Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (born March 28, 1921, died between 1943 and 1945) was a Jewish political assassin who shot Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, on 1938-11-07. He had recently received news of an early pogrom in which his parents were expelled from Hanover to Poland after living for nearly three decades in Germany.
This killing was used as an excuse for the ransacking of 8,000 Jewish properties and arrests of 30,000 Jewish men across Germany on the night of 9-10 November, 1938. The event came to be called the Kristallnacht or the night of broken glass, because of the glass from looted shops covering the roads the following morning.
After the shooting, Grynszpan gave himself up to French police and refused attempts by his liberal lawyers to develop alternate arguments for his crime, such that he was involved in a homosexual relationship with vom Roth (which would have reduced the political dimensions of his crime). After the Germans overran France in 1940, he was transferred to Berlin, where his trial could not be held, possibly because Joseph Goebbels feared that he might adopt the homosexuality argument, and also because German jurists were unlikely to give the death penalty to a minor. It is thought that he was sent to a concentration camp around 1943 and is likely to have been killed some time before 1945.

Exile to assassin
Despite the best attentions of French and German doctors including Adolf Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt (hanged as a war criminal in 1948), Ernst vom Rath died on 9 November. On 17 November he was given a state funeral in Düsseldorf, attended by Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop amid maximum 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 vom 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 organized, 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 organized by the Nazi Party or the SA, but neither should they be opposed or prevented.
The assembled Nazi leaders needed no further encouragement. 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.

Dire consequences
The death of vom Rath and the horrors of the Kristallnacht pogroms brought Herschel Grynszpan international notoriety. On 14 November the Dorothy Thompson, who in 1934 had become the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, made an impassioned broadcast to an estimated 5 million listeners in defense of Grynszpan, pointing out that the Nazis themselves had made heroes of the assassins of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.
"I am speaking of this boy [she said]. Soon he will go on trial. The news is that on top of all this terror, this horror, one more must pay. They say he will go to the guillotine, without a trial by jury, with the rights that any common murderer has... Who is on trial in this case? I say we are all on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities. Whether Herschel Grynszpan lives or not won't matter much to Herschel. He was prepared to die when he fired those shots. His young life was already ruined. Since then, his heart has been broken into bits by the results of his deed.
"They say a man is entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers, and a man's kinsmen rally around him, when he is in trouble. But no kinsman of Herschel's can defend him. The Nazi government has announced that if any Jews, anywhere in the world, protest at anything that is happening, further oppressive measures will be taken. They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage. Therefore, we who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard. This boy has become a symbol, and the responsibility for his deed must be shared by those who caused it."
Liberal and left-wing newspapers and commentators in many countries echoed her sentiments. While deploring the assassination, they argued that Grynszpan had been driven to his act by the Nazi persecution of German Jews and of his family in particular.
Jewish organizations were horrified by Grynszpan's action, which they condemned more severely than most non-Jewish liberals, while echoing the plea of extenuating circumstances, and condemning the subsequent victimization of all German Jews in response to the act of an isolated individual. The World Jewish Congress "deplored the fatal shooting of an official of the German Embassy by a young Polish Jew of seventeen," but "protested energetically against the violent attacks in the German press against the whole of Judaism because of this act" and especially against the "reprisals taken against the German Jews." The Alliance Israélite Universelle in France "rejected all forms of violence, regardless of author or victim," but "indignantly protested the barbarous treatment inflicted on an entire innocent population."
Several appeals were launched to raise money for Grynszpan's defense. In the U.S., Thompson launched an appeal which raised more than $40,000 in a few weeks: she asked that Jews not donate to the fund, so that the Nazis could not attribute Grynszpan's defense to a Jewish conspiracy. Jewish organizations also raised money. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, two Paris Jewish lawyers, Szwarc and Vésinne-Larue, were engaged by the Grynszpan family. Once the case became internationally known they were replaced by one of Paris's leading advocates, Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, a flamboyant Corsican, a leading anti-fascist activist and a former Education Minister in Radical government of Edouard Herriot. Moro-Giafferri engaged a Yiddish-speaking lawyer, Serge Weill-Goudchaux, as his associate and liaison with Grynszpan and the Grynszpan family. Both lawyers' fees and costs were paid by Dorothy Thompson's defense fund.
