After the successful conclusion of the Munich Agreement, many international
leaders harbored the hope that Hitler was a statesman with whom they could
continue to negotiate. But on the night of November 9, 1938, an event occurred
which revealed the true nature of Hitler's regime to the world and also
marked the beginning of deadly radicalization of Nazi policy concerning
the Jews.
For some months now, moderate anti-Semites within the Nazi hierarchy
had been losing ground to those favoring extreme measures such as the immediate
removal of Jews from Germany. The subsequent removal of the first big group of Jews
in late October 1938 sparked a chain of events resulting in the Night of
Broken Glass, a massive, coordinated attack on Jews throughout Greater
Germany.
On October 27th, about 17,000 Jews of Polish origin, including over 2,000
children, were abruptly expelled from Germany on orders of Reinhard Heydrich,
second-in-command of the SS. The Grynszpan family from the city of Hanover
were among the Jews forcibly transported in railroad cars then dumped at
the Polish border as unwanted persons. Polish border authorities at first
denied them permission to enter. The Jews thus ended up in a kind of no-man's-land
between the German and Polish borders.
The Grynszpan family had not taken along their 17-year-old son Herschel.
He had gone to Paris for safekeeping at the age of 15 to stay with his
uncle who worked there as a tailor. Young Herschel was a sensitive, somewhat
sickly youth who stood just over five feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds.
He was devoutly Orthodox, attended temple regularly, and strictly observed
the various rules of his faith.
Proud of his Jewish heritage, Herschel had a keen interest in the plight
of his family and the half-million Jews still living in Greater Germany.
During his years in Paris he regularly read the Yiddish newspapers his
uncle brought home which chronicled the downward spiral of "his people"
under Nazi control in Germany, Austria and the newly acquired Sudetenland.
The papers also reported the mass expulsion of the Polish Jews from Germany.
Just before that expulsion, Herschel suffered a major setback of his
own. His request for permanent residency in France was rejected by local
French officials, followed by a decree of expulsion to take effect on August
15, 1938. Herschel ignored the expulsion decree and remained in Paris illegally
for the time being until he could figure out where to go.
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Jews of Polish origin are abruptly expelled from Germany in late October 1938 - allowed to take a suitcase and little else - then taken by train and dumped at the Polish border with nowhere to go. Below: Portrait of Herschel Grynszpan in jail after his arrest. |
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Below: A crowd watches as a temple is allowed to burn while only the surrounding structures are hosed down by German firefighters. |
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Below: A smashed plate-glass window and looted contents of a Jewish-owned shop in Berlin. |
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Below: Jewish men at Baden-Baden in Germany are marched off under heavy guard to a concentration camp - marking the advent of Nazi mass roundups of Jews. |
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He had become, like his family, a man without a country, unwanted anywhere
because of his Jewish ancestry. Herschel sank into deep depression at this
turn of events and even considered suicide. Making matters worse, he then
received a letter from his family describing the ordeal of their expulsion
from Germany.
His 22-year-old sister, Esther, wrote: "You undoubtedly heard of
our great misfortune. I will describe to you what happened...On Thursday
evening at 9 o'clock a Sipo [Nazi security policeman] came to us and informed
us that we had to go to police headquarters and bring along our passports...We
were not told what it was all about, but we saw that everything was finished
for us. Each of us had an extradition order pressed into his hand, and
one had to leave Germany before the 29th. They didn't permit us to return
home anymore. I asked to be allowed to go home to get at least a few things.
I went, accompanied by a Sipo, and packed the necessary clothes in a suitcase.
And that is all I saved. We don't have a penny..."
His father had spent the past 28 years building up a modest tailoring
business in Hanover.
Driven half-mad with sorrow and anger over all that was happening, Herschel
decided to commit a radical act of violence to draw the world's attention
to the plight of the Jews.
On Monday morning, November 7, he walked into a Paris gun shop and purchased
a 6.35-caliber revolver along with a box of 25 bullets. When the shop owner
asked why he wanted the gun, Herschel answered that he sometimes carried
large amounts of money for his father and needed the protection.
