Remember Kristallnacht?

 Herschel Grynszpan and the untold story of Kristallnacht

Just as the spread of any virus can persist almost perpetually, so too has the disease of antisemitism infected Europe for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Op-ed.

On the night of November 9 1938, all across Nazi Germany, ] an organized pogrom was perpetrated against the Jewish population by Nazis in an event now known as Kristallnacht. They stretched from Germany proper and annexed Austria and Sudetenland in what was Czechoslovakia. 30,000+ Jewish men were “arrested” and placed in concentration camps for the crime of being Jewish. The “justification” for them was the assignation of a German official in Paris by a Polish-born Jew, Herschel Grynszpan.

A little background into Herschel’s history in the preceding years; he had been sent to live with an uncle in France via Belgium at the age of 15 in 1936. His parents had been trying to get him to safety by sending him to the British Mandate, but he was rejected for immigration on the grounds he was “too young.” In October 1938, his parents were deported to Poland along with tens of thousands of Polish Jews living in German-occupied lands. The impetus for this decision by Germany was Poland’s adoption of the antisemitic policy to revoke all Polish passports of Jews who had lived outside of Poland for 5 years. The Grynszpans, along with thousands of other Polish Jews, were denied re-entry into Poland and were forced to stay in the refugee camp in Zbaszyn.

Angered and in great despair at the plight of his family, Herschel sought to murder the Nazi ambassador to France, Johannes von Welczeck. He allegedly unknowingly passed him in the hallway on his way to the front desk of the consulate. By whatever story Herschel told the receptionist, Ernst vom Rath was summoned and shot. He would die two days later of his injuries. Herschel Grynszpan was 17 at the time he assassinated Ernst vom Rath and confessed to Paris police his crime without attempting to escape.

In response, Hitler told his Propaganda Officer Goebbels to give an inflammatory speech in Munich, which included ideas of destroying Jewish businesses, burning synagogues, and suggesting the German people would be so outraged at the assassination of a German official by a Jew they would take the law into their own hands. It was widely understood to be marching orders of the Feuer. Mind you, the only Jew who had any involvement in the assassination had already been apprehended in Paris.

Goering notably admonished the Nazi politicians for the material damages caused by the riots (totaling an estimated 1 billion marks), saying German-owned insurance companies would suffer the consequences of paying for Jewish property claims (all of which were denied.) The absurdity of that mentality is hard to imagine for most people because we are nearly 100 years removed from it. That span of time has done little, if anything, to curb the ugly truth of systemic antisemitism, however.

Germany attempted to restrict any photos of the riots from being sent to the West and Europe. Their media censorship is very reminiscent of what is so typical of state-sponsored antisemitism historically. Very few images were published, one notable example being Life Magazine’s November 28 1938, issue.

Most consider Kristallnacht to be the start of what would be the Holocaust, history’s measuring stick for a new word, Genocide. While there are so many genocidal events across history and the globe, none seem to ring so loud as the Nazi’s systematic murder of 6 million Jews. There could be many parallels drawn between the murder of millions of Jews and the systematic murder of other religious and ethnic groups worldwide; none of those groups have suffered such events as many times as Jews.

Ultimately, Kristallnacht was a symptom, a runny nose one may have when suffering from a severe cold or flu virus. Kristallnacht was not something that blew up on its own by any means. The truth is much more sinister here than what most historians would like us to believe. Just as the spread of any virus can persist almost perpetually, so too has the disease of antisemitism infected Europe for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.

This mental illness wasn’t isolated to Germany and Poland. Virtually the entire world had a despondent attitude to Jewish immigrants. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 in the U.S. severely restricted Jewish immigration. FDR even refused to accept additional Jews from Eastern Europe, stating there were quotas and limits to immigration. The U.S. never reached the limits and quotas set by the Johnson-Reed Act; FDR could have allowed an additional 180,000 Jews in from Eastern Europe and still wouldn’t have reached it either.

Ireland, in the 1930s, refused to allow Jews to immigrate unless they first converted to Christianity. This was the case with all European, North American, and Middle Eastern countries. All of them desired to try and stay out of the coming conflict with Germany or were leery of the stories they had heard attributed falsely to Jews being communist troublemakers coming out of Russia. Even Canada restricted immigration from Eastern Europe, only accepting around 5000 Jews between 1933 and 1939. The systemic antisemitism that had rooted itself across the globe made it nigh on impossible for the Jews of Europe to immigrate to safety, thus forcing us to remain alone to face the Nazi genocide.

To this day, we are unsure of Herschel Grynszpan’s fate other than he was jailed and seemingly never tried. There are rumors he died in 1940, 1943-44, and even potentially survived and lived freely in Paris. In 2016 a photo showing a young man in 1946 protesting the U.K.’s policy to refuse Jewish immigration to the Mandate was scanned by facial recognition software indicating a 95% likelihood of a match to Herschel. This rumor upheld the tradition of passing the buck of blame well into the last half of the 20th century, with surviving Nazis using Grynszpan’s alleged freedom in Paris without trial as justification for their never being prosecuted for war crimes for their actions. Yimach Shemam!

What we can be sure of is Herschel’s horror when he found out his act of murder was used as the catalyst for the start of the Holocaust by the Nazis and the toll that systemic antisemitism had on him as a young man. Herschel Grynszpan spent most of his teenage years on his own, stateless and without the proper influence and guidance of his parents because of rabid antisemitism. In 1960, he was declared dead in absentia on May 8, 1945.

Shimshon Cook is a Zionist and a member of Herut North America and is ”Deep in the Heart of Texas.” Herut North America is an international movement for Zionist pride and education dedicated to the ideals of pre-World War II Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. More about Herut can be found on our website, www.HerutNA.org. When on the site,click on this link to join Shimshon and Jeff Dunetz in Herut, North America, the Unapologetic Zionists.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/399139