Hitler's Pawn by Stephen Koch

Author:Stephen Koch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640091450
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Friedrich Grimm may have ridden to Düsseldorf on the vom Rath funeral train, but for most of the remainder of 1938 he was busy in Paris, trying to concoct evidence of the Jewish conspiracy he was so certain had to have taken place. But while conspiracy theories of every kind and political coloration sprouted on the case like mushrooms on a rotting log, his efforts were futile. After their own elaborate investigations, the French police concluded that Herschel had really and truly acted entirely on his own. And Otto Abetz, Grimm’s superior among the Nazis in Paris, confessed after the war that the massive effort to prove the existence of a conspiracy produced no evidence of any kind. Grimm at one point was reduced to claiming that the absence of any evidence about the Jewish plots emanating from the Sportsclub Aurore in itself proved the club’s guilt: Those clever Jews were so good at covering their tracks!

Meanwhile, Grimm attempted to bend Judge Tesnière in a pro-German direction. This effort had considerably more success. Grimm needed to be close to the legal proceedings, but as a German lawyer, he was not admitted to the French bar. He circumvented this difficulty by manipulating the vom Rath family. Under French law, one active party in a criminal proceeding can be the one known as the partie civile, who is usually the victim of the crime. Grimm arranged to name Gustav vom Rath, as the father of Ernst, as the partie civile in the trial of Herschel Grynszpan and arranged to have a French lawyer, in fact under his instructions, represent Gustav in court. The actual vom Rath family had next to nothing to do with the proceedings.17

Grimm, however, was a busy man. He had two fully staffed offices: one in the German embassy in Paris, and another in Berlin. Gerald Schwab defines Grimm’s mission: “Grimm’s task was twofold: first, to prevent the French inquiry from highlighting the evident causes of the crime, that is, a detailed examination of anti-Semitic excesses in Germany; and second, to eliminate to the extent possible any element which might reflect negatively on Germany and thus influence French attitudes toward the Third Reich.”18

At first success seemed likely. At an early stage, Judge Tesnière ruled that since the events of the Kristallnacht had followed the shooting, they were not relevant to the prosecution of the crime and could not be introduced as evidence. This was of course a setback for those like Dorothy Thompson who wanted to find “higher justice” by making the trial a showcase of Nazi crimes. To be able to prove that Herschel had been driven to despair by a German government that was thoroughly and lawlessly anti-Semitic would have been a propaganda coup for Moro-Giafferi. Yet at least in the early stages of the planned prosecution, the path to that strategy seemed closed: the pogrom—the most damning evidence of all—was held to be inadmissible. Instead, Moro-Giafferi had to gather information about the Polish deportations. That surely would be admissible—but there was yet another even more serious obstacle.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.