Herschel Grynszpan - Grynszpan's Defence

Grynszpan's Defence

The death of vom Rath and the horrors of the Kristallnacht pogroms brought Herschel Grynszpan international notoriety. On 14 November Dorothy Thompson, who in 1934 had become the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, made an impassioned broadcast to an estimated 5 million listeners in defence of Grynszpan, pointing out that the Nazis themselves had made heroes of the assassins of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.

"I am speaking of this boy . Soon he will go on trial. The news is that on top of all this terror, this horror, one more must pay. They say he will go to the guillotine, without a trial by jury, with the rights that any common murderer has... Who is on trial in this case? I say we are all on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities. Whether Herschel Grynszpan lives or not won't matter much to Herschel. He was prepared to die when he fired those shots. His young life was already ruined. Since then, his heart has been broken into bits by the results of his deed.

"They say a man is entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers, and a man's kinsmen rally around him, when he is in trouble. But no kinsman of Herschel's can defend him. The Nazi government has announced that if any Jews, anywhere in the world, protest at anything that is happening, further oppressive measures will be taken. They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage. Therefore, we who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard. This boy has become a symbol, and the responsibility for his deed must be shared by those who caused it."

Liberal and left-wing newspapers and commentators in many countries echoed her sentiments. While deploring the assassination, they argued that Grynszpan had been driven to his act by the Nazi persecution of German Jews and of his family in particular.

Jewish organisations were horrified by Grynszpan's action, which they condemned more severely than most non-Jewish liberals, while echoing the plea of extenuating circumstances, and condemning the subsequent victimization of all German Jews in response to the act of an isolated individual. The World Jewish Congress "deplored the fatal shooting of an official of the German Embassy by a young Polish Jew of seventeen", but "protested energetically against the violent attacks in the German press against the whole of Judaism because of this act" and especially against the "reprisals taken against the German Jews." The Alliance Israélite Universelle in France "rejected all forms of violence, regardless of author or victim", but "indignantly protested the barbarous treatment inflicted on an entire innocent population."

Several appeals were launched to raise money for Grynszpan's defense. In the U.S., Thompson launched an appeal which raised more than $40,000 in a few weeks: she asked that Jews not donate to the fund, so that the Nazis could not attribute Grynszpan's defense to a Jewish conspiracy. Jewish organizations also raised money. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, two Paris Jewish lawyers, Szwarc and Vésinne-Larue, were engaged by the Grynszpan family. Once the case became internationally known the family sought a well known lawyer and retained Isidore Franckel one of Paris's leading advocates and President of the Central Committee of the Alliance of Revisionists-Zionists, also known as Hatzohar. Isidore Franckel wanted a well known non-Jewish lawyer as co-counsel and engaged Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, a flamboyant Corsican, leading anti-fascist activist and a former Education Minister in Radical government of Édouard Herriot and a Yiddish-speaking lawyer, Serge Weill-Goudchaux, as his associate. Legal fees and costs were paid by Dorothy Thompson's defense fund.

Until Franckel and Moro-Giafferi took over the defense, everybody had accepted that Grynszpan went to the Embassy in a rage and shot the first German he saw, as a political act to avenge the persecution of his family and German Jews in general. Grynszpan's own statements after his arrest supported this: he reportedly said to the Paris police: "Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth. Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal."

Franckel and Moro-Giafferi, however, took the view that if Grynszpan was allowed to claim that he had shot vom Rath with such a motive, this would result in his certain conviction and possibly take him to the guillotine (despite his being a minor), since French law took a severe view of political assassination. If, on the other hand, the crime could be shown to have had a non-political motive, this might lead to an acquittal, or at least to a lesser sentence, since French law traditionally took a lenient view of the crime passionel (crime of passion). His legal strategy was thus to "depoliticize" Grynszpan's actions.