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Hitler's Pawn

The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust

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Hitler's Pawn

Written by: Stephen Koch
Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
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About this listen

After learning about Nazi persecution of his family, Herschel Grynszpan (pronounced "Greenspan"), an impoverished 17-year-old Jew living in Paris, bought a small handgun and on November 7, 1938, went to the German embassy and shot the first German diplomat he saw. When the man died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels made the shooting their pretext for the great state-sponsored wave of anti-Semitic terror known as Kristallnacht, still seen by many as an initiating event of the Holocaust.

Overnight, Grynszpan, a bright but naive teenager - and a perfect political nobody - was front-page news and a pawn in a global power struggle. When France fell, the Nazis captured Grynszpan after a wild chase and flew him to Berlin. The boy became a privileged prisoner of the Gestapo while Hitler and Goebbels plotted a massive show trial to blame "the Jews" for starting World War II. A prisoner and alone, Grynszpan grasped Hitler's intentions and waged a battle of wits to sabotage the trial, knowing that even if he succeeded, he would certainly be murdered. The battle of wits was close, but Grynszpan finally won. Based on the newest research, Hitler's Pawn is the richest telling of Grynszpan's story to date.

©2019 Stephen Koch (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books 20th Century Historical Judaism True Crime United States Wars & Conflicts World Military War Holocaust France Prisoners of War
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Insightful

While I have long known Kristallnacht as the event at the start of WWII, I hadn’t fully understood what precipitated it. And here is the answer: a Polish teenager with a gun, protesting how Jews were being persecuted. The war would have happened anyways, but this was the event Hitler could use as his excuse to unleash the chaos, so to speak. A fascinating story, helpful to understand.

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