Sex work in the Bois de Boulogne

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How prostitution became France's hottest social issue

The new Socialist government's determination to abolish prostitution has the whole country in debate. But what do the sex workers think of the plan?

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• • Angelique Chrisafis
  • The Guardian, Monday 24 September 2012 15.00 EDT
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A prostitute working from a campervan in the Bois de Boulogne. Photograph: Amy Toensing/Getty Images

In a parking bay on a deserted industrial estate in Lyon, Karen, in her late 40s, sat in the passenger seat of her second-hand Ford Transit van wearing only black underwear. It was 7.30pm on a Friday night. She lit a pink lantern on the dashboard. Soon, a steady flow of cars was circling the car park – Mercedes, jeeps, old bangers — their drivers slowing to peer at the women in corsets sitting alone in a dozen parked, white vans, arms folded, candlelight flickering across their faces. "Some men drive round for hours just staring," she said. "Then they'll stop, ask the price, and demand a discount. I'll say, 'What, for all that petrol you've wasted?'"

A silver car slowed. "20 euros for a blow job, 40 euros for 'love'," she smiled. "Too expensive," said the man, accelerating. A 60-year-old agreed to sex for 40 euros. Karen climbed into the back of the van, which she had decorated with a bed, a heater, purple curtains and a chest of drawers. Three minutes later the man walked out into the night. Karen laid out a clean sheet of paper-towel on the bed, spruced her blond hair. "See, it's all very quick," she said. Most of the evening was spent sitting waiting. Then in 15 minutes, three clients paid for sex, including a Spanish man in his 20s in designer clothes. Each took less than five minutes. She had made her daily quota of cash needed to pay her bills.

A former secretary from the southern naval city of Toulon, three times married, with two daughters, Karen first started selling sex in the 1980s: a brief stint on the street near a Lyon station, working mainly in clients' cars, "which is very uncomfortable". She quit and got married, but in 1992, divorced and with a young child she suddenly needed to "put food on the table". She returned to sex-work, first in a hostess bar, then meeting clients at her home via a newspaper small-ad. For seven years, she has worked on the street in her van, Monday to Saturday from 7pm to around 1am, paying tax as self-employed. "'No pimp, no boss' is my motto. I'd rather do this than an office job, getting shouted at by a boss for a pittance." Her strict rules include condoms for everything and no kissing clients. "You have to hit rock bottom to do this," she said. "It's not an easy job, but it's a job where you can make money quickly. People try to say we're victims, say that we're alienated, that there's a sex attack in our childhood history, but I've never been raped by anyone. This is my free choice." She never looks into a client's eyes in the moment of a sexual exchange – "I look anywhere but" – and they rarely tell her their names. But in her top drawer beside the condom supplies is a petition signed by several of them: in neat writing, stating their profession: such as "public works" or "driver". It's a protest against the new French government's war on prostitution.

Sex work was hardly a priority in the French election campaign, yet it has become one of the defining social issues of Francois Hollande's new Socialist government. In June, the women's minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, made the bold announcement that she wanted to "abolish prostitution" in France and Europe. "My objective, like that of the Socialist party, is to see prostitution disappear," she said. The previous French parliament had already adopted a resolution aiming for a "society without prostitution". But can a government rid society of paid sex? The debate is raging among French intellectuals. Sex workers have taken to the streets, accusing the government of moralistic paternalism, saying Socialists are using the issue to distance themselves from the pariah Dominique Strauss-Kahn. DSK, once the Socialist hope for president, is under official investigation in France over complicity in apimping operation after sex workers were allegedly procured for his orgies. He said he didn't pay and didn't know the women were sex workers. "I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman," his lawyer told the press. The inquiry has been extended to examine alleged group rape over the question of whether one sex worker was forced. Strauss-Kahn denies any violence.

The "white van women" selling sex on Lyon's industrial estate in Gerland embody the French state's difficult attitudes to prostitution. As in the UK, prostitution itself – receiving money for sex, or paying for sex – is not a crime. But activities around it are. Laws prohibit pimping, human trafficking, buying sex from a minor and soliciting sex in public. Brothels were outlawed in 1946.

Lyon, France's third biggest city, which has around 600 street prostitutes, has always been at the heart of sex worker protests. In 1975, more than 100 prostitutes occupied a church in the city complaining about police harassment, sparking similar protests across France until riot police evicted them. Now the Lyon Transit vans are the new frontline. In 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, introduced a controversial law against soliciting, making it illegal to stand in a public place known for prostitution dressed in revealing clothes. To get round this, women started working in private vans. Selling sex inside a vehicle was not breaking the law. But police are now using any means to crack down on the growing number of sex-work vans, namely parking tickets and tow-trucks. In Lyon, sex workers complain of constant parking fines and being towed to the pound. Some on the industrial estate owe thousands of euros in parking tickets and pound-release fines accrued each month. "You can get two parking tickets in 20 minutes, or be towed away on Tuesday, pay a fine, and be towed again on Thursday," said one. The women stand their ground. One drives 500km from Bordeaux each week, works and sleeps in her van for four days and nights, before going home. Others travel to the area from Burgundy or Paris.

Sex-workers in Lyon protest against the government's plans to penalise their clients. Photograph: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images

The government is planning a major consultation on the abolition of prostitution. One idea under consideration is to criminalise the client, meaning anyone who buys sex from a sex worker would face prison and a fine. There are only a handful of European countries where clients of sex workers face prison. In 1999, Sweden became the first, followed by Norway and Iceland. But it is far from certain that France will put it on the statute books. The French Socialists would like their abolitionist stance to be mirrored in Europe, namely in the country they see as closest in its attitude to prostitution: the UK. Other neighbours have radically different approaches: in Germany, prostitution is legal and municipally regulated; in Spain, vast borderland brothels in places such as La Jonquera in Catalonia are frequented by French clients.

In a cafe near Place de Clichy, in northern Paris, Elizabeth, 49, and seven Algerian transgender sex workers were having coffee before going to work on the streets in the west of Paris. Elizabeth, originally from Cali in Colombia, had arrived in her blue Citroën people carrier, which with a mattress in the boot doubled as her workspace in Paris's Bois de Boulogne park, where she sells sex from 11am to 6pm each weekday, for ¤40. The Bois de Boulogne, a favