Book Review – ‘Hitler’s Scapegoat: The Boy Assassin And The Holocaust’

REVIEW

NOVEMBER 7, 1938. A moody looking teenager walked into the German Embassy in Paris, which was proudly flying its swastika flag. In the boy’s pocket was a small pistol he’d bought earlier.

He asked to speak to an official and was sent in to talk to a young lawyer called Ernst vom Rath. Seated behind his desk, vom Rath greeted the boy politely. The boy sat down awkwardly and then, shouting out that he was acting on behalf of the persecuted Jews, he pulled out the gun and fired.

His aiming was “atrocious”, as it commonly is among those not properly practiced in the use of guns. Three of his five bullets missed vom Rath entirely, one passed through him and did no harm, but the other damaged his spleen, pancreas and stomach. Vom Rath was doomed: he took two days to die from his gunshot wounds.

Stephen Koch provides a gripping book and narrative which tells the whole story of the 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, who made history by being the first Jew to take up arms against the Nazi regime.

Yet the assassination and its tragic aftermath are full of bitter ironies. For one thing, poor Ernst vom Rath was, in fact, no Nazi, but rather a vociferous critic of the government he was serving: Grynszpan “very likely shot the one man in the embassy who secretly agreed with him”.

It’s seductive to imagine Herschel Grynszpan’s act as one of supreme defiance on behalf of his people – as a heroic, youthful stand against Fascism, while dithering politicians were kowtowing, appeasing and making “peace at any price”.

THE immediate and devastating effect of the shooting, though, was an even more terrible persecution of the Jews. For the Nazis used it as an excuse to unleash Kristallnacht, the pogrom that many consider to be an initiating event of the Holocaust.

Just hours after the death of vom Rath was announced, Synagogues across Germany were burned to the ground, Jewish shops and businesses were looted and destroyed and some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, stripped of their property and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen – prison camps, not yet death camps.

Elsewhere on that fatal night, more than 100 Jews were murdered by knifing, burning or brutal beating.

Herschel Grynszpan, pacing in his French prison cell, was in agony on hearing the news. “At night,” he wrote to a friend, “I dream about the ghetto, about Jewish women and children running away . . . God, oh my God! I didn’t want that.”

The funeral of vom Rath was an absurdly grandiose affair, staged in a huge hall in Dusseldorf. The dead man was hailed as “the first martyr to fall for the Third Reich” and his coffin was illuminated by huge spotlights “a la 20th Century Fox”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ evil genius of propaganda, was given space to broadcast the party’s official interpretation of the assassination. “The Jew Grynszpan represents world Jewry.” He added: “The shooting in Paris was world Jewry’s attempt to shoot down the German people”. Any reprisals were therefore being justified.

Indeed, in the world view of the Nazis, the Jews and the Bolsheviks – more or less the same thing, as they saw it – were committed to a war of genocide against the Aryan/Germanic people, who must therefore fight a titanic, apocalyptic war of self-defence to save themselves.

Herschel, a Polish Jew by origin, was born and raised in Hanover. He was a clever, somewhat sickly boy, standing barely 5ft, dark-eyed and given to silent brooding.

When he was 15, he was sent to Paris to live with his aunt and uncle, while his family remained in Germany. Despite increasing persecution, they trusted that “Germany was still a nation of laws”.

On October 27, 1938, there came a knock on their door and the Grynszpan family were told to report to the police station – “a mere formality”. Taking only their coats and passports, they complied.

They never saw their home of more than 20 years again.

Along with some 18,000 other Polish Jews from all over Germany, the family were marched to the train station. Once on a train, the Gestapo moved down the crowded carriages, confiscating everything of value from the helpless passengers.

Two kilometres short of the Polish border, they were herded off the train and marched through the driving rain.

The sick and elderly who couldn’t walk were beaten in bloody savage attacks. “They shouted, ‘Run! Run!’” recalled Herschel’s father, Sendel, in later years.

Finally, they were shoved across the border and abandoned without any money, food, clothes or shelter.

On November 3, in Paris, Herschel received a distressing postcard from his sister – the final straw that triggered the murder of Ernst vom Rath.

On it, Berta wrote about their “great misfortune”, saying the family had no money. She begged for him to send some. But her brother had no money to send.

They were living in an army barracks, sleeping on sacks stuffed with straw, eating gruel and “snatching at bread tossed into the starving throng from trucks . . . In 11 days, nobody had been able to change clothes.”

Later, Berta would be just one more victim who vanished in the Holocaust, although we do not know the details. Miraculously, the rest of Herschel’s family survived and finally made it to Israel after the war.