Until Moro-Giafferi took over the defense, everybody had accepted that Grynszpan went to the Embassy in a rage and shot the first German he saw, as a political act to avenge the persecution of his family and German Jews in general. Grynszpan's own statements after his arrest supported this: he reportedly said to the Paris police: "Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth. Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal."
Moro-Giafferi, however, took the view that if Grynszpan was allowed to claim from the dock that he had shot vom Rath with such a motive, this would result in his certain conviction and possibly take him to the guillotine (despite his being a minor), since French law took a severe view of political assassination. If, on the other hand, the crime could be shown to have had a non-political motive, this might lead to an acquittal, or at least to a lesser sentence, since French law traditionally took a lenient view of the crime passionel (crime of passion). His legal strategy was thus to "depoliticize" Grynszpan's actions.

Grynszpan's defense
This seems to have been the origin of the theory that Grynszpan was acquainted with vom Rath prior to the shooting, and that vom Rath was his intended victim. According to this version of events, vom Rath was a homosexual, and met Grynszpan in a Paris bar, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. It is not clear whether Grynszpan was himself alleged to be homosexual, or whether he was said to be using his youth and appearance to win an influential friend. According to this theory, vom Rath had promised to use his influence to get Grynszpan's position in France regularized. When vom Rath reneged on this promise, Grynszpan went to the Embassy and shot him.
In support of this theory, Professor Hans-Jürgen Döscher, a leading German authority on the period and author of Reichskristallnacht, published documents in 2001 which he said showed that Grynszpan and vom Rath had had a sexual relationship. Döscher quoted extracts from the diary of French author André Gide, himself a homosexual and well-informed regarding Parisian gay gossip. Vom Rath, Gide wrote, "had an exceptionally intimate relationship with the little Jew, his murderer." Later Gide said: "The idea that such a highly thought-of representative of the Third Reich sinned twice according to the laws of his country is rather amusing."
It seems clear that vom Rath, a 28-year-old bachelor who had used family connections to get himself posted to the pleasant surroundings of Paris, was homosexual. According to the rumours collected by Döscher, he was known as "Madame Ambassadeur" and "Notre Dame de Paris" among Parisian gay men. These rumours were collected by investigators hired by Moro-Giafferi, and used as the basis for a defense. After the war, it was revealed that vom Rath had been treated for rectal gonorrhoea at the Berlin Institute of Radiology.
Further evidence is presented by Gerald Schwab in the form of a letter, sent to Ernst vom Rath's brother in 1964 by Erich Wollenburg, a communist exile from Nazi Germany who claimed to be an associate of Moro-Giafferi:
One day, and unless I am mistaken it was in the spring of 1939, I met Moro-Giafferi on Boulevard St. Michel, and I asked him for news of Grunspahn (sic) for whom he was the defence lawyer. He had just come from visiting him in his cell, and was revolted by the attitude of his client. "That young man is a fool, infatuated with himself," he said. "He refuses to give a non-political character to his act by saying for example that he assassinated vom Rath because he had had money quarrels with him following homosexual relations. Yet, such an attitude in regard to the murder of vom Rath is necessary, in order to save the Jews of the Third Reich, whose lives are becoming more and more precarious in regard to the prosperity, their health, their futures, etc. If only... he would deny the political motives of his crime, and assert that he had only personal vengeance in mind, vengeance as a victim of homosexuality, the Nazis would lose their best pretext for exercising their reprisals against the German Jews who are victims of his fit of madness and now, of his obstinacy." I asked him if Grunspahn really had had relations with vom Rath. He replied, "Absolutely not!" I said to him then, "But as a defender of Gruhnspahn shouldn't you protect not only the interests of your client, but his honour as well?" It was at that moment that Moro-Giafferi exclaimed, "Honour! Honour! What is the honour of that absurd little Jew in the face of the criminal action of Hitler? What does the honour of Grunspahn weigh in the face of the destiny of thousands of Jews?"

