Herschel Grynszpan
Based on Wikipedia: Herschel Grynszpan
On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old boy walked into the German embassy in Paris with a revolver in his pocket and a postcard to his parents that read like a suicide note. By that evening, he had shot a Nazi diplomat. Two days later, the diplomat was dead—and across Germany, synagogues were burning.
The boy's name was Herschel Grynszpan. What he did that morning would give the Nazi regime exactly the excuse it had been waiting for.
A Boy Without a Country
Herschel Grynszpan was born in Hanover, Germany, on March 28, 1921—but he was never German. This sounds like a contradiction, but it made perfect sense under German law. The Citizenship Law of 1913 was based on a principle called jus sanguinis, Latin for "right of blood." You inherited citizenship from your parents, not from the soil where you happened to be born. Since Herschel's parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated to Germany in 1911, Herschel was Polish—even though he had never set foot in Poland and spoke Yiddish and German, not Polish.
His parents, Zindel and Rivka, ran a modest tailor's shop in Hanover. The family knew tragedy intimately. Of their six children, only three survived childhood. A stillborn baby. A daughter who died of scarlet fever at fourteen. A son killed in a road accident at eleven. Herschel was the youngest of those who lived.
The Grynszpans belonged to a group that other Jews looked down upon: the Ostjuden, or "Eastern Jews." These were immigrants from Poland, Russia, and the territories in between—Yiddish-speaking, religiously observant, often poor, and widely stereotyped as backward by the more assimilated Jews of Western Europe. Herschel felt this stigma keenly. He later complained that his teachers disliked him because he was an Ostjude, that he was treated as an outcast by both teachers and students.
He responded to antisemitic insults with his fists. School records show frequent suspensions for fighting. His teachers considered him intelligent but lazy, a boy who never tried to excel. Perhaps he had simply concluded that excelling would make no difference.
No Future in Germany
Herschel dropped out of school at fourteen. By 1935, Jewish students in Germany were already facing systematic discrimination, and his parents could see clearly that their son had no future in the country of his birth. They decided he should emigrate to Palestine—then under British control and accepting limited Jewish immigration.
With financial help from Hanover's Jewish community, Herschel was sent to a yeshiva in Frankfurt, a rabbinical seminary where he could study Hebrew and the Torah. By all accounts, he was more religious than his parents. He spent eleven months there, preparing for his new life.
But when he returned to Hanover and applied for emigration, the local Palestine office told him he was too young. He would have to wait another year.
His parents made a new plan. Herschel would go to Paris, where his uncle Abraham and aunt Chawa lived. He obtained a Polish passport and a German residence permit, got permission to leave for Belgium—where another uncle lived—and then slipped illegally across the French border in September 1936. He couldn't enter France legally because he had no money, and Jews weren't permitted to take money out of Germany.
He was fifteen years old, alone in a country whose language he barely spoke, living on the margins of the law.
A Poet of the Streets
Paris in the late 1930s was home to a small enclave of Polish Orthodox Jews, a Yiddish-speaking island in the heart of France. Herschel settled into this world, rarely venturing outside it. In two years, he learned only a few words of French.
At first, his life had a kind of shabby romanticism. He was what he later called a "poet of the streets," wandering aimlessly through Paris, reciting Yiddish poems to himself, spending his days in coffeehouses and movie theaters. But the carefree period didn't last. He couldn't work legally. He couldn't study legally. He was trying desperately to become a legal resident, and failing at every turn.
His German re-entry permit expired in April 1937. His Polish passport expired in January 1938. In July 1937, the Paris Police Prefecture ruled that he had no basis for remaining in France and ordered him to leave within a month.
But leave for where? He couldn't return to Germany. And then, in March 1938, Poland passed a law stripping citizenship from any Pole who had lived abroad for more than five years. With a stroke of a bureaucrat's pen, Herschel Grynszpan became stateless—a person belonging to no country on Earth.
He continued to live illegally in Paris, dependent on his uncle Abraham, who was himself extremely poor. The uncle and aunt told him constantly that he was a drain on their finances, that he needed to get a job despite the risk of deportation. Herschel refused, terrified of being caught. By October 1938, he was in hiding from the French police.
Those who knew him described a shy, emotional teenager who often wept when discussing the plight of Jews around the world—especially his beloved family back in Germany.
The Postcard from Zbąszyń
What happened next is one of those moments when the grand machinery of state power grinds directly through a single family.
In August 1938, responding to Poland's new citizenship law, German authorities announced that all residence permits for foreigners were being cancelled. On October 26—just days before the Polish decree would take effect—the Gestapo was ordered to arrest and deport every Polish Jew in Germany.
