Paul Sullivan on the day the Nazis committed the worst pogrom in Germany since the Middle Ages…

On October 27, 1938, Hanover resident Zindel Grynszpan and his family were forced out of their home by German police. Grynszpan’s modest tailor’s shop, which he had been operating since 1911, was confiscated along with his family’s possessions and they were forced to move over the Polish border—part of a “relocation” of 17,000 Polish Jews by the Nazis.

Nazi harassment of Jews had already been happening for several years at this point, of course. As early as 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, a one-day boycott was proclaimed against Jewish shops, a law was passed against kosher butchering and restrictions were imposed on Jewish children attending in public schools. By 1935, the Nuremburg Laws had deprived Jews of German citizenship, and a year later Jews were prohibited from participation in parliamentary elections; signs reading “Jews Not Welcome” started to appear in many German cities.

But 1938 was a major turning point, a year when many Jews realised that their hopes for working around the existing restrictions were vanishing; that they would they soon be forced to leave even though leaving was becoming more difficult. More evidence that the Nazi noose was tightening came in March 1938 and the Law On The Legal Status On Jewish Religious Organisations’, which stripped Jewish communities of their official religious status, and another passed in July that required all Jews to carry identification cards.

In late October of that year, the Polish government had refused to admit the deportees from the so called Polen Aktion, resulting in them being interned in ‘relocation camps’ on the Polish frontier. This included Zindel Grynszpan, whose seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, was living with an uncle in Paris when he received news of his family’s expulsion. Young and passionate, he decided to get revenge—by assassinating the German Ambassador to France.