The homosexual theory
From November 1938 to June 1940 Grynszpan was imprisoned in the Fresnes prison in Paris while legal arguments continued over the conduct of his trial. The defence sought to delay the trial as long as possible by making procedural difficulties, in the hope that the publicity surrounding the vom Rath murder would quiet down and the trial would be less politicized. But the prosecution was also in no hurry.
The heavyhanded actions of the Germans did not help. A German lawyer, Friedrich Grimm, was sent to Paris, supposedly representing the vom Rath family, but in fact was widely known to be an agent of Goebbels. Grimm tried to argue that Grynszpan should be extradited to Germany, even though he was not a German citizen - there was no way the French government could agree to this. The Germans argued that Grynszpan had acted as the agent of a Jewish conspiracy, and their fruitless efforts to find evidence to support this contention further delayed the trial. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 made it impossible for the Germans to participate further (although they engaged a Swiss lawyer to represent their interests), and also causing the French authorities to lose interest in prosecuting Grynszpan. Grynszpan applied for release from detention so that he could join the French Foreign Legion, but this was refused.
Once the war broke out, Moro-Giafferi changed his tactics and demanded an immediate trial, confident that the anti-German mood, and the inability of the Germans to present evidence, would result in Grynszpan's acquittal. But the investigating judge had joined the army, the Ministry of Justice did not want the trial to proceed, and the Swiss lawyer engaged by the Germans employed various delaying tactics. As a result, there was no trial, and Grynszpan was still in prison when the invading German Army approached Paris in June 1940.
The French authorities evacuated the inhabitants of the Paris prisons to the south in early June. Grynszpan was sent first to Orléans, from where he was sent by bus to the prison at Bourges. En route, however, the convoy was attacked by German aircraft. Some prisoners were killed, while others escaped in the confusion. One of these was apparently Grynszpan, since he was not among the survivors who arrived in Bourges. But Grynszpan had not escaped, he had merely been left behind. Remarkably, instead of making good his escape, he walked to Bourges and turned himself in to the police. From Bourges he was sent to make his own way to Toulouse. Presumably the French expected him to disappear, but he duly presented himself at the prison in Toulouse and was incarcerated. Grynszpan had no money, knew no one in France, and spoke little French. Apparently he believed he would be safer in a French prison than wandering the countryside.
The Nazis, however, were on Grynszpan's trail. Friedrich Grimm, by now an official of the German Foreign Ministry, and SS Sturmbannführer Karl Boemelburg arrived in Paris on 15 June with orders to find Grynszpan. They followed him to Orléans, then to Bourges, where they learned that he had been sent to Toulouse, which was in the Unoccupied Zone to be run by the authorities of Vichy France. France had surrendered on 22 June, and one of the terms of the armistice gave the Germans the right to demand that France surrender all "Germans named by the German Government" to the German occupation authorities. Although Grynszpan was not a German citizen, Germany had been his last place of legal residence, and the Vichy authorities made no objection to Grimm's formal demand that he be handed over. On 18 July Grynszpan was delivered to Boemelburg at the border of the Occupied Zone. He was driven back to Paris, flown to Berlin and locked up in the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.

Paris to Berlin
Grynszpan spent the remainder of his life in German custody, being shuttled between Moabit Prison in Berlin and the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Flossenburg. At Sachsenhausen he was housed in the "bunker" reserved for "special prisoners" - he shared it with the last Chancellor of Austria, Kurt Schuschnigg. He received comparatively mild treatment because Goebbels intended that he be made the subject of a propaganda show trial, to prove the complicity of "international Jewry" in the vom Rath murder. Grimm and an official of Goebbels's ministry, Wolfgang Diewerge, were put in charge of the preparations, using the files which had been seized from Moro-Giafferi's offices in Paris (Moro-Giafferi himself had escaped to Switzerland).
