Novemberpogrom 1938 – Vertreibung, Attentat, Terror.: Die Geschichte und Nachgeschichte von Herschel Grynszpan

Abstract

On November 7, 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish refugee, shot and killed Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris. The Nazi regime took this assassination as a pretext for unleashing extreme violence against hundreds of thousands of German Jews, their dwellings, shops, and synagogues, a process that culminated in the so-called ‘Reichskristallnacht’ of November 9, 1938. Grynszpan belonged to a Jewish family from Hanover that had been deported to Poland by the Nazi authorities days before - together with some 15,000 to 17,000 other German Jews. The article offers a detailed account of the situation stateless Jews faced at the end of the 1930s, in the context of a growing refugee crisis caused by Nazi racial policies. The article also describes Herschel Grynszpan’s ordeal in French and German custody and the postwar European aftermath of his case.