Hitler's Scapegoat

The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust

Stephen Koch

$29.95

Paperback

In stock
Ready to ship

QTY:

English

Amberley Publishing
15 February 2020

True crime; History; The Holocaust; Second World War

On 7 November 1938, an impoverished seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, obsessed with Nazi persecution of his family in Germany, brooding on revenge - and his own insignificance - bought a handgun, carried it on the Metro to the German Embassy in Paris and (never before having fired a weapon) shot down the first German diplomat he saw. When the official died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels used the event as their pretext for the state-sponsored wave of anti-Semitic violence and terror known as Kristallnacht, the pogrom that was the initiating event of the Holocaust. Overnight this obscure young man, Herschel Grynszpan, found himself world-famous, his face on front pages everywhere, and a pawn in the machinations of power. Instead of being executed, he found himself a privileged prisoner of the Gestapo while Hitler and Goebbels prepared a show-trial. The trial, planned to the last detail, was intended to prove that the Jews had started the Second World War. Alone in his cell, Herschel soon grasped how the Nazis planned to use him, and set out to wage a battle of wits against Hitler and Goebbels, knowing perfectly well that if he succeeded in stopping the trial, he would certainly be murdered. Until very recently, what really happened has remained hazy. Hitler's Scapegoat, based on the most recent research - including access to a heretofore untapped archive compiled by a Nuremberg rapporteur - tells Herschel's extraordinary story in full for the first time.

By: Stephen Koch
Imprint: Amberley Publishing
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm,
Weight: 232g
ISBN: 9781445699103
ISBN 10: 1445699109
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 15 February 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified

Stephen Koch taught fiction to graduate students for more than twenty years in the writing division of the Columbia University School of the Arts and to undergraduates for seven years in the Princeton University Program in Creative Writing. He is the author of two acclaimed novels, Night Watch and The Bachelor's Bride, and several works of non-fiction, including Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals.