A Jew in Europe in the 1930s was a person without a home. A Jewish Pole, for example, might have left for Germany in the 1920s to avoid Poland’s anti-Semitic mood; but when the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, he was no longer welcome. Where might he go to flee these Nazis? Not back to Poland. In 1938 Poland revoked citizenship for those who had lived outside the country for more than five years, a law clearly aimed at Jews. Maybe to France? Tens of thousands did just that, but also by 1938, in an attempt to appease their Nazi neighbors, the French closed the door to refugees and proclaimed illegal those already present, arresting them and placing them in internment camps.

Could this Jewish man flee to America? Historian David M. Kennedy affirms that the United States was aware of Hitler’s treatment of Jews, but immigration policy favored those entering with financial means; German law forbade Jews from leaving the country with more than US $4, so a Jewish immigrant from Germany was always in penury and never qualified for entry. The U.S. did expand the number of immigrants it took in, but even then only 11,000 entered in 1937 under these more-generous guidelines. The tragic need was exposed by hindsight, but at the time, Kennedy asserts, the country’s “anti-immigration attitudes” and the rules of the 1924 National Origins Act prevented the country from providing asylum.^[1]

It is one thing to study these political maneuverings and consider immigration policies, but history is made up of individual stories, and the power of Stephen Koch’s new book, Hitler’s Pawn, released this week by Counterpoint, is in the view it offers of one particular Jewish boy, a boy caught in this net of anti-Semitism with no place to call home.

When he was 15-years old, Herschel Grynszpan’s family sent him out of Hanover, Germany, to Paris to live with his uncle and aunt (the surname is pronounced “Greenspan”). Within two years, Polish measures rendered his passport useless, and French statute declared him an outlaw; with French police hunting him, Herschel moved out of his uncle’s apartment and slept in an abandoned maid’s closet. Then, in October 1938, German police rounded up his parents and siblings from their home in Hanover and escorted them with 18,000 other Polish Jews to the Polish border, where they were dumped, bereft of their money or possessions.

How does a person react to such setbacks? Would anyone expect a typical 17-year old boy to cope with such persecution with poise and verve?

Herschel certainly didn’t. In his despair he bought a small handgun and walked into the German embassy in Paris, requesting a meeting with an official. Career diplomat Ernst vom Rath received him in his office, and once alone with him, Herschel shot him, yelling that vom Rath was a filthy Kraut and that he had killed him in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews (he did not know how many of Germany’s Polish Jews had been expelled).

So Herschel was a stupid kid with an explosive temper and the foresight of a mole, and if he weren’t Jewish in 1938, he might have provoked a simple fistfight at school. Instead, the top levels of the Third Reich saw potential in his story. Chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, under Hitler’s direction, used Herschel’s action as a spark in their anti-Semitic planning. Calling Grynszpan’s act “World Jewry’s” attack on Germany, Goebbels’s propaganda machine suggested that if vom Rath were to die from his injuries, it would instigate the most serious consequences for the Jews of Germany. Vom Rath did die—as Goebbels knew he would—and those serious consequences were the Kristallnacht, an orgy of rioting and violence, where Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were destroyed so that, in Hitler’s phrase, “the Jews should feel the rage of the people.”

For Grynszpan, what could be worse? The Nazis had used his attack upon them to spark a conflagration against his people. His world was collapsing upon him and at every turn, in every way, his attempt to control his own story had been turned on its head.

From there, Goebbels’s plans were worse. Herschel was held in France and was awaiting a trial there, but as World War II began it never occurred. Eventually Grynszpan fell into German hands, but Germany did not execute him. They held him as a privileged prisoner, planning to use him as a key defendant in a great propaganda trial—a trial to show that World War II was a giant Jewish conspiracy and that Herschel was a pawn in the chain of “World Jewry.” The conspiracy Herschel’s trial would expose would reveal to the world once and for all why Hitler’s Final Solution was essential.

Much of Koch’s book details this trial’s approach and Herschel’s attempts to undercut Goebbels’s plan for him. Herschel ultimately wins the battle of wit and manipulation, proving himself too risky a defendant to be given a platform, for once controlling a piece of his own story, even if a small one.

Herschel’s story does not read like a moral. It is hard to see bravery in the murder of a diplomat who, ironically, was likely opposed to Hitler. Koch sees in Herschel’s outmaneuvering of Goebbels a kind of poetic heroism, where Grynszpan matures and is then able to seize his fate. And while I appreciate his restraint in applying that sentiment subtly, it offers no consolation.

Herschel may have outwitted the Third Reich and denied them their great trial, but he could not deny them what the trial was designed to justify. It is hard here not to agree with Elie Wiesel’s fellow patient in the infirmary at Buna, the one who cynically declared, “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”^[2] Hitler still prosecuted his Final Solution, show trial or no.

The frustrating tragedy for Herschel Grynszpan is that his story was being controlled by those who hated him, and while he bravely attempted to foil their every move, what he ultimately needed was the help of people—lots of people—who would choose not to hate him, but to help.

^[1] Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear. Oxford, 2001. 410-418.

^[2] Wiesel, Elie. Night. Hill and Wang, 2006. 81.