Opening Eyes

In the United States, the likelihood of civil war (yes, I’m dead serious) is much, much closer than most in the country understand.  Those who would fight to keep God given freedoms understand that they have a responsibility to maintain those freedoms in a fashion where they will be handed down to their children un-altered.  Indeed, it would rightfully be said that there is no greater responsibility to our children than this.  If you underestimate the determination of these good people, I encourage you to read this.

Those who would limit or remove basic freedoms (we call them The Gang) understand the determination of those described in the paragraph above.  They always have. Read Mike Vanderboegh’ s history lesson below (at Sipsey Street Irregulars), the same author as the link above, and understand that which 99 out of 100 of your fellow citizens do not:

Herschel Grynszpan.

“Kristallnacht”

The son of Polish Jews who emigrated to Germany in 1911, Herschel Grynszpan was born in Hanover in 1921, where his father Sendel had a modest tailor’s shop. Herschel had an elder sister, Esther, and brother, Mordechai. After Hitler came to power, the Grynszpan family began to suffer persecution. To keep their oldest son safe, in 1936 Sendel and Berta sent the 15 year old Herschel to Belguim to live with his uncle and aunt. Shortly afterward, Herschel crossed illegally into France seeking work, moving to Paris. He spent the next two years trying to get legal residence in France, without which he could not work or study legally, but was rejected by French officials. His reentry permit for Germany expired in April 1937 and his Polish passport expired in January 1938, leaving him without legal papers. Meanwhile, his family’s position back in Germany was becoming desperate. The Nazi boycott of Jewish shops was killing his father’s tailoring business and his siblings lost their jobs. On 26 October, the Gestapo was ordered to arrest and deport immediately all Polish Jews in Germany.

The Grynszpans were among the estimated 12,000 Polish Jews arrested, stripped of their property and herded aboard trains headed for Poland. When they got to the border, they were forced to walk two kilometers to the Polish border town of Zbszyn. But the Poles, every bit as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, refused to admit them. The Grynszpans and thousands of other Polish-Jewish deportees were left stranded at the border, fed only occasionally by the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organizations. It was from Zbszyn that Berta Grynszpan sent a postcard to Herschel in Paris, telling him what had happened and pleading with him to rescue them and arrange for them to emigrate to America – which was an impossibility. Berta’s postcard reached Herschel on Thursday 3 November. Herschel decided to avenge his parents’ persecution.

Four days later Herschel wrote a farewell postcard to his parents and went to a gunshop where he bought a 6.35mm pistol and a box of 25 rounds, for 235 francs. He then walked to the German Embassy and went inside, asking to see an embassy official — he later said he had wanted to kill the German ambassador. The clerk on duty asked Ernst vom Rath, a junior embassy official, to see him. When Grynszpan entered vom Rath’s office, he pulled out his gun and shot vom Rath three times in the abdomen. He shouted “You’re a filthy boche” and said he was acting in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews. Grynszpan made no attempt to resist or escape. He freely confessed to shooting vom Rath, who died two days later. Grynszpan said that his motive for doing so was to avenge the persecuted German Jews. Ironically, vom Rath was in fact an anti-Nazi and was under investigation by the Gestapo at the time of his death. Heck, he wasn’t even an anti-Semite but he died just the same.

The Nazis had been planning to let loose their Brownshirts on the Jewish community for some time. Grynszpan’s act was just the excuse they were looking for. Vom Rath died on the fifteenth anniversary of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the greatest day of the Nazi calendar. That night Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made an incendiary speech to veteran Nazis at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich. Goebbels hinted that there might be “spontaneous outbursts” against the Jews. The assembled Nazi leaders needed no further encouragement.

Thus began the anti-Jewish pogrom known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” or in German, “Kristallnacht.” On the night of 9-10 November 1938 the Nazis fanned out across Germany. During Kristallnacht over 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed and 400 synagogues were burnt down. More than 1 billion Reichsmarks’ damage to property was reported – and Jews were unable to file insurance claims for property losses. Ninety-one Jews were killed and more than 30,000 were sent to concentration camps (where over a thousand died within a short time of beatings, outright murder and disease). The rest were released some months later. Those who could, left Germany after that. The ones who didn’t perished later with all their kin in the Holocaust. Herschel Grynszpan set out to make an anti-Nazi gesture, inadvertently killed an anti-Nazi, and gave the Nazis the excuse for the first nationwide assault on the Jews. It was the Law of Unintended Consequences writ large. And it was only the beginning. As William Shirer wrote in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

On the flaming, riotous night of November 9, 1938, the Third Reich had deliberately turned down a dark and savage road from which there was no return, A good many Jews had been murdered and tortured and robbed before, but these crimes, except for those which took place in concentration camps, had been committed mostly by brown-shirted rowdies acting out of their own sadism and greed while the State authorities looked on, or looked the other way. Now the German government itself had organized and carried out a vast pogrom. The killings, the looting, the burning of synagogues and houses and shops on the night of November 9 were its doing. So were the official decrees, duly published in the official gazette, the Reichsgesetzblatt . . . which fined the Jewish community a billion marks, eliminated them from the economy, robbed them of what was left of their property and drove them toward the ghetto — and worse.” (Page 434)

Gerald Schwab, who witnessed the events of Kristallnacht as a German Jewish boy and who later researched the case, titled his 1990 book The Day the Holocaust Began, as indeed it did. One wonders what Grynszpan made of the awful result of his assassination of vom Rath. We cannot know because two years later, after the fall of France, Herschel passed into German custody and thereafter disappeared into what the Nazis called “Nacht und Nebel” — Night and Fog. Never heard of “Night and Fog?”:

“After lengthy consideration, it is the will of the Führer that the measures taken against those who are guilty of offenses against the Reich or against the occupation forces in occupied areas should be altered. The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose.” — Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, Nacht und Nebel Decree to the Gestapo, 7 December 1942.

Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel ordered: “The prisoners are, in future, to be transported to Germany secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because – A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

Having served the Nazis unintentionally but well, Grynszpan vanished into the Nacht und Nebel. Grynszpan apparently died in one of their camps in the final year of the war. In one final ironic twist, Grynszpan’s parents — who had been so concerned about Herschel’s safety that they sent him to “safety” within pistol range of vom Rath — survived the war.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, human nature does not change.

Understand this, and open up your eyes.