By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD
On the morning of November 7, 1938, a teenaged boy, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and asked to speak to an embassy official. He was ushered into the office of Ernst vom Rath, the embassy’s third secretary, whereupon Grynszpan shot the 29-year-old vom Rath five times, mortally wounding him. Vom Rath died two days later.
The Grynszpans were Jewish and, as the story goes, the 17-year-old shot vom Rath because his parents, Sendel and Rivka Grynszpan, were deported from Germany to Poland as part of the Nazi regime’s effort to exclude Jews from German society. A later story indicated that there was a homosexual connection between the young Grynszpan and vom Rath which was the real cause of the murder, but we’ll deal with that later.
In any event, Adolf Hitler, who had been itching to take stronger actions against the Jews, wasn’t going to let the murder of a minor public official go unnoticed. He posthumously promoted vom Rath to the rank of legal counsel first class and ordered a state funeral for him, which Hitler himself attended along with his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who delivered a eulogy.
Hitler was notified of the shooting while he and other Nazis were celebrating the anniversary of their 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels then suggested to the assembly, apparently at the direction of the Fuehrer, that while demonstrations “should not be prepared or organized by the [Nazi] party, insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.”
The result was two days of rioting while German officials looked the other way as Hitler Youth and other anti-Semitic sympathizers rioted against Jewish shops, synagogues, and prayer rooms in what later came to be known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
Destroyed or partly destroyed were 267 synagogues, 7,500 Jewish stores and businesses, and 29 department stores. Jewish-owned shops were looted. Over 30,000 Jews were arrested and put into concentration camps, which paved the way forward toward the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish problem.” Describing the events, Daily Telegraph reporter Hugh Greene wrote:
“Mob law ruled Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the ‘fun’.”
And it all happened because Hitler wanted to take advantage of the death of an obscure German official; the Jews, after all, had fired the first shot.
Ironically, after the shooting, Grynszpan was taken into custody without incident by the Paris police, but was never put on trial for the murder. Legal wrangling kept the French courts from acting and when France fell to Germany in 1940, Grynszpan was transferred to German custody where Hitler had planned a show trial in which Grynszpan and his fellow Jews could be condemned.
However, the trial was derailed by the constant rumors of that homosexual link between Grynszpan and vom Rath. Fearing a public backlash, Grynszpan was held without trial and his status was unknown at the time of the Third Reich’s surrender in 1945.
Never let a crisis go to waste. Just sayin’.
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We all know there are some wacky things going on right now. I hope against hope every week that things will calm down and I won’t need to comment. But, alas, such is not the case.
One of the latest is something called the 1619 project which was developed by The New York Times Magazine. We examined it with Mike Gonzales, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a few weeks ago on my Faith On Trial radio program.
“This will,” he writes of the project in The Daily Signal, “accelerate a trend already underway: subjecting schoolchildren to a curriculum that blames slavery on capitalism and whose creator believes socialism offers the best path to equality.”
He warns about the overt political nature of the 1619 Project, which places slavery at the center of America’s founding. America began, not in 1776 when independence was declared, but in 1619 when the first slaves were brought by the British to what is now American soil. The curriculum, which provides reading materials, videos, and activity lessons, will indoctrinate children on how America and capitalism is racist, he says.
The opening essay in the project materials, one which won the originator, Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times, the Pulitzer, says, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” Another essay in the curriculum by Matthew Desmond says, “If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”
Why then our revolution? According to the project the Colonists wanted independence because they thought the British were going to abolish slavery in America. It teaches children to dislike America and ignores the American promise of freedom and our advances in civil and individual rights, Gonzalez says.
According to estimates, the 1619 project is now in nearly 4,500 classrooms, and the curriculum has been adopted by some of the largest school districts in the country, including Buffalo, Chicago, Wilmington, Del., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Washington, D.C. The curriculum is easily adopted, he said, because the Progressive/Socialist Left has done a good job of infiltrating schools of education where primary and secondary school teachers are trained. “The left has done a good job of targeting those schools.”
Great timing for this!
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Last week I penned a review of the book, Rules for Retrogrades: Forty Tactics to Defeat the Radical Left by the brothers Timothy and David Gordon. Shortly after I submitted the column, Timothy was fired from his teaching job at Garces Memorial High School in Bakersfield, Calif., a Catholic school where he taught theology.
His offense was a Twitter post suggesting that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization and encouraging people to defend themselves from arsonists and vandals.
I don’t know if Black Lives Matter is truly a terrorist organization or not. But I do know that when there is any racial unrest, BLM is there in the midst, making demands and urging the defunding of police. I also know that as I write this, a group claiming to be Black Lives Matter has taken control of a seven-block area in Seattle and has blocked off entry to the area they first called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), and are now calling the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), whatever any of that means.
Terrorism? Is it BLM? Don’t know; but what I do know is that the police must take it back for the residents who live and work there.
BLM also argues for the disruption of the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” and also promotes criminal justice reform, which President Trump has been touting for some time, well before George Floyd’s murder.
Back to Gordon: The problem with his firing was that it was a knee-jerk reaction by educators who should have known better. Unfortunately, they were probably taught in the same schools Gonzales warned us about.
Don’t we reason anymore? Where is our common sense? Next thing you know they’ll want to ban Gone With the Wind.
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and hear him every Thursday morning at 10 (CDT) on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)
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