There were also new laws designed to bar any contact between Jews and Germans. Thus, Jews were forbidden to use public transportation, study in German schools or seek treatment in German hospitals.
As he brought the November 12 meeting to a close, Hermann Goering, a leader of the Nazi Party, said these chilling words, “Incidentally, I would like to say that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.”
German Jews took the hint and scrambled to get out of the country. By May 1939, Germany’s Jewish population had fallen to 213,390. By October 1941, when emigration was put to an end, there were only 164,000 Jews living in Germany and Austria combined.
In the early 1930s, German Jews had immigrated to seemingly safe European countries such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland—where they were later caught up in the Nazi inferno—but by 1938 there were very few countries willing to increase their quotas to accommodate the flood of refugees seeking a safe haven. At the Evian Conference convened by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in July 1938, which was attended by representatives from 32 countries, only the Dominican Republic agreed to take in additional refugees, in exchange for a large sum of money. The United States itself refused to increase its German-Austrian quota—partly due to the anti-Semitism of Breckinridge Long, who was responsible for carrying out immigration-related policies.
While England did agree to temporarily take in about 10,000 Jewish children in a rescue effort known as Kindertransport, only about 60,000 German Jews were allowed entry into British-controlled Palestine. Some German Jews who could not enter European countries or the United States eventually found refuge in Central and South America and in Shanghai. Most of those who remained in the Third Reich—mainly elderly Jews—perished during the Holocaust.
And what of Hershel Grynszpan, the unhappy teen who provided the Nazis with the ammunition they needed to “justify” the Kristallnacht rampage? While after the war there were rumors that he had survived and was living in Paris under an assumed name, the rumors turned out to be just that. We do know that after being imprisoned in France, he was transferred to Germany, where he was supposed to be the “star performer” in a Nazi show trial. For various reasons, the trial kept being postponed and the paper trail related to Grynszpan goes cold in 1942. French doctor and researcher Alain Cuenot posits that Hershel succumbed to the harsh living conditions present in his internment camp, Sachsenhausen. American historian Alan E. Steinweiss disagrees; he believes Hershel was executed when it became clear the trial wasn’t going to take place.
While we will probably never know what happened to Hershel Grynszpan, we do know that most of his family survived the war. They managed to escape to the Soviet Union—one of Hershel’s sisters was murdered there in 1942—and after the war they immigrated to Israel.
Hershel Grynszpan was declared officially dead by the German government in 1960, but his legacy is still being debated today. Many see him as a troubled youth whose irresponsible act of vengeance caused disaster for hundreds of thousands of German Jews. But according to Henry L. Feingold, in The Politics of Rescue. The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945), there was at least one positive outcome of Kristallnacht: “Even the most Germanized Jew was now forced to think in terms of emigration.”