Part III focuses on the very odd persona of "Grynszpan", a young Jewish hoodlum who was to play such a crucial part in the unfortunate events of "Kristallnacht":
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Although Grynszpan had no job or money (his uncle refused to support him), he was nevertheless able to move into a hotel. His hotel happened to be just around the corner from the offices of an important and influential Jewish organization, the International League Against Anti-Semitism, or LICA. The questions which now arise are: Who supported him after February 1938 and who paid for his hotel room? Although he had no apparent means of support or even valid identity papers between February and November 1938, Grynszpan was nevertheless able to purchase a handgun for 250 francs on the morning of 7 November 1938 and then, about an hour later, go to the German Embassy and shoot vom Rath.
Grynszpan was arrested at the scene and was taken to a police station. Although he was a totally obscure Polish Jew with no money and no apparent supporters, nevertheless one of France's most famous lawyers, Moro Giafferi, appeared at the police station a few hours after the shooting and told the police that he was Grynszpan's attorney. Nothing could possibly have appeared about the shooting in any newspaper before his arrival. How then could Moro Giafferi have possibly known about the shooting? Why was he so eager to defend this young foreigner? And finally, who was going to pay his attorney fees? As it turned out, Giafferi took good care of Grynszpan during the following years. Before the Grynszpan case could come before a French court, the war broke out. After the Germans occupied France, he was turned over to them by the French authorities. He was taken to Germany where he was interrogated many times, but no trial ever took place. Moro Giafferi, who had moved to Switzerland in the meantime, still managed to take good care of Grynszpan.
Many German officials were actively interested in the case. They wanted Grynszpan brought to trial, but this never happened. Rumors circulated. A trial date was scheduled but then postponed again and again and again. Whenever any official asked why Grynszpan had not been brought to trial, he was given a different answer each time. The veil of mystery surrounding this case was lifted only slightly many years after the war when a note was discovered among the many hundreds of pages in the Grynszpan file. This single short note stated simply that the trial against Grynszpan would not take place for "other than official reasons."t It gave no further explanation. Although the National Socialist regime supposedly committed the greatest imaginable crimes against the Jews, the murderer Grynszpan survived the war and returned to Paris. Why to Paris, where he could still have been arrested and tried for murder? But instead he received a new name and new identity papers there. From whom? Who was in Paris to help him and once again take such good care of him?
Incidentally, the Grynszpan family also survived the war. The young man's father, mother, brother and sister were deported to Poland as a result of the Polish passport affair and shortly thereafter were somehow able to emigrate to Palestine. Amazingly enough, this took place at a time when immigration to Palestine was limited to persons who possessed at least 1,000 English pounds in cash. Grynszpan's father, a poor piece-work tailor, certainly never had a fortune of 4,000 English pounds. Many years after the war the father testified at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem that he and his family had to give up all of their money except for ten marks per family member when they arrived at the German-Polish border in October l938.l2 How did they ever raise the 4,000 English pounds only a short time later for their migration to Palestine? Who organized their move?
Perhaps the answer to all of these questions is ... Moro Giafferi! He was not a sorcerer, but someone even more powerful: he was the legal counsel of the LICA. The LICA was founded in Paris in 1933 by the Jew Bernard Lecache and operated as a militant propaganda organization against real or imagined anti-Semitism. Its main office is still in Paris at the same address it was at in 1938. (Now known as the LICRA, it unsuccessfully sued Robert Faurisson a few years ago.) Moro Giafferi was well worth the fees LICA paid him as its legal counsel. He apparently enjoyed spectacular scenes. He had already achieved international renown at a mass meeting in Paris following the Berlin Reichstag fire of February 1933. Without knowing at all what had happened, he nevertheless delivered a spiteful speech against National Socialist Germany in which he accused Hermann Goering of setting the fire. In February 1936 Giafferi hurried to Davos, Switzerland, where the Jew David Frankfurter had shot and killed Wilhelm Gustloff, the head of the Swiss branch of the German National Socialist Party. During the subsequent trial it was clearly established that Frankfurter had been a hired murderer with backing from an unidentified but influential organization. All clues pointed to the LICA, but with Moro Giafferi as his defense counsel, Frankfurter remained silent about who, if anyone, had hired him. Amazingly enough, Frankfurter's answers to questions about the shooting showed the same pattern as Grynszpan's answers almost three years later after Giafferi arrived to help following the shooting of Ernst vom Rath.
Who Could the Provocateurs Have Been?
Like a medal, the Crystal Night has two sides. One side lies in the shining glare of historical research while the other remains in the shadows. Until now no one (at least as far as I know) has tried to examine the hidden side.
In the wake of the Crystal Night, almost everyone wanted to know who the culprits were. Dr. Goebbels had to give an official explanation which was, in effect, that the German people had been so enraged by the murder of Ernst vom Rath that they wanted to punish the Jews and therefore started the pogrom. But Goebbels did not really believe this story himself. To several persons he expressed his suspicion that a secret organization must have instigated the entire affair. He simply could not believe that anything so well organized could have been a spontaneous popular outburst.
One must understand the broad popularity of the National Socialist regime at that time to realize how incredibly difficult it was to imagine that any secret, well organized opposition movement could have instigated such a pogrom. We now know about some of these so-called resistance organizations. But at that time such well-organized opposition groups seemed preposterous, so overwhelming was the popularity and self-confidence of Hitler and the National Sociatist government. Although the National Socialists were probably more aware of the danger of Jewish power and influence than anyone else, they nevertheless totally underestimated it. In a real sense, they were far too naive. One consequence of this enormous popularity and self-confidence was that the Party leaders themselves simply could not imagine that it was not one of their own colleagues behind the whole affair. Among the Party leaders fingers were being pointed in all directions. Apparently to avoid internal wrangling and the harm that this would do to their public image, an investigation to determine the instigators never took place. Hitler believed that Dr. Goebbels, his closest confidant and the one man he could never abandon, had been the instigator.
The only persons actually punished were individual SA men who had participated directly in the pogrom and been accused in German courts of murder, assault, looting or other criminal acts by Jewish or German witnesses to these crimes. But before any of these cases ever actually came to trail, Hitler issued a special decree ordering the postponement of all such cases until after the accused individuals were first prosecuted by the Supreme Party Court, an internal court concerned with discipline within the National Socialist Party organization. The most severe punishment which the Court could impose was expulsion from the Party. In this way the Party hoped to remove any guilty members from its own ranks before they appeared as defendants in the criminal courts. In February 1939 the Chief Judge of the Supreme Party Court, Walter Buch, reported his findings to Hermann Goering. From an examination of the Buch report as well as many documents from some of the thousands of trials of so-called Nazi criminals held after the war, and corroborating testimony by thousands of defendants and witnesses, I have been able to gain a detailed and accurate understanding of what actually happened during those fateful days and nights of November 1938.
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Tomorrow: Munich on the Ninth of November - Part IV
Courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review 'Crystal Night' 1938: The Great Anti-German Spectacle - Ingrid Weckert
(Paper Presented to the Sixth International Revisionist Conference.)
This and other Revisionist articles are posted, among many other websites, at www.ihr.org and www.vho.org