After buying the gun, Herschel walked to a nearby café,
entered the restroom there and loaded it, then put the gun in his left
coat pocket. He took the Paris subway to the German embassy, arriving at
9:35 a.m. He entered the building and asked the first person he encountered,
the wife of the concierge, if he could see an embassy official concerning
some important papers he wanted to submit. He was pointed toward a flight
of stairs and told to see a Herr Nagorka, the clerk-receptionist, up there.
Upstairs, Herschel told Nagorka he had an important document he wanted
to hand-deliver to an embassy official. Nagorka offered to deliver the
document for him, but Herschel insisted he had to deliver it himself because
of its importance. This is how he wound up in the office of 29-year-old
Secretary of Legation, Ernst vom Rath, who was the most junior embassy
official on duty that morning.
Vom Rath seated Herschel, took his own seat nearby, then asked to see
the document. Herschel responded to his request by shouting: "You're
a filthy Kraut and in the name of the twelve-thousand persecuted Jews,
here is the document!"
Herschel reached into his coat pocket, took out the gun, and blasted
away at vom Rath, shooting five shots wildly, striking vom Rath twice as
he stood up. The first bullet lodged in vom Rath's left shoulder and did
little damage. The second bullet struck him in the lower left side, causing
severe internal damage.
Herschel dropped the empty gun to the floor. The wounded vom Rath gave
Herschel a quick smack with his fist, then dashed toward the door, clutching
his abdomen and calling out for help. Herschel never left the office but
just waited to be arrested. He was taken into custody by Nagorka and another
embassy worker. At Herschel's request he was then handed over to the French
police.
Vom Rath was rushed to the hospital where he underwent emergency surgery
to remove his ruptured spleen, and to repair damage to his stomach and
pancreas. Despite the surgery and massive blood transfusions, vom Rath
suffered from a very high fever and gradually weakened until he expired
at 4:25 p.m., Wednesday, November 9th.
While this was occurring, Adolf Hitler and most of the highest ranking
Nazis were in Munich for the annual re-enactment of the Beer Hall Putsch.
Every year on November 9, veterans of the 1923 Putsch gathered to retrace
the same steps they had taken in their failed attempt to overthrow Germany's
democratic government. The day was also a national holiday known as the
Day of the Movement with Germans enjoying a day off from work and kids
staying home from school.
Upon first hearing of the shooting incident, Hitler had sent his own
personal physician to Paris to aid vom Rath. Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels, meanwhile, instantly recognized the shooting as a golden opportunity.
Goebbels was by now the most powerful anti-Semite in the Nazi hierarchy,
second only to Hitler. The little man with the club foot, who had been
teased about his own so-called Jewish looks as a youth, harbored a life-long,
deep-seated hatred for Jews. For five years now, Goebbels' propaganda machine
had been spewing out a never-ending stream of messages portraying Jews
as the mortal enemy of the German people. For Goebbels, the shooting in
Paris was a chance to incite the German people to "rise in bloody
vengeance against the Jews."
Goebbels, of course, wouldn't do anything without his Führer's
approval. In the early evening hours of November 9, a messenger arrived
bearing news of vom Rath's death just as Hitler and his old cronies were
about to sit down to a festive dinner at Old City Hall in Munich, following
a long day of self-congratulations, pomp and Nazi pageantry. Upon being
told of vom Rath's demise, an angry looking Hitler took Goebbels aside
and conferred privately for several minutes, finally telling Goebbels the
SA storm troopers should have a "fling" at the expense of the
Jews.
After dinner, Hitler left the hall without making a speech, leaving
Goebbels to deliver the actual marching orders to the assembled Nazi leadership.
Goebbels first announced vom Rath's death, then launched into an anti-Semitic
diatribe, prompting the SA and Nazi Party leaders to incite a popular uprising
against Jews throughout Greater Germany without making it look like the
Nazi Party was the actual instigator.
When Goebbels finished his remarks, most of the assembled leaders headed
for the nearest telephone to call their local SA and Party offices to deliver
the appropriate instructions. However, the nuance of Goebbels message somehow
got lost amid all of the telephone conversations. As a result, uniformed
Brownshirts and Party activists carrying swastika banners took to the streets
instead of nondescript civilians.