The Grynszpan family was among the estimated 12,000 people rounded up that night. At Adolf Eichmann's trial decades later, Herschel's father Sendel described what happened:
"They took us in police trucks, in prisoners' lorries, about twenty men in each truck, and they took us to the railway station. The streets were full of people shouting: 'Juden raus! Raus nach Palästina!'—'Out with the Jews! Off to Palestine!'"
The deportees were stripped of their property and herded onto trains headed east. When they reached the border, they were forced to walk about two kilometers to the Polish town of Zbąszyń.
Poland refused to let them in.
This was the grotesque irony of the situation. The Polish government had passed its citizenship law precisely because it didn't want these people back. So thousands of Jews—stripped of everything they owned, expelled from the only country most of them had ever known—found themselves stranded in a no-man's-land between two nations that both rejected them.
A British Red Cross worker who arrived on the scene described what she found: "Thousands crowded together in pigsties. The old, the sick and children herded together in the most inhumane conditions... some actually tried to escape back to Germany and were shot."
On November 3, Herschel received a postcard from his sister, dated October 31. It described what had happened to the family. One line had been crossed out, but it apparently pleaded for help.
The Gun Shop on the Rue du Faubourg St. Martin
On November 6, Herschel asked his uncle for money to send to his family. Abraham said he had little to spare—and reminded his nephew, once again, that harboring an illegal immigrant was costing him money and putting him at legal risk.
They argued. Herschel walked out of his uncle's house with about 300 francs—roughly an average day's wage in Paris at the time—and spent the night in a cheap hotel.
The next morning, he wrote a farewell postcard to his parents and put it in his pocket:
"With God's help. My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me, the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do. Forgive me. Hermann."
Hermann was his German name.
He walked to a gun shop on the Rue du Faubourg St. Martin and bought a 6.35 millimeter revolver and a box of twenty-five bullets for 235 francs. Then he took the metro to the Solférino station and walked to the German embassy at 78 Rue de Lille.
What happened next has a quality of terrible accident to it. Herschel's apparent target was Johannes von Welczeck, the German ambassador to France. As Herschel entered the embassy, von Welczeck was leaving for his daily morning walk. They passed each other without recognition.
At the reception desk, Herschel identified himself as a German resident with important intelligence—a spy, he claimed, with a document that he had to give to the most senior diplomat available. The clerk, seeing a nervous seventeen-year-old claiming to be a spy, decided this was a matter for a junior official. He asked Ernst vom Rath, the younger of two available diplomats, to see the visitor.
Vom Rath was twenty-nine years old. When Herschel entered his office, the diplomat asked to see the important document.
Herschel pulled out his revolver.
According to the French police account, he shouted: "You're a filthy boche! In the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document!"
He shot vom Rath five times in the abdomen.
The Pretext
Herschel made no attempt to escape. He identified himself truthfully to the French police, confessed to the shooting, and repeated that his motive was to avenge persecuted Jews.
Ernst vom Rath, despite the efforts of both French and German doctors—including Hitler's personal physician, Karl Brandt—died two days later, on November 9.
The date mattered. November 9 was the fifteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923—Hitler's failed coup attempt that had become the Nazi Party's most sacred holiday. That evening, at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich where the putsch had been organized, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels addressed an audience of veteran Nazis from across Germany.
After consulting with Hitler, Goebbels made an inflammatory speech. It would not be surprising, he said, if the German people were so outraged by the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jew that they took the law into their own hands and attacked Jewish businesses, community centers, and synagogues.
The message was clear, even if it preserved a fiction of spontaneity. Goebbels' diary entry for that day is blunt: "I brief Hitler on the affair. He decides: allow the demonstrations to go on. Withdraw the police. The Jews should feel the people's fury. That's right. I issue appropriate instructions to the police and party... Thunderous applause. Everyone dashed to the telephone. Now the people will act."
Within hours, they did.
The Night of Broken Glass
The pogrom that erupted that night, November 9-10, 1938, came to be called Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass, named for the shattered windows of Jewish shops and synagogues that littered German streets.
More than ninety Jews were killed outright. Over 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where more than a thousand died before the rest were released several months later. Thousands of Jewish shops, homes, and offices were smashed or burned. More than two hundred synagogues were destroyed.
The property damage exceeded one billion Reichsmarks—about 400 million dollars at the time, or roughly nine billion dollars in today's money. In a final insult, Hermann Göring, who oversaw German economic planning, ruled that Jews could not collect on their insurance claims for the destruction.