When France fell in 1940, some 19 months after the killing of vom Rath, young Herschel was handed over by French authorities to the Gestapo, who planned to use him for a show trial to prove that “it was the Jews who started it”. But the trial never happened.

COMPLEX legal wranglings ensued, in which, the author suggests, Herschel himself played a cunning role – even at one time claiming that the real reason he had shot vom Rath was because they were homosexual lovers.

It was a lie, but a clever lie, embarrassing the Nazis and making it impossible for them to use the case as evidence of a widespread Jewish conspiracy.

Herschel’s dignified words are also on record: “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish . . . My people have a right to exist on this Earth.”

His final fate, like that of so many in this most awful of all wars, is unknown, but he certainly died before its end. Despite the uncertainty, Koch writes him the most handsome of epitaphs:

“He had been history’s pawn, a brave and foolish boy . . . he died for his people, forgotten and alone.”

Britain, Economic, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

The EU has a natural propensity to haggle

BREXIT

LONG before the people of the UK voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, before the term Brexit had even been coined, it was Grexit that was preoccupying the minds of Eurocrats.

Greece came close to crashing out of the single currency on at least four separate occasions after a vast black hole opened up in the country’s accounts in 2009.

At one stage in 2012, the British banknote printers De La Rue was asked by the government in Athens to make contingency plans to print new drachma notes (Greece’s pre-euro currency) in preparation for what many called the “Double D” solution to the economic problems Greece was facing: default on the country’s debt and devaluation with the return of the drachma.

Today, Greece remains one of the 17 members of the eurozone – and this fact alone should lift the spirits of the UK negotiators. Armed with her newly acquired Parliamentary majority, Theresa May returns to Brussels seeking at the very least to put a time limit on the Irish backstop deal she signed up to.

Each time a Greek default loomed into view, threatening the stability of the eurozone and raising the possibility that Italy or one of the other member countries might also head for the exit, the main protagonists – the hard-line German-dominated European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt and the European Commission in Brussels – caved in and authorised a bailout.

Last-ditch negotiations, usually conducted over a weekend when the financial markets were closed, would typically go into the early hours of Sunday morning.

Late-night deals were hatched against a backdrop of TV screens showing central Athens on fire and anti-austerity protesters ripping up flagstones in the capital’s Syntagma Square.

The first £38bn bailout was agreed in the dead of the night on April 23, 2010, by the troika of the ECB, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. It was one of several rescue packages for Greece, some of which required a change of government to get them over the line.

WHAT happened to Greece is typical of the Eurocrat tendency to fudge, to muddy the waters and eventually to seek compromise in a crisis situation.

Indeed, the history of the EU is littered with examples of Britain locked into eleventh-hour talks with eurocrats as the UK has sought changes in our terms of membership.

John Major worked through the night in 1991 to secure Britain’s opt-out from the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty which would have dictated working conditions in Britain and could have undermined the labour market reforms pioneered by his predecessor Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, she herself was a fierce negotiator in organising rebates from Brussels from the UK’s oversized contributions to the EU budget. In 1984, in the imperial grandeur at the historic palace of Fontainebleau in France, European leaders painfully conceded the famous British EU budget contribution rebate – or as the French sarcastically called it “le chéque Britannique”.

And let’s not forget that in the teeth of his promise to hold an in/out referendum, David Cameron returned from Brussels in the early hours one day in February 2016 with draft reform proposals agreed by European Council President Donald Tusk which he claimed would give Britain “special status”.

In the event, the pledges made by Brussels were so anaemic that they failed to convince British voters that sovereignty could be maintained by voting remain – a huge mistake by the eurocrats who failed to recognise the strength of anti-EU feeling among large swathes of the UK population.

Both in national negotiations and in commercial transactions, reaching an accord more often or not comes down to the wire.

With the clock now ticking inexorably to March 29, the desperation of the leaders of the other 27 EU countries to avoid an economic and financial crisis at the very moment that Germany and the eurozone are facing the bleak prospect of recession may be Theresa May’s best hope. This is regardless of how unyielding Brussels negotiators have been to date and their willingness to play havoc with business confidence and financial stability by its brinkmanship.

THE potential loss to Brussels of a £39bn one-off payment to a Commission cash starved as it is following years of economic slowdown, could potentially be a bargaining chip for the Prime Minister in the last-chance saloon.

In the final analysis, the anecdotal evidence of what the late-night sessions in Brussels, Nice, Maastricht and other destinations should tell us, is that it’s Germany and, to a lesser extent, France which decide.

Besieged by increasingly hostile populist movements, neither Berlin or Paris will want to make political life tougher than it already is.

The politics of the EU, at their most raw, are little different to those of the bazaar. The natural tendency should be now to relish an aggressive haggle but then, eventually, to compromise.