Historian says Jewish boy killed his Nazi lover
Editors Note: Kristallnacht turns out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of what is now called the Holocaust. See bottom of page for additional info and links.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,583700,00.html
Kate
Connolly
Wednesday
October 31, 2001
The
Guardian
The assassination of a top German diplomat
which triggered Kristallnacht, the organised Nazi pogrom against Jews across
Germany, was not politically-motivated, as commonly believed, but the result of
a homosexual love affair between a Nazi diplomat and a young Jewish man,
according to a leading expert on the Third Reich.
Hans-Jürgen Döscher, considered Germany's foremost authority on the events of
November 9 1938 following the publication last year of his definitive history,
Reichskristallnacht, has gathered scores of documents and eyewitness accounts,
including the diaries of the French writer André Gide, to support the theory.
On November 7 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jew, walked into the German embassy
in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, five times. Vom Rath died
two days later. Nazi propagandists condemned the shooting as a terrorist attack
to further the cause of the Jewish "world revolution", and the pogrom was
launched.
The attacks - called Kristallnacht (crystal night), an ironic reference to
the broken glass left on the streets - led to the murder of 91 Jews, the arrests
of 26,000 others and the destruction of 177 synagogues.
Until now, it was widely believed that Grynszpan had intended to shoot the
ambassador, Count Johannes Welczek, in protest at the SS's expulsion of his
parents to Poland. But according to Professor Döscher, who teaches modern
history at Osnabrück University, Grynszpan's actions were a spontaneous
expression of anger over the broken promises of his lover, Vom Rath, not a
political gesture.
In the updated edition of Reichskristallnacht, due to be published in
November, Prof Döscher claims that Vom Rath was nicknamed Mrs Ambassador and
Notre Dame de Paris as a result of his homosexual antics. He and Grynszpan - a
"boy with a beautiful penetrative gaze" - met in Le Boeuf sur le Toit bar, a
popular haunt for gay men in the autumn of 1938 and became intimate.
Grynszpan, who was in his late teens, had been living illegally in Paris, and
Prof Döscher states that 29-year-old Vom Rath agreed to use his influential
position to secure official papers for his friend.
When Vom Rath went back on his word, Grynszpan reacted by storming into the
German embassy on rue de Lille 78, demanding to see him, and opening fire on him
with a revolver.
Grynszpan was arrested and languished in jail in France until 1940, when he
was handed over to the Nazis, who planned a show trial which would be used to
justify the outbreak of the second world war.
A combined report from the German foreign, justice and propaganda ministries
in January 1942 declared: "The purpose of the trial should be to clarify to the
German people and the world that the international community of Jews is to blame
for the outbreak of this war."
According to Prof Döscher, when Grynszpan learned of this motivation for the
trial in the early 40s, he revealed the real truth to his Nazi captors. Fearing
embarrassment and humiliation, they then stripped Vom Rath of his martyrdom and
scrapped their plans.
Grynszpan was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then disappeared.
He was declared dead in 1960.
Prof Döscher gleaned his previously unpublished evidence from court archives,
reports from the propaganda ministry, letters, diary extracts, and interviews
with diplomats of the time. Most startling are the diaries of Gide, in which the
writer expresses his amazement that the scandal failed to gain public attention.
Vom Rath, Gide wrote, "had an exceptionally intimate relationship with the
little Jew, his murderer".
Referring to the fact that Vom Rath was both gay and had an affair with a
Jew, Gide later said: "The thought that a such highly-thought of representative
of the Third Reich sinned twice according to the laws of his country is rather
amusing."
But that was not what amazed him most. "How is it that the press failed to
bring this scandal into the open?" he asked.
The pretext for this violence was the November 7 assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager whose parents, along with 17,000 other Polish Jews, had been recently expelled from the Reich. Though portrayed as spontaneous outbursts of popular outrage, these pogroms were calculated acts of retaliation carried out by the SA, SS, and local Nazi party organizations.
Stormtroopers killed at least 91 Jews and injured many others. For the first time, Jews were arrested on a massive scale and transported to Nazi concentration camps. About 30,000 Jews were sent to Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, where hundreds died within weeks of arrival. Release came only after the prisoners arranged to emigrate and agreed to transfer their property to "Aryans."
Kristallnacht culminated the escalating violence against Jews that began during the incorporation of Austria into the Reich in March 1938.
AnswerMan
http://www.codoh.com/answer/anshgrynsz.html
As a result we hear all kinds of other stories, about a possible homosexual relationship, or which turn Herschel into some kind of martyr, or make him a prophet of the Holocaust, or even a freedom fighter, while still others have him surviving the war and settling down in Paris like a World War Two version of Anastasia. If you are interested in that kind of stuff, read Andy Marino's Herschel: The Boy Who Started World War II, and Gerald Schwab's The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan. On the other hand, the best guides to Kristallnacht and its causes and consequences are David Irving's Goebbels and Ingrid Weckert's Flash Point.
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