The mystery of Hershel Grynzspan's death

[StephanieSklar]

I hesitated in putting up this thread in the Resistance section; at first I thought of putting it in the Holocaust section, but I decided to put it here because when he murdered the secretary of the German embassy in Paris in november 1938 (he wanted to murder the ambassador but he was out walking his dog), he said he did it as a protest against the Nazi persecutions of his people (the Jews) at home.

So, while the murder was the official pretext for Kristallnacht, I believe that Kristallnacht would have happened anyways another time under another pretext...If my post was re:K.Nacht per se I would've put it in the other section.

Ok!! Yesterday I watched a doc. on Planete TV channel, a France-based news channel w/lots of documentaries. The show was about H. Grynzpan and the murder.

There are lots of unsolved mysteries regarding this. One is, what happened to him after the war? He was a minor at the time of the murder, and there was much ballyooing between France and Germany after the murder, sp. re: jurisdictions. The Germans said that since the murder happened in their embassy and both murderer and victim were from Germany, he should be shipped and that is that. The French said that Grynzpan arrived in France illegally and stayed illegally (which he himself confirmed during police interrogation, in front of a German embassy staffer fluent in French and French gendarmes). France politics were in turmoil at the time, and a trial could have been seen as embarrassing. French society was bitterly divided over this, with almost as much fervor as the Dreyfus affair in the XIXth century. The Right was pleading to either send him back to Berlin or to try him for first degree murder in Paris immediatly; its newspapers also editorialized that the borders should be closed to illegals like him. The Left tried to make him a hero, sp. the Communists. An American female journalist living in Paris (whose name escapes me) helped him with his defence.

But an election was looming in France, and his trial was postponed. In early 1939 it was decided that the trial would be held in Sept.1939. But WWII canceled the whole thing. He had his pre-trial hearings in June 1939; his aunt and uncle living in Paris were condemned to aiding an illegal. Hershel's lawyer, a veteran of Paris courts paid by the female journalist, tried to push the trial in a new direction: he pleaded that Herzhel and the German Secretary were homosexuals and that the murder was a lovers's quarel. Grynzpan was furious at such pretentions; he wanted to fire the lawyer but for some reason couldn't.

Sept.1939 came and no trial. In june 1940 war was coming to the French soil; he was driven to the exit of the prison and told to go to Toulon, by his own means, where he would be held in another prison. Now keep in mind that he could've escaped, as there was no guard with him. So he walked, hitchiked, ect to Toulon. There he went to the chateau that was converted as a jail for "very special prisonners:. On the orders of the Ministry of Justice, his real name was not written in the directory. A pseudonym was given.

He was transfered to Berlin by the Vichy govt., in 1942. He was held in a prison, before that he was interviewed by the gestapo, without violence, as the govt.was conscious of his worth. No trial happened...

At the end of the war he wasn't found, neither dead nor alive. The last time it was known that he was in the prison was in nov.1944. but a jan.1945 prison transfer sheet from the Brandeburg jail has the name of a Oscar mos Schneider, 28-03-1921. It was the first name on the prisonner list, listed in front of all the others...mos meant Jew, and the date of birth was Grynzpan's.

So, was he sent to an extermination camp, was he shot by a guard, or was he released in the confusion of May 1945? Some hypothesis are that he could've been sent back to France, where his trial could have been seen as a grotesque farce at this point in time. So he could have been freed there, told to keep the secret to his grave or else...

Some say that he started a new life as a gas station attendant in the south of France. His family testified at Eichmann's 1960 trial that they never heard from him after 1940, but that they were divided as to what was his fate...

A Franco-Israeli historian, Mrs Rita Schumann, spent some recent years trying to figure out what happened, and she is at a loss. She doesn't know, all she says are that anything could have happened, whether he died in jail, in Auschwitz, or he lived (and may be still living), no one know for sure...

it's really a good WW2 mystery. Millions of innocent Jews lost their lives, but him, a premeditated murderer, stayed alive at least until the end of 1944, six years after killing a member of the German diplomacy...May be he wasn't killed at all.

So, does anyone know what happened to him??

[AliasDavid]

The most probable theory seems to be that Herschel Grynszpan was executed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in August 1942, when it had turned out that his case was not suited for a show trial. According to the German historian Hans Jürgen Döscher, the testimony of other Sachsenhausen inmates corroberates that version (Hans Jürgen Döscher: ">>Reichskristallnacht<< Die Novemberpogrome 1938", München, 2000, p. 172). At his trial, Eichmann claimed that he had interrogated Mr. Grynszpan in 1943 or 1944
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Grynszpan),
but I find that improbable. Why should the Nazis have kept him alive, after he had become useless to them? Why would the paper trail of the Grynszpan case have stopped in 1942, if he had still been alive later
(see http://www.roizen.com/ron/grynszpan.htm).
In any case, no proof has emerged that he survived the war.
UlrichH

[trespasser07]

Has anything more appeared regarding Herschels death? Strange that nothing has ever been found about him and it is still a mystery to be solved.

[trespasser07]

Hi, below is what nmost people seem to think happened to Herschel in the later war years (based on the BBC twenty minutes subject on him);

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, 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.