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Herschel Feibel Grynszpan
(March 28, 1921 - after 1957?) Germany

Herschel Grynszpan

Student

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Herschel Grynszpan (sometimes spelled in the German forms Grünspan or Grunspahn) was born in Hanover, his parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated there in 1911. He had a brother and a sister. He attended school until 1935 when he was 14 but left then because he was being discriminated against because he was Jewish. With financial assistance from the Hanover Jewish Community he attended a rabbinical seminary in Frankfurt-am-Main where he studied for just under a year.

His parents wanted him to emigrate to Palestine as they thought there would be no future for him in Germany but he was turned down because of his age. So it was decided he should go to Paris and live with his uncle and aunt. He obtained a Polish passport and permission to leave Germany for Belgium. In September 1936 he entered France illegally.

He lived in an enclave in Paris with Polish Orthodox Jews. He applied many times to stay in France with no luck and finally in July 1938 the Prefecture of Police ruled that he had no basis to stay in France and he was ordered to leave.

Meanwhile, in Germany, things were getting very nasty for Jewish people. Herschel's family had been rounded up along with other Polish Jews to be deported to Poland.

Herschel GrynszpanOn Sunday 6th November 1938 Herschel asked his uncle for money to send to his family. His uncle said he had nothing to spare. There was a row and Herschel stormed out of the flat with 300 francs in his pocket. The next day he went to a gun shop bought a gun and bullets and went to the German Embassy. He asked to see an official and was shown into the office of Ernst von Rath. He shot him three times.

The reason for Herschel killing Ernst von Rath was claimed by officials and Herschel himself, to be political. It was said that he went to the Embassy to kill any German at random. It was said Herschel was doing it to avenge the treatment of Jews in Germany, a political assassination.

The consequences of the death of Ernst von Rath were dire. The Nazis used it as an excuse (in afct Ernst Von Rath was a known anti-Nazi, already under surveillance by the Gestapo) to attack everything Jewish - Kristallnacht, resulting in ninety people dead 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to camps, 200 synagogues smashed.

Herschel GrynszpanHe was imprisoned awaiting trial from November 1938 to June 1940. A high flying German lawyer was sent to get him extradited to Germany but bombing raids hampered things. The French officials evacuated prisoners from Paris to the south of France.

The convoy of prison vans was attacked by German fighter planes. Herschel was not listed amongst the survivors and it was assumed he had died but he had survived. Instead of making good his escape he presented himself at a French prison. The prison was in Vichy France and when the Germans demanded to have him, he was handed over and sent to Gestapo Headquarters.

A show trial was planned for May 1942, but was abruptly cancelled after rumors and an anonymous letter surfaced which claimed that von Rath had engaged in a protracted, homosexual relationship with Herschel. Instead of being sent to Auschwitz, Herschel was kept alive first in Sachsenhausen and then at Moabit prison in Berlin. The date of his death is unknown. There were rumours after the war that he had survived and was living under another name in Paris, but there is no evidence for this. He was declared legally dead by the West German government in 1960. His father also survived and gave evidence at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.

Ernst von Roth was gay and was known as "Notre Dame de Paris" in gay circles, he was 28 and unmarried. He met Herschel in a bar "Le Boeuf sur le Toit". He had promised to help Herschel stay in Paris and when he could not fulfil his promise Hershel shot him.

Andre Gide had written in his diary: that Von Rath "had an exceptionally intimate relationship with the little Jew, his murderer". The young man seduced by the older homosexual was to be the basis of his defence if a trial ever started.

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