Herschel Grynszpan - Dire Consequences

Dire Consequences

Despite the best attentions of French and German doctors, including Adolf Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt, Ernst vom Rath died on 9 November. On 17 November, he was given a state funeral in Düsseldorf, which was attended by Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop with considerable publicity. In his funeral oration, Ribbentrop described the shooting as an attack by the Jews on the German people: "We understand the challenge, and we accept it", he said. By then, however, vom Rath's assassination had already had the most dire consequences for the people Grynszpan had apparently been trying to help—the German Jews.

The day of Rath's death was the fifteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the "Tag der Bewegung" (Day of the Movement): the greatest day of the Nazi calendar. That evening Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, after consulting with Hitler, made an inflammatory speech at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich where the Putsch had been organised, in front of a crowd of senior veteran Nazis from all over Germany. 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 centres and synagogues. Such "spontaneous outbursts", he said, should not be openly organised by the Nazi Party or the SA, but neither should they be opposed or prevented.

Within hours, Nazi militants launched a massive pogrom against Jewish communities throughout Germany, known to history as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"), which lasted all night and into the next day. Over 90 people were killed, more than 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps (where over a thousand died of mistreatment before the remainder were released some months later), and thousands of Jewish shops, homes and offices and more than 200 synagogues smashed up or burned. More than 1 billion Reichsmarks' damage to property was reported - and Jews were unable to claim insurance for property losses. These events shocked and horrified world opinion and helped bring to an end the climate of support for appeasement of Hitler in Britain, France and the United States. They also caused a new wave of Jewish emigration from Germany.

Grynszpan was distraught that his action had triggered such a violent assault on the German Jews (although his own family, having already been deported to the Polish border, were safe from this particular manifestation of Nazi anti-Semitism). The assassination of vom Rath was merely a pretext for the launch of the pogrom. The Nazi government had been planning a new level of violence against the Jews for some time and were waiting for an appropriate pretext. Eric Johnson notes that in the year preceding Kristallnacht the Nazis "had entered a new radical phase in anti-Semitic activity". A Jewish leader in Palestine wrote in February 1938 based on "a very reliable private source – one which can be traced back to the highest echelons of the SS leadership, that there is an intention to carry out a genuine and dramatic pogrom in Germany on a large scale in the near future."