Herschel grynszpan book
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When Ernst vom Rath went to work on the morning of November 7, 1938, he had no idea he would soon be mortally wounded—or that his death would serve as the excuse for a two-day terror attack on German Jews. He was at work at the German embassy in Paris when Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, walked up to him and fired five times at close range.
Days later, vom Rath was dead and the streets of Germany were littered with shards of broken glass. The young diplomat’s death was used as the excuse for Kristallnacht, a two-day, nationwide pogrom against Germany’s Jews that is now seen as a harbinger for the Holocaust. But who was the man whose death supposedly instigated the violence, and why did Grynszpan kill him?
Vom Rath would not even be a historical footnote had it not been for the political forces that swept through Germany when he was in his early twenties. He was born in 1909 to a Frankfurt politician, and later studied law. In 1932, he made a decision that would influence not only his brief life but world history: He joined the Nazi Party.
Hitler was not yet in pow
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The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris | Jewish Book Council
In May of 1942, at the height of World War II, Adolf Hitler sent his foreign minister a note inquiring into the life of one of the many millions of prisoners in the Third Reich. Ribbentrop recalled that he was asked “whether he thought the time was right to undertake the Grynszpan trial.” After a short consultation with the Nazi propaganda minister, Ribbentrop replied that he did not believe the time was right. Instead the prisoner was transferred to Magdeburg. “No official document of the Third Reich discloses his fate.”
Jonathan Kirsch, a writer who has often covered topics related to religion, as well as Judaism, notes in his introduction that “[Herschel] Grynzspan has indeed all but disappeared from the historical record….he is a missing person when it comes to the vast literature of the Second World War.” One of the experts on Grynzspan noted that Jews felt he did “a gre
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Review
[Herschel Grynszpan] faced what his biographer Jonathan Kirsch perceptively calls the 'existential threat of statelessness.' Kirsch has a dramatic story, and he tells it well. --Timothy Snyder"
In his well-crafted study Jonathan Kirsch manages to put some meat on the skinny frame of his protagonist and also to put a human face on his victim. In so doing, Kirsch has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Kristallnacht. --David Clay Large"
On Nov. 7, 1938, a troubled Jewish teenager walked into an embassy in Paris, got in to see a low-level Nazi attache and shot him dead a killing that gave Hitler a pretext for the savage, anti-Semitic orgy of Kristallnacht. --Scott Martelle"
In his well-crafted study... Jonathan Kirsch manages to put some meat on the skinny frame of his protagonist and also to put a human face on his victim. In so doing, Kirsch has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Kristallnacht. --David Clay Large
[An] excellent account...Reading this excellent, thought-provoking biography, one is all too easily reminded of Camus's 1942
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