Goebbels, however, found it just as difficult to bring Grynszpan to trial in Germany as he had done in France. The Nazis held unchallenged political power, but the state bureaucracy retained its independence in many areas (and in fact harboured the most effective networks of the German Resistance). The Justice Ministry, still staffed by lawyers concerned to uphold the letter of the law, argued correctly that since Grynszpan was not a German citizen, he could not be tried in Germany for a murder he had committed outside Germany, and since he had been a minor at the time he could not face the death penalty (this had not been a problem for democratic France). These arguments dragged on through 1940 and into 1941.
The solution was to charge Grynszpan with high treason, for which he could be legally tried and executed if convicted. It took some time to persuade everyone concerned of the "legality" of this, and it was not until October 1941 that he was formally indicted. The indictment argued that Grynszpan's objective in shooting vom Rath had been to "prevent through force of threats the Führer and Reichschancellor from the conduct of their constitutional functions" at the behest of international Jewry.
On 10 April the acting Justice Minister, Franz Schlegelberger, wrote to Goebbels demanding to know whether Hitler, when he had authorized the trial, had been aware that Grynszpan was planning to use the "homosexual defense." The issue that was troubling the Justice Ministry was not the allegation that vom Rath had had a sexual relationship with Grynszpan - they knew that to be false, and in fact they knew Grynszpan had told some of his fellow prisoners at Sachsenhausen that it was false. The problem was their belief that vom Rath had in fact been homosexual, that Grynszpan knew details of this (these had been given to him by Moro-Giafferi in Paris), and that he would reveal them in court. This would embarrass both the vom Rath family and the Foreign Ministry. It was also learned that vom Rath's brother Gustav had served a prison sentence for homosexual offences.
Soon after this, Hitler was made aware of the problem - by whom it is not clear, but it is probable that the matter had reached the ears of Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery and Hitler's private secretary, who thought it his duty to inform Hitler that Goebbels had not told him the whole truth about the Grynszpan case. It is probably not coincidental that the Riom Trial was called off on 4 April, after Blum and the other defendants had used it as a platform to attack the Vichy regime. This no doubt helped influence Hitler against a further risky show trial. In any event, by the beginning of May 1942 it was clear to all that Hitler did not favour a trial. The matter was raised on and off for several months more, but without Hitler's approval there could be no progress. In recognition of this, Grynszpan was moved in September to the prison at Magdeburg.
Grynszpan's fate after September 1942 is not known. Since his trial was never actually called off, merely postponed indefinitely, he was probably kept alive in case circumstances changed and a trial became possible. He was still alive in late 1943 or early 1944, when he was interrogated by Adolf Eichmann at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Ron Roisen reports rumours that he was still alive in Magdeburg Prison in January 1945, but there is no definitive evidence of this. He was probably executed some time in 1944 or 1945. There were rumours after the war that he had survived and was living under another name in Paris, but there is no evidence for this. He was declared legally dead by the West German government in 1960. His parents, having sent him to "safety" in Paris while they and his siblings stayed in Germany, survived the war. Having been deported to Poland, they escaped in 1939 to the Soviet Union. After the war they migrated to Israel. Sendel Grynszpan, Herschel's father, was present at the Israeli premiere in 1962 of Sir Michael Tippett's oratorio about Grynszpan, A Child of Our Time.

Eichmann on Grynszpan
Grynszpan was the subject of a fairly well known article by Leon Trotsky: "For Grynszpan: Against Fascist Pogrom Gangs and Stalinist Scoundrels". At that time most "respectable" left-wing parties were trying to distance themselves from Grynszpan as far as possible, but Trotsky argued that he did not condone his tactics but he respected his militancy. (Read the full text of the article.)