Short of the Holocaust itself, the most infamous pogrom against the Jews in modern times was Germany’s Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, on Nov. 9-10, 1938, in which Nazi-orchestrated and facilitated rioting over the assassination of Nazi Diplomat Ernst vom Rath led to widespread destruction of Jewish property, synagogues and businesses. I had intended to write about this event in my column last week but decided against it because there didn’t seem to be any thematic connection to current events, which is usually my goal. The very next day “the Gateway Pundit reported: “‘The View’ Co-Host Sunny Hostin Says Trump Preparing His Own ‘Kristallnacht,’ Precursor to Nazi Holocaust.”
Far from being a random fit of lunacy by airhead Hostin, this political grenade she lobbed was obviously planned anti-Trump electioneering by ABC following a precedent set in 2020, when CNN’s propaganda go-to girl, Christiane Amonpour, leveled a similar charge against the Trump presidency.
The claim is absurd on its face given Trump’s long history of pro-Israel actions, but it’s also dishonest about the Nazi role in that event.
Like almost every other Nazi outrage during the Third Reich, including the “Night of the Long Knives,” this “Night of the Broken Glass” had an intimate connection to the butch homosexuals of the SA and SS. Indeed, while there is evidence that some form of attack against the German Jews had already been planned, the sheer ferocity of Kristallnacht – openly characterized by the Nazi leaders as an act of “revenge” – suggests a deeply personal and genuinely spontaneous reaction among the brown- and black-shirted rioters. I contend their motivation was blind rage that one of their fellow pederasts had been slaughtered by a Jewish boy street hustler.
The following is a slightly modified excerpt from “The Pink Swastika,” 4th Edition (the expanded 6th Edition being my current book-in-progress).
Ernst vom Rath was a high-level SA official who had received a diplomatic posting to the German embassy in Paris. While serving there he had taken up with a 17-year-old self-identified male prostitute by the name of Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew. In partial payment for his services, Grynszpan had extracted a promise from vom Rath that his parents would be spared the consequences of a recent law that “revoked the citizenship of Polish Jews who had been living abroad for more than five years and who still retained Polish citizenship.” But vom Rath failed to keep his promise, and Grynszpan’s family, along with thousands of others, “were herded into camps in a no-man’s land along the border region of Zbonszyn in freezing weather.”
In retaliation, Grynszpan shot vom Rath on the night of Nov. 7, 1938. Two days later the Nazis staged the “Night of Broken Glass.” Grynszpan fled and was not caught by the Gestapo until 1940. They finally had Grynszpan, but their planned high-profile courtroom prosecution went up in smoke. “At the last moment the trial was canceled on Hitler’s orders: Grynszpan had threatened to reveal a homosexual relationship with Rath.”
The Nazis were furious.
Anthony Read and David Fisher (“Kristallnacht: The Nazi Night of Terror”) explain:
“Vom Rath had been sold to the world as an official martyr, shot down in the service of the Führer. He had even been given a state funeral at which Hitler himself had been a mourner. Was he now to be portrayed in the world’s press as a queer with a taste for 17-year-old boys?”
The Nazis claimed the confession was a lie, but there must have been enough evidence to support the story or the prosecutors could have easily refuted it. Instead, they delayed the trial.
“The delay gave Goebbels the time to create a new myth about the late Ernst vom Rath, and he set about it in a highly ingenious manner. He arranged for the letters of French prisoners of war to be specially vetted by one of his men, who seized the more passionate and erotic messages. The letters were then doctored to make it appear that they had all been written to vom Rath by various mistresses, with the aim of producing them in court as written evidence of his heterosexuality. At one stroke, Goebbels would have created a new Don Juan, a German womanizer irresistible to Frenchwomen.
“The Nazis could produce no legitimate evidence that vom Rath was a heterosexual, and even their falsified evidence went unused because the Justice Ministry had obtained additional information that made a public trial impossible.
“[A] story had been circulating in public that Herschel had in fact been vom Rath’s male whore and procurer for some time in 1938, and that vom Rath had been known in Parisian homosexual circles as ‘the ambassadress’ and ‘Notre Dame de Paris.’
“They also learned that vom Rath’s brother ‘had been dismissed from the service for homosexual offenses.’ This was too much for even Goebbels’ propaganda machine to overcome, so the trial was again postponed.”
In full disclosure it must be acknowledged that Read and Fisher ultimately adopted the official line that the allegations of a homosexual affair between vom Rath and Grynszpan were untrue – the creation of Grynszpan’s lawyer. However, I have since learned that the primary evidence used to discredit the allegations was another prison letter, this one “encrypted” and supposedly sent by Grynszpan himself stating he made some of it up. The prior history of the case suggests that the “Grynszpan letter” may have been ghost-written by Goebbels.
How a Jewish teen could have such insider access to Germany’s highest-ranked diplomat as to get the promise of favored treatment for his parents – and then kill him for betrayal – is never explained. And it’s not as if the Nazis were innocent of rewarding pederastic homosexuals with diplomatic postings. Consider for example Dr. Theodor Auer, the German consul in Casablanca, Morocco. His “affair with the son of a local sheik and his ‘behaviour’ with Arab, French and Jewish ‘bumboys’ were detailed by the British Secret Operations Executive (SOE).”
In any case, there is no denying Krystallnacht was a horrific attack on Germany Jewry, but there is no parallel to anything Trump or the pro-Israel MAGA movement have ever done. Indeed, the closest parallel is Queers for Palestine – and the nationwide Hamas-promoting terror faction of today’s Democratic Party.