The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan cover art

The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan

A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris

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The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan

By: Jonathan Kirsch
Narrated by: Simon Prebble
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About this listen

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht comes this untold story of a teenager whose act of defiance would have dire international consequences.

On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. He did it, he said, out “of love for my parents and for my people.” Two days later, vom Rath lay dead, and the Third Reich exploited his murder to inaugurate its long-planned campaign of terror against Germany’s Jewish citizens, in the mass pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht.

In a bizarre concatenation of events that would rapidly involve Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, Grynszpan would become the centerpiece of a Nazi propaganda campaign that would later describe his actions as "the first shot of the Jewish War.

©2013 Jonathan Kirsch (P)2013 Audible Inc.
20th Century Europe France Historical Judaism Military Modern World War Holocaust Refugee Imperialism Middle East

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