Herschel Grynszpan

[Adam Carr]

As I said above, if Grynszpan had survived the war, he would have had no motive for concealing his existence for the whole of the rest of his life. The French would not have prosecuted him, and he would have been a hero in the US and in Israel.

[trespasser07]

I agree it would be strange if he survived, only reason I can think of is revenge from the von Rath family or others but I am guessing he would have had protection. Adam what is your view on him as a hero or criminal? I know that his actions were the reason that Kristallnacht occured.

[AliasDavid]

I could think of two motives Grynszpan may have had not to reveal his identiy after the war had ended. The first is that he might have been afraid of being reproached for provoking the Nazis to start the Holocaust. The second is that he was commonly thought to be a homosexual (see the testimonies compiled by Hans-Jürgen Drescher in "Reichskristallnacht. Die Novemberpogrome 1938", München 2000, chapter 2), and he might have preferred not to live as a known homosexual, what with his purported relationship with a Nazi (see http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_y ... acht_story on the last part). However, I can't imagine the Nazis wouldn't dispatch the witness, who must've known quite a lot.
UlrichH

[trespasser07]

I wonder if there are documents regarding this just waiting to be unearthed.

[paratatruc]

My two cents about Herschel Grynszpan
1)The stories about t him being a homosexual who slept with germans are a complete B***t.
His lawyer wanted him to present himself as the lover of Von Rath who commited a crime of passion, but Herschel refused to follow his advice and threatened to fire him.

2)Without knowing it, he most probably saved the lives of countless persons.
Document shows that the Kristalnacht was premeditated even before the assassination, but it certainly increased
its violence and intensity. The number of Jews who left Germany and Austria was in steady decline since 1934, and the Kristallnacht gave a formidable boost to the emigration .Had these people stayed, they would have finished somewhere in a ditch in Riga or Minsk.

[David Thompson]

paratatruc -- Please provide our readers with sources for factual claims. Our rules require them.

[Adam Carr]

Gerald Schwab's book The Day the Holocaust Began: the Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan gives great detail on how Grynszpan's lawyer, Vincent de Moro-Giafferri, invented the story that Grynszpan and vom Rath were lovers (or alternatively that vom Rath was homosexual and paid Grynszpan for sex), in order to help his client. He hoped to do two things: to dissuade the Germans from persuing the case for fear of exposure that vom Rath, who came from a respected family, was homosexual (which he was), and to persuade the French court that Grynszpan's action was a crime de passion and not a political assassination, thereby gaining a more lenient sentence. It's true that Grynszpan disliked this tactic, but he was happy to use it himself later, when he was in German custody, by threatening to expose vom Rath if he was put on trial. This was one of the reasons (the other being the failure of the Riom trial) that Goebbels decided not to proceed with a show trial for Grynszpan.

[trespasser07]

New book avaliable soon on Grynszpan;

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-Strange-L ... 881&sr=8-1

[trespasser07]

Hi, below is what most people seem to think happened to Herschel in the later war years (based on the BBC twenty minutes subject on him) - posted in an older forum too;

He was in Sachsenhausen and then transferred to Magdeburg prison in September 1942, this is were all documentation and sightings seem to have stopped. However he was interviewed in either 1943 or 1944 by Adolf Eichmann, again questions about was he alone in the assassination of von Rath etc.

Probably by the end of 1944 or early 1945, it seemed that Hitler wasn't going to give the word for a trial anymore, and he was executed. On the 28th January 1945, he was moved to Bradenburg prison. That night a lot of prisoners were killed in the prison and they all had their affiliation as christians, apart from one, who had the name Otto Schneider and the date of birth was identical to Herschel (28.03.1921). Most people seem to believe that this man was Herschel.

Regards.

[Adam Carr]

Who is "most people"? Do you have a source for this?

[trespasser07]

Hi Adam please see link below for radio interviews, it is near the end;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... _Assassin/

Regards.

[trespasser07]

The link below suggests that he was still alive in 1946;

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... cht-pogrom

Regards.

[wm]

Does Everyone Have a Look-Alike?

There's a fairly decent chance of it, actually, thanks to the limited number of genes that influence facial features.

There is only so much genetic diversity to go around [...] If you shuffle that deck of cards so many times, at some point, you get the same hand dealt to you twice.

[trespasser07]

I'm not questioning facial recognition technology or Roger Moorhouse!

[wm]

As professor Sheehan says look-alikes, twin strangers, doppelgangers (some say everyone has up to seven twin strangers) happen quite frequently, and even Mother Nature can't do anything about it.

What they did with facial recognition is junk science, belief in the magic of the computer. If you show the computer similar-looking or identical-looking people, it's gonna say they are similar or identical. But it's not a proof of anything, because look-alikes happen quite frequently.