Herschel Grynszpan: The Shot That Shook Nazi Germany

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Herschel Grynszpan was seventeen when he walked into the German embassy in Paris with a tiny handgun. Five shots later, the Nazis had the excuse they wanted to unleash Kristallnacht.

Herschel Grynszpan and the Hatred Boiling Beneath Nazi Germany

Antisemitism is as old as humanity. I struggle to comprehend it myself. Despite comprising just 0.2% of the world’s population, some 22% of all Nobel laureates have been Jewish. That includes Jonas Salk (polio vaccine), Fritz Haber (synthetic fertilizer), Ralph Baer (the first video game console), and actress Hedy Lamarr (frequency-hopping radios). And then there was, of course, Albert Einstein. That guy was supposedly pretty quick.

I have spent a little time in Israel myself. Most modern Israelis are secular. The Jewish religion hovers in the background almost everywhere, but the actual folks who live there did not seem terribly committed. However, I did find the Israeli people to be friendly, industrious, and fiercely patriotic. They have to be. The entire planet seems rabid to exterminate them.

Kristallnacht’s Human Cost Was Already Building

That’s not hyperbole. In the 1940’s, Nazi Germany undertook an organized program of extermination aimed at the Jews and a few other marginalized people groups. The rest of the world honestly didn’t do a great deal to stop that, at least not at the beginning. While the Germans called this enterprise The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, history calls it The Holocaust.

By the time the guns fell silent, and the ovens cooled, some six million Jews were dead. Two thirds of European Jews and roughly 40% of Jews worldwide were murdered during this brief bloody period. You can see how that might leave a mark on their national consciousness.

The Germans ran the extermination camps with legendary efficiency. Places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Mauthausen, and Dachau dealt death on an industrial scale. However, all of that horrible fire started with a single spark. That spark was conflagrated by a 17-year-old boy named Herschel Grynszpan.

Herschel Grynszpan’s Troubled Road From Germany to Paris

Herschel Grynszpan was born in March of 1921 in Hanover, Germany, to Polish parents. According to the rule of jus sanguinis that was in force in Germany at the time, young Herschel’s nationality was determined not by his place of birth but by the nationality of his parents. Jus sanguinis is sort of the opposite of birthright citizenship. This is an important part of the story.

While those on one side of the American immigration debate will decry this as inhumane, pretty much the entire planet outside the Americas operates according to its tenets even today. 33 of the 192 recognized countries in the world today recognize some sort of birthright citizenship. Everywhere else, you inherit your citizenship from your parents, not the particular dirt upon which you were born.

Herschel was the youngest of six children. Three did not survive to reach adulthood. He was said to be a shy though lazy child who was prone to emotional outbursts.

In the vernacular of the day, Herschel and his family were Ostjuden or “Eastern Jews.” Their place as minorities and the innate prejudices in Germany conspired to make Herschel’s early life fairly miserable. Where some folks might just roll over in the face of such stuff, Herschel Grynszpan was quick to throw a punch. He typically responded to schoolyard antisemitism with fisticuffs and found himself expelled from school several times as a result. By age 14, Herschel’s parents were trying to get him shipped off to the British Mandate of Palestine. As this was not an option from Germany, they sent Herschel to stay with relatives in Paris while the paperwork percolated.

How Herschel Grynszpan Became a Man Without a Country

Herschel entered France illegally in 1936. Without papers or official standing, this meant he could not get a job and lived in constant fear of deportation. To make things worse, Poland passed a law in 1938 that stated that any Polish citizen living five years or more outside of Poland forfeited their citizenship. The boy had spent most of his life in Germany, and he had apparently never been to Poland. Herschel Grynszpan was now a man without a country.

Herschel had not had much education and couldn’t secure employment anyway. As a result, he lived off of the generosity of his uncle and just knocked about Paris. Throughout it all, the boy was quite vocal about how much he missed his parents.

The Deportation Crisis That Pushed Grynszpan Toward Violence

The Polish government issued its citizenship decree in August of 1938. In response, the Gestapo resolved to round up and deport all Polish Jews living in Germany. Herschel Grynszpan’s family was among some 12,000 Jews arrested. They left the country in railway cattle cars to the jeers of local Germans.

The Polish government was none too happy to have them back. These 12,000 refugees were made to survive in the open and were fed by the Polish Red Cross. Those who attempted to pass back into Germany were shot.

