Czechoslovakian issue remained unsolved.
Thus, in the small hours of 28 October, German police swooped on some 15 000 Polish Jews throughout the country, served deportation orders on them, and, within a matter of hours, put them on special trains bound for the Polish frontier.
Near the border the trains disembarked their hapless passengers and they then herded like cattle through swamps and marshes to the frontier.
On reaching “no-man’s land”, however, they found that they could neither proceed nor retreat, for their way into Poland was barred by Polish guards, while behind them S.S. troopers fired into the air to discourage any Jews who might be thinking of re-entering Germany.
And there, near the village of Zbonszyn, those several thousand souls were stranded.
Amongst the Zbonszyn refugees were the parents of the 17 year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who was on a visit to his uncle in Paris at the time. The news of his parents’ plight embittered Herschel’s heart. A deep and burning feeling of frustration overcame his whole being, but was soon replaced by an unquenchable thirst for something that the Jewish soul had been able to repress for so long – revenge!
Herschel Grynszpan, 1921 – ?
On 7 November, 1938, he left the home of his uncle and set out for the German Embassy.
Had it but known the nature of Herschel’s mission, German Jewry would have moved heaven and earth to prevent him from entering that building; but, alas, it did not. Herschel stepped inside and asked to see the Ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczek. He was met by the doorman, who told him to wait on the steps while he conveyed the message to His Excellency. A door in the corridor opened and out stepped a young man who walked towards Herschel and asked the object of his call. The answer came in no uncertain terms, in the form of bullets from the revolver that Herschel had drawn from his inner jacket pocket.
The man whom Herschel had shot and who now lay critically wounded on the floor was Ernst vom Rath, third secretary of the Embassy, a man who had never been unfriendly to the Jews, and who for some time had been suspected by the Nazis – and not without foundation – of being an enemy of the regime.
The attack on vom Rath struck fear into the heart of German Jewry. While he lingered between life and death from 7 to 9 November, their anxiety mounted, for the ominous words of the violently antisemitic Das Schwarze Korps, official weekly of the S.A.,1 published on 3 November, were still fresh in their minds: “The Jews in Germany are a part of world Jewry. They must share the responsibility for any attacks world Jewry launches upon Germany, and they must answer for any injury world Jewry inflicts or is likely to inflict on us”.
The evening papers on 9 November carried the news of vom Rath’s death. There was no immediate public reaction however, for to the man in the street the death of this minor diplomat meant nothing. But German Jewry knew that the storm must surely follow. And precisely at 2 a.m. the following morning that storm broke simultaneously throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, as the disciplined German heart suddenly – and at this odd hour – cried out for vengeance.
First Jewish shops were attacked, pillaged and burnt – all in all about 7500 Jewish businesses. From there, the mob moved onto the synagogues and within moments flames were billowing forth and licking the very sky. Some 200 shuls were either razed to the ground or reduced to charred shells. The Sifrei Torah (Scrolls of the Law) were carried to the public squares and burnt, in many instances in the enforced presence of the Rabbi. Later, when the mob could find no more Jewish shops and synagogues, attacks were made on Jewish houses and apartments, and furniture was dragged into the streets and hacked to pieces. Jewish orphanages were invaded as well as community centres; even homes for consumptives. The violence continued throughout the 10th until, at 10 p.m. Goebbels called a halt and the indignant German heart was immediately calmed. On 11 November the Volkischer Beobachter wrote, the outraged people’s soul has found a safety valve.”
Throughout that day and the previous night, Jews had been brutally assaulted in the streets and many had lost their lives. But now the Secret Police went into action and within a few hours about 30 000 Jews were arrested, mostly communal leaders, rabbis and the last of the Jewish lawyers and ‘healers’ (the special title of inferiority the Nazis had given to Jewish doctors, who could by now only treat Jewish patients). They were thrown into concentration camps, “to protect them”, as the Nazis told the world, “from the indignation of the people”.
The assassination of Ernst vom Rath had been used as the pretext for the worst pogrom that Germany had ever seen. But it was only the prelude to much worse.
On 12 November, Hermann Goering called an inter-ministerial conference at which new anti-Jewish measures were decided upon. Goering told the meeting that he had just had instructions from the Fuehrer that “the Jewish question is to be co-ordinated and solved now, once and for all, in one way or another.” The measures that were agreed upon were designed to eliminate German Jewry from the social, cultural and economic life of the country. From these laws to total annihilation was but a short step, as the world soon learnt.
Indeed, the annihilation of all German Jewry was foreshadowed in Das Schwarze Korps on 24 November. There, it was stated that the Jews would be driven from their homes, segregated and reduced to poverty. Such a policy would cause them to sink into delinquency, thus giving the German people an excuse to treat them as criminals and exterminate them by fire and sword, bringing the factual and final end of Jewry in Germany – its absolute annihilation.
On 12 November, the following decrees were published in the Reich Law Gazette:
(a) A decree requiring German Jewry to pay “an atonement fine” of one billion reichsmarks as a punishment for “the hostile attitude of Jewry against the German people, not even recoiling from cowardly murder”.
(b) A decree intended to exclude Jews from the economic life of Germany. It provided that as from 1 January, 1939, Jews could not own retail stores, mail order or brokerage firms, nor could they engage in any trade, either independently or as employees in executive positions.
(c) A decree that Jews were immediately and at their own expense to repair the damage suffered by them as a result of the pogrom. Insurance money payable to Jews in respect of the damage was to be forfeited to the Reich.