In fact, the popular uprising Hitler and Goebbels hoped to ignite never
materialized. Most civilians either pulled down their window shades and
stayed inside or stood silently on the sidewalk along with the regular
German police and watched as storm troopers, SS men and Hitler Youth, accompanied
by miscellaneous street punks, broke into Jewish homes, beat up and murdered
Jewish men and terrorized Jewish women and children.
All over Germany and Austria that evening, Jewish shops and department
stores had their windows smashed and contents wrecked. Synagogues were
especially targeted for vandalism, including desecration of sacred Torah
scrolls which were unraveled and tossed into a pile then burned.
Hundreds of synagogues went up in flames while fire fighters stood by
watching or simply hosed down surrounding buildings to prevent the fire
from spreading. Nearly all Jewish cemeteries near the synagogues were also
desecrated.
About 25,000 Jewish men were hauled off to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen
concentration camps where they were brutalized by SS guards and in some
cases randomly chosen to be beaten to death. In all, it is estimated that
up to 2,500 Jews perished from beatings on the street, incarceration in
the camps, and from the numerous suicides that occurred, including entire
families.
The
many thousands of broken plate-glass windows resulted in the term Kristallnacht
or Night of Broken Glass to describe the events of November 9th lasting into
the early morning hours of the 10th. Although the Nazis didn't get the
popular uprising they had hoped for, they did notice that the overall population
of some 60 million Germans showed remarkable indifference toward this first
mass persecution of the Jews. Those who were shocked or outraged knew enough
to keep their thoughts to themselves or risk being sent to a concentration
camp.
Outside of Germany, however, the shock and outrage were not silenced.
Radio commentators and newspaper writers in the United States declared that Germany
had descended to a level of barbarism unseen since the pogroms of the Middle
Ages.
The storm of negative worldwide publicity served to isolate Hitler's
Germany from the civilized nations of the West and weakened any pro-Nazi
sentiments in those countries. Before Kristallnacht, small pro-Hitler movements
existed in both Britain and the U.S. After Kristallnacht, sympathy for
the Hitler regime gradually evaporated. The United States also permanently
recalled its ambassador from Germany.
However, radical anti-Semites within the Nazi hierarchy didn't care
what the world thought. A few days after Kristallnacht, on November 12th,
a dozen top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hermann
Göring, gathered to discuss what happened and to decide on further
measures.
Heydrich reported 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, 267 synagogues
burned (with 177 totally destroyed) and 91 Jews murdered during Kristallnacht.
Heydrich then requested new decrees forbidding Jews from having any social
contact with Germans by excluding them from public transportation, schools,
and hospitals, essentially forcing them into ghettos or out of the country.
Goebbels said the Jews would be made to clean out the debris from burned-out
synagogues which would then be demolished and turned into parking lots.
At this meeting there was a general agreement to eliminate Jews entirely
from economic life in the Reich by transferring all Jewish property and
enterprises to non-Jews, with minor compensation to be given to the Jews
in the form of German bonds.
Regarding the economic damage from Kristallnacht and the resulting massive
insurance claims, Göring declared the Jews themselves should be billed
for the damage and that any insurance money payable to them should be confiscated
by the Government.
"I shall close the meeting with these words," said Göring,
"German Jewry shall, as punishment for their abominable crimes, et
cetera, have to make a contribution for one billion marks. That will work.
The swine won't commit another murder. Incidentally, I would like to say
that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany."
As for Herschel Grynszpan, he was interrogated by the French police
and declared: "It was not with hatred or for vengeance against any
particular person that I acted, but because of love for my parents and
for my people who were unjustly subjected to outrageous treatment. Nevertheless,
this act was distasteful to me and I deeply regret it. However, I had no
other means of demonstrating my feelings...It is not, after all, a crime
to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have the right to live. My people have
a right to exist on this earth. And yet everywhere they are hunted down
like animals."
Herschel eventually wound up in the clutches of the Gestapo and spent
time in various Nazi prisons and concentration camps, and vanished without
a trace.