Herschel Grynszpan

[trespasser07]

Does anyone have information about the kid after the war or if he even survived it?

[David Thompson]

Does anyone have information about the kid after the war or if he even survived it?

Herschel Grynszpan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Grynszpan
Herschel Grynszpan: the Fate of A Forgotten Assassin
http://www.roizen.com/ron/grynszpan.htm

[trespasser07]

Cheers David. I have also heards the rumours that he survived the war and was living under a differnt name in Paris I wonder if we will ever know for sure.

[trespasser07]

Does anyone have any opinions on the boy's demise? Apparently Eichmann interviewed him in 1944 so he was still alive at that point.

[trespasser07]

Just reading the article David posted and there are statements regarding the Michael Soltikow trial in mUnich. It says that Soltikow stated that Grynszpan was present one day in the court room, can this be true?

Thanks.

[trespasser07]

http://collections.yadvashem.org/photos ... 21570.html

[trespasser07]

Just doing some research and read that on January 28/29th 1945, some 686 political prisoners were shot at Sonnenburg by an SS execution squad. Could Grynszpan have been among them? Or is it possible that he was among the 140 political prisoners transferred to Tyrol by the SS in the closing days of the war and then liberated by the Fifth Army on 5th May 1945?

Thanks for any info

[michael mills]

Does it matter? He was an assassin who murdered a diplomat, a crime under international law.

Presumably he died a prisoner in German hands at some point before the end of the war. Persons who support the death penalty can hardly complain.

[Adam Carr]

I wrote the Wikipedia article on Grynszpan, based on various sources online and on Gerald Schwab's book The Day the Holocaust Began. I've seen no serious suggestion that Grynszpan survived the war. Goebbels had him kept alive after he was taken to Germany in 1940 because he wanted to put on a grand show trial to prove that there had been a Jewish conspiracy to drag Germany and France into war, but the failure of the Riom trial, plus the emergence of the (false) story that Grynszpan and Vom Rath had been lovers, led him to abandon the plan. After that, Grynszpan was of no further use and he was probably killed in the general "clean out" of political prisoners in the last months of the war. If he did survive, it's hard to see a good reason for him to have concealed his identity after the war, particularly since his parents survived and spent years looking for him. He could have collected his Legion d'Honneur and settled in Israel, where he would now be 90.

[trespasser07]

Sadly ironic that he was sent away to "safety" by his parents while they where deported to Poland. The irony is that he was captured and that they survived by escaping to the soviet union. Although of course his action was a crime, I can sympathise with his situation in 1938 and that of other jews in the reich. The general view is that Herschel was murdered by the Gestapo in Magdeburg Prison, he had been transferred there from Berlin.

[trespasser07]

Also after the war would be have been put back on trial for murder by the French government? I only ask as this may be a reason to assume a new identity and disappear into Europe after 1945.

[michael mills]

The general view is that Herschel was murdered by the Gestapo in Magdeburg Prison, he had been transferred there from Berlin.

Why "murdered"?

Why not "executed"?

After all, Grynszpan had himself committed an act of murder of a person protected under international law, a capital offence at the time.

True, Grynszpan had not been given due process in a court of law. But it is not unknown for states in our own day to execute a sentence of death without trial on persons who are known beyond reasonable doubt to have committed an offence carrying the death penalty under the law of the states concenrned. An example is the recent summary execution of Bin Ladin by agents of the United states.

[trespasser07]

Good point Michael I mean it is more than likely that the Gestapo did execute him for this, but I just find it strange that there is no documentation or orders found ordering this execution. For most other well know prisoners of his type there is evidence and proof of their execution, an example of this is Johann Georg Elser who tryed to kill Hitler in 1939 but was also kept alive for a kind of show trial. He was executed on 9 April 1945, in the Dachau concentration camp, just a few weeks before the end of war. But no info regarding Herschel has ever emerged.

[Adam Carr]

Grynszpan was not a German citizen and the murder of vom Rath was not committed in Germany. The Germans thus had no legal standing in his prosecution, which was why they made no attempt to extradite him in 1938. Their killing of him in 1945, if that's what happened, cannot be given any semblance of legality. Only a French court could have tried him for murder, but since he was a stateless minor, they were still arguing about the legality of trying him when war broke out in 1939. The case was then dropped in fact if not in theory.

[trespasser07]

It certainly would have been complicated putting him on trial, and I wonder if he survived and was found would the French government have put him on trial after the war or dropped the charges.

Just had a look at the Ron Roizon article Adam and found an interesting bit of info;

"The trial and re-trials of Michael Soltikow, the first of which was held in Munich, form a bizarre chapter in the Grynszpan story.45 Soltikow's misguided enthusiasm for exculpating Jews of responsibility for the war may well have seemed to him to provide the best method for dramatizing his own would-be denazification. In any event, Soltikow appeared fervently to believe that Grynszpan was alive. He went so far as to ask the Munich court to subpoena Grynszpan, and claimed at one point in his trial that the assassin had actually been present at a previous day's proceedings. When the Munich judge noted that German law would require Grynszpan to be arrested if present in the court, an outraged Soltikow argued that now the fugitive would never voluntarily show himself."

Can there be any truth to this statement?