News of this pogrom conflagrated the hotheaded young Herschel Grynszpan. On 7 November 1938, he left his uncle’s house with 300 French francs (about a day’s wage at the time). He used 235 of those to purchase a diminutive 6.35mm handgun and a box of ammunition from a French gun shop in the Rue du Faubourg St. Martin. Thusly equipped, he made his way to the German embassy in Paris.

The German Embassy Ruse and Five Shots at Ernst vom Rath

Grynszpan presented himself to the embassy staff claiming to be a German citizen in possession of critical secret documents for the ambassador. As the German ambassador to France, one Johannes von Welczeck, had walked out of the building just as Herschel had walked in, staff members directed him to Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath was the junior of the two embassy officials remaining after the ambassador had departed for his daily walk.

Grynszpan walked into vom Rath’s office unhindered, and vom Rath asked to see the documents. In response, the Jewish teenager said, “You’re a filthy boche! In the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document!” He then shot the German official five times in the belly with his tiny .25-caliber handgun.

Grynszpan remained at the scene and did not resist arrest. His stated motive was to avenge the Jews deported to Poland. Despite the fact that Grynszpan’s little pistol wasn’t much of a gun, the 29-year-old German diplomat died two days later on 9 November 1938. Vom Rath was laid to rest in a state funeral eight days later. Hitler and the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop were in attendance.

Kristallnacht: How the Nazis Exploited Grynszpan’s Attack

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, was quietly thrilled. Vom Rath died fifteen years to the day from the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, the most revered holiday on the Nazi calendar. With Hitler’s support, Goebbels subsequently made an inflammatory speech blaming all the world’s manifest ills on the Jews. When the German people reacted with predictable violence, he had the police and SA stand aside.

The end result was Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass.” Over the span of two days, angry German citizens destroyed some 1,400 synagogues, burned thousands of Jewish businesses, murdered more than 90 Jews, and sent between 26,000 and 30,000 Jewish males off to concentration camps. The damage totaled nearly $9 billion in 2024 dollars. Kristallnacht is generally recognized as the seminal event that triggered the Holocaust.

Hitler Wanted a Show Trial, but Grynszpan Became a Problem

Goebbels and Hitler desperately wanted to host a show trial and execute Herschel Grynszpan as an enemy of the German people. As such, they seized the boy once they successfully invaded France and spirited him off to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. However, killing Herschel was not as straightforward as it might seem.

At this stage in the war, the Germans still sort of played by their own rules. The crime had been committed in France, and, thanks to their own regulations, Grynszpan was not a German citizen. Additionally, as he was technically a child when the crime was committed, they had no standing to execute him.

The Rumor That Threatened Hitler’s Planned Grynszpan Trial

To make things even worse, his victim Ernst vom Rath was a known homosexual. This was common then, as it is common today. However, it was also quite illegal under German law. Vom Rath’s brother had already been court-martialed and put out of the Waffen SS for homosexual behavior. The Germans, with their enthusiasm for eugenics, were always suspicious of direct family members under those circumstances. That and apparently most everybody in Paris had seen vom Rath catting around the city picking up young men and boys.

A rumor arose that Grynszpan and vom Rath were actually gay lovers. It was further alleged that the boy had entered the embassy that fateful day not to make a political statement but rather to murder his former paramour. Grynspan pushed back against this originally, claiming never to have previously met the man. His stated target was always the ambassador. However, once the reality of a trial in the heart of Germany began to set in, he and his lawyers leaned into the rumor.

Herschel told his lawyers he would spill all the gory details in the courtroom. What should have been a scripted legal farce resulting in a glorious execution now promised to be a huge smear on the master race. Goebbels was flummoxed.

What Really Happened to Herschel Grynszpan?

The Nazis farted around with Herschel Grynszpan until they realized they had bitten off more than they could chew on the world stage. At some point before the end of the war, he was most likely killed in a death camp. Scholarly work published as recently as 2001 was still trying and failing to sort out Grynszpan’s sexual orientation and whether or not he had known vom, Rath before he killed him.

Several witnesses claimed after the war that Herschel Grynszpan had been murdered by the SS. However, in December 2016, a 1946 photograph taken at a displaced persons camp in Bavaria was discovered in the archives of the Jewish Museum in Vienna. Facial recognition software determined with 95% probability (the highest possible score) that the face in the image was that of Herschel Grynszpan. Grynszpan was formally declared dead in absentia in 1960 by the West German government. However, even today, nobody can truly be sure.

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