When Herschel Grynszpan learned in his prison cell what his action had been used to justify, he was distraught. But his family, at least, had already been deported to Poland before Kristallnacht began. They were beyond the reach of that particular horror.
The truth, of course, is that the Nazi government had been planning violence against Jews for some time and was simply waiting for a pretext. Herschel Grynszpan provided one. If he hadn't, they would have found another.
The Celebrity Assassin
Kristallnacht shocked the world. It helped end the climate of appeasement toward Hitler in Britain, France, and the United States. It triggered a new wave of Jewish emigration from Germany.
And it made Herschel Grynszpan internationally famous.
He seems to have enjoyed his celebrity, at least at first. He was frequently interviewed in his prison cell and wrote letters to celebrities around the world. The American journalist Dorothy Thompson, one of the most influential radio voices in America, made an impassioned broadcast to an estimated five million listeners defending him. She pointed out the hypocrisy of the Nazi regime, which had celebrated the assassins of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and German-Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.
The French government, however, was in an impossible position. They couldn't release the man who had assassinated a diplomat on their soil. They couldn't extradite him to Germany, where he would certainly be killed. They couldn't put him on trial without creating a propaganda circus that would serve Nazi interests.
So they waited. And while they waited, the world changed around them.
Into the Darkness
In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun. In May 1940, German forces swept through France with stunning speed. Paris fell in June.
Herschel Grynszpan was still in French custody. As the German army approached, the French tried to move him south, away from the advancing forces. But somewhere in the chaos of France's collapse, he fell into German hands.
The Gestapo seized him and brought him back to Germany. The Nazis had long dreamed of putting him on trial—a show trial that would demonstrate Jewish criminality to the world. Goebbels personally oversaw the preparations. The trial was scheduled for 1942.
But it never happened.
The reasons remain somewhat murky. One theory holds that Grynszpan made a claim—possibly fabricated as a legal strategy—that his relationship with vom Rath had been homosexual in nature. This would have been embarrassing to the Nazi regime, which executed homosexuals. Another theory suggests that the Nazis simply decided a trial would be counterproductive, drawing attention to their own persecution of Jews at a time when they were trying to keep the Holocaust secret.
Whatever the reason, Herschel Grynszpan disappeared into the Nazi prison system.
The Vanishing
The last confirmed sighting of Herschel Grynszpan was in 1943, when he was held at Magdeburg prison. After that, nothing.
His parents survived the war. They searched for him desperately, hoping he might somehow have lived through the concentration camps, as some did. They heard nothing. In 1960, more than fifteen years after the war's end, the West German government declared him dead in absentia—legally dead despite the absence of a body or death certificate. His parents had requested this, they said, because they had not heard from him in over fifteen years, and it was completely out of character for him to go so long without contact.
But the question has never been entirely settled. In 1957, a journalist named Kurt Grossman claimed that Grynszpan was alive and living in Paris under a false identity. In 2016, a photograph surfaced of a man in Bamberg, Germany, dated July 3, 1946—a man who bore a striking resemblance to Herschel Grynszpan.
Neither claim has been verified. Neither has been definitively disproven.
The Weight of an Act
Herschel Grynszpan was seventeen years old when he walked into that embassy with a gun. He was a boy without a country, without legal status, without prospects, without money—a boy whose family had just been torn from their home and dumped on a frozen border between two nations that both rejected them.
He wanted to make the world hear his protest. In that, at least, he succeeded.
Whether his act helped or harmed the cause of European Jews is a question that cannot be answered simply. Kristallnacht would likely have happened anyway, in some form, at some time—the machinery of persecution was already in motion. But Grynszpan gave the Nazis their excuse, their convenient story of Jewish aggression that justified German "self-defense."
At the same time, the horror of Kristallnacht did more than perhaps any other single event to turn world opinion against Hitler before the war. The brutality was too naked, too public, too obviously orchestrated to be explained away.
Herschel Grynszpan remains a figure who defies easy categorization. A terrorist? A resistance fighter? A desperate teenager? A catalyst for both atrocity and awakening?
Perhaps all of these. Perhaps none. Perhaps simply a boy who could not bear to do nothing while his family suffered—and who lived just long enough to see his act of defiance twisted into a weapon against his own people.
His sister Esther, who had sent him that desperate postcard from the Polish border, was murdered by the Nazis in 1942 or 1943. His parents lived. He almost certainly did not.
The last words we have from him are on that postcard he wrote the morning he bought the gun:
"I could not do otherwise."