The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris

by Jonathan Kirsch

Overview

The Washington Post Notable Non-Fiction of 2013

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht comes this untold story of a teenager whose act of defiance would have dire international consequences.

On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. He did it, he said, out “of love for my parents and for my people.” Two days later, vom Rath lay dead, and the Third Reich exploited his murder to inaugurate its long-planned campaign of terror against Germany’s Jewish citizens, in the mass pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht. In a bizarre concatenation of events that would rapidly involve Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, Grynszpan would become the centerpiece of a Nazi propaganda campaign that would later describe his actions as "the first shot of the Jewish War."

In The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan, best-selling author Jonathan Kirsch brings to light this wrenching story, reexamining the historical details and moral dimensions of one of the most enigmatic cases of World War II. Was Grynszpan a crazed lone gunman, or was he an agent of the Gestapo, recruited to provide a convenient pretext for a major escalation of Nazi aggression? Was he motivated by a desire to strike a blow for the Jewish people as an early partisan fighter, or did his act of violence speak to an intimate connection between the assassin and his target, as Grynszpan later claimed?

In re-creating the life of this German-Polish refugee turned assassin, Kirsch convincingly demonstrates that the life of Herschel Grynszpan remains just as fascinating as the conspiracy theories that surround him. Challenging the perception of the European Jew as docile and unwilling to resort to violence in the face of aggression, Grynszpan was almost unanimously assailed by most German Jews, who were rightly fearful that the Nazis would use the murder to wreak widespread retribution. Yet he was at the same time embraced by the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who rallied others to his international defense. Condemned by the likes of Goebbels at the time, he was still labeled as a "psychopath" and an agent provacateur by Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann trial two decades later.

As Kristallnacht increasingly becomes known as an international day for remembrance, Jonathan Kirsch brilliantly succeeds here in illuminating both a single life cast into the shadows of history as well as the "countless tragic lives of Eastern European Jews in the terrible days leading up to World War II."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871404527
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/06/2013
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of the best-selling The Harlot by the Side of the Road and A History of the End of the World, the book editor of the Jewish Journal, and a longtime contributor of book reviews to the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Table of Contents

Prologue The Boy Avenger xi

Part I From Hanover to Paris

1 The Day Hitler Dined Alone 3

2 The Prodigal Son 16

3 Tout Va Bien 44

4 Special Handling 74

Part II Incident on the Rue De Lille

5 "So That the World Would Not Ignore It" 97

6 The Blood Flag 119

7 Higher Powers 147

8 Phony War 179

Part III Paris to Berlin

9 In The Belly of the Beast 209

10 Paragraph One Hundred Seventy-Five 228

11 Grynszpan's Ghost 247

12 The Exterminating Angel 263

Chronology 285

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 295

Bibliography 315

Index 321

Editorial Reviews

In November 1938, a 17-year-old Polish Jew walked into the German embassy in Paris and assassinated diplomat Ernst vom Rath in reprisal for the deportation of his family and 12,000 other Jews. Grynszpan couldn’t have foreseen the consequences of his vigilante justice—just two days later, the Nazis would use the assassination as a pretext for Kristallnacht. In telling Grynszpan’s story, Kirsch (The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual) is particularly strong in his treatment of the killing’s strung-out aftermath. Framing the murder as part of an international Jewish conspiracy, the Germans made elaborate plans for a lengthy scripted show trial. But Grynszpan derailed attempts to try him by claiming that he and vom Rath had been engaged in a homosexual relationship. The scandalous assertion embarrassed German leaders, and Kirsch questionably calls it “his greatest act of courage.” Ultimately, “the sheer scale of German mass murder” overshadowed the Grynszpan case. While Kirsch undertook little original research (he did interview half a dozen historians of the Holocaust), he’s done an excellent job of combing through the secondary literature on the Grynszpan case. Though unnecessary details distract from the narrative, this is still a lively and suspenseful tale. 8 pages of photos. Agent: Laurie Fox, Linda Chester and Associates Literary Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"No novelist could invent a story with as many twists of history and character as the one Jonathan Kirsch tells about Herschel Grynszpan…The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan illuminates the countless short and tragic lives of eastern European Jews running for shelter in the terrible days leading up to World War II."

Alice Kaplan

"In his well-crafted study… Jonathan Kirsch manages to put some meat on the skinny frame of his protagonist and also to put a human face on his victim. In so doing, Kirsch has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Kristallnacht, whose 75th anniversary falls this year."

Los Angeles Times - David Clay Large

"On Nov. 7, 1938, a troubled Jewish teenager walked into an embassy in Paris, got in to see a low-level Nazi attache and shot him dead—a killing that gave Hitler a pretext for the savage, anti-Semitic orgy of Kristallnacht."

Scott Martelle

"With a storyteller’s touch and a lawyer’s insight, Kirsch elevates this tragic tale and makes it read like a legal and moral thriller."

Thane Rosenbaum

"Herschel Grynszpan wanted nothing more than to be remembered for his rash, heroic actions. In Kirsch, he has finally found an objective, yet passionate, chronicler."

Ronald C. Rosbottom

Biblical scholar and Los Angeles Times columnist Kirsch (The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God, 2008, etc.) examines a forgotten young Jewish assassin, eliciting new queries about Jewish armed resistance during World War II. The name of Herschel Grynszpan may have "ended up in the dustbin of history," but his deed--the shooting of German official Ernst vom Rath, which so enraged the Nazis that they unleashed Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938--did not. Kirsch believes it is time to take another look at the life of this troubled Hanover-born Jewish teenager, who was sent to Paris in 1936 in a last-ditch attempt by his desperate family to find some opportunity for advancement or even survival. By 1933, the Grynszpan parents had already survived pogroms in Poland and three decades of poverty in Hanover; once the Nazi vise tightened, the youngest son was sent to Paris to stay with uncles and aunts. Herschel was at his wit's end when money ran out and employment was closed to him, and the French and Germans both rejected his request for visas. Trapped in Paris, he subsequently learned that his parents and sister had been rounded up and dumped on the Polish border. Under financial and familial pressure, in hiding and subject to anti-Jewish reprisals, Grynszpan bought a gun, proceeded to the German embassy and shot vom Rath in a desperate act of vengeance not unlike what moved the young medical student David Frankfurter to shoot Swiss Nazi functionary Wilhelm Gustloff in 1936. Grynszpan's deed gave the Nazis a "convenient pretext" for the unleashed barbarity against Jews, while Jewish reaction was divided. Journalist Dorothy Thompson offered an impassioned radio address in his defense. Suspicions of conspiracy and homosexuality abounded, and Kirsch expertly picks through the murky details to shed new light on the historical significance. A compelling study of "a spectral figure whose real nature remains a mystery and whose historical significance is profoundly enigmatic."

Kirkus Reviews

[Herschel Grynszpan] faced what his biographer Jonathan Kirsch perceptively calls the 'existential threat of statelessness.' …Kirsch has a dramatic story, and he tells it well.

Timothy Snyder - New York Review of Books

On Nov. 7, 1938, a troubled Jewish teenager walked into an embassy in Paris, got in to see a low-level Nazi attache and shot him dead—a killing that gave Hitler a pretext for the savage, anti-Semitic orgy of Kristallnacht.

Scott Martelle - The Washington Post