Further anti-Jewish laws followed. Thus, on 16 November the “numerous clauses” was abolished and the few remaining Jews in German schools were expelled. As the Volkischer Beobachter wrote when introducing this decree, “After the ruthless murder in Paris we can no longer require German teachers to instruct Jewish pupils.” On 28 November, a police decree was published authorising administrative officials to exclude Jews from certain localities and to ban them from appearing in public at certain hours. Pursuant to this decree, on 3 December the Berlin Police Chief banned Jews from all theatres and cinemas, as well as other places of entertainment museums, sports fields and several prominent Berlin streets.
Detailed provisions for the compulsory realisation and liquidation of Jewish property and businesses were promulgated on 3 December. This decree also prohibited Jews from acquiring landed property, and required Jewish securities, stocks and bonds to be deposited with a recognised bank. Sales of land belonging to Jews could only take place under permit from the government, and if the ‘Aryan’ purchaser acquired such land cheaply he had to make a payment to the Reich.
Other decrees published following the Paris shooting forbade Jews from possessing arms and even deprived them of their licences to drive motor vehicles. Certain local areas passed their own anti-Jewish measures. In Nuremberg, for instance, it was decreed that Jews could not remain in the city for more than 48 hours without a police permit. Such was the shattering aftermath of the November pogrom, the aftermath of young Herschel’s folly. His act had been the spark that set all Germany aflame with the lust for Jewish blood.
Early in 1939 G. Warburg, in his book Six Years of Hitler, wrote the following tragically prophetic words:
The Pogrom has not quenched the thirst of the radical Nazis around Herr Himmler for the blood of the Jews. The wrecking of Jewish homes, the destruction of Jewish livelihoods, the tearing apart of Jewish families, the hundreds of executions, murders, maimings and suicides, the thousands of arrests, were not enough. They regard the Pogrom as merely the preliminary to something worse. They have worked up their hatred by their own agitation to such a pitch that only a mass slaughter can give them satisfaction.
And what of Herschel?
He was arrested by the French police and detained in prison, but the French never brought him to trial. In May 1940, when the train conveying him and other French prisoners from Paris to Toulouse was bombed and there was the chance of escape, he remained and insisted on being taken to prison. In June 1940, with the French collapse, he fell into German hands.
By this time, Herschel was not just the Nazis’ excuse for the “November Pogrom”, but had become the symbol of “the International Jew who had caused the war itself”. On 20 September, 1939, Goebbels had published a yellow book – “Grynszpan and his Accomplices” – in which this thesis had been propounded.
From the moment that he received news of Herschel’s capture, Goebbels dreamed of a great State Trial “to open the eyes of all mankind”. Nothing, however, was done until November, 1941, when Goebbels sent Dierwege, the author of the yellow book, to Paris to collect witnesses. Dierwege interviewed M. Georges Bonnet who, according to him, was prepared to testify that “the Jewish influences that had delayed Grynszpan’s trial had compelled him to declare war on Germany”.
But the Nazi party leaders were not in agreement as to the desirability of holding the trial and, although arrangements were made for the trial in the Berlin People’s Court and Judge and defending counsel were appointed, it was postponed sine die on 11 May, 1942. From this moment the darkness that engulfed the millions of European Jews who disappeared in the Nazi extermination camps closed around Herschel, and the world knows nothing more of this tragic young Jew whose rash deed brought such misfortune to his people.1
The world heard more of the November 1938 pogrom, however, for certain aspects thereof were the subject of evidence given at the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46. Some of this evidence cast serious doubt on the assertions made by Goebbels in 1938 that the pogrom was “the spontaneous expression of the people’s indignation”. According to documents produced in evidence at the trial the following instructions were issued by the Gestapo to all police offices on the night of 9 November, 1938:
These instructions must be forwarded to all S.S. quarters immediately:
(1) Within the shortest time possible action against the Jews will start all over Germany, especially against their synagogues. Interference of any kind will not be tolerated.
(2) Important material in the archives of the synagogues must be confiscated and removed to a safe place.
(3) Between 20 000 and 30 000 Jews within the Reich must be arrested. They are to be chosen from among wealthy Jews. Special instructions pertaining to this phase of the actions will be issued during the night.
Reinhardt Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and the man generally regarded as the real engineer of the extermination of European Jewry, issued the following order on the same night:
Because of the assassination of a member of the German Legation in Paris, demonstrations against the Jews in the Reich, Austria and the Sudeten area are to be expected in the night from November 9 to 10. To deal with these events the following orders are to be obeyed:
Leaders of all the State Police must at once call for a meeting to secure co-ordinated action of demonstrations.
For such actions only orders are to be issued which do not endanger the life or property of German citizens. Synagogues are to be set on fire only if buildings of German citizens are not endangered by the flames ….
So much for the spontaneity of the pogrom.
As to the anti-Jewish measures that followed, those that were intended to eliminate German Jewry from the economic life of the country were already considered early in 1938, long before the shooting of vom Rath, if the testimony given at the Nuremberg Trial by Funk, the Reich Minister of Economics, is to be believed. But this may well have been an attempt by Funk to exculpate himself and to place the blame for his oppressive economic measures on others.
These, then, are the facts of the Grynszpan affair.
But they pose problems of cause and effect which are not easy to solve, namely whether the shooting of vom Rath brought about the subsequent events in Germany, or whether history merely used the assassin as a human trigger-device to set in motion a predestined chain of events; whether the tragic history of European Jewry would have been quite the same if the boy had never been born.
Solly Kessler (1929-2005) was a Cape Town attorney and a prominent figure in Jewish communal affairs throughout his life. Amongst other positions held, he served on the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (Cape Council) and the Western Cape Zionist Council (including as Chairman). A leading liberal voice in Jewish circles, he was responsible for drafting the Hate Speech clause in the Bill of Rights, and also presented both written and oral testimony into the pivotal Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (#4, 2000). Mr Kessler was a frequent contributor to Jewish publications, including Jewish Affairs. This article is based on an unpublished paper he wrote in 1988, at the time of the 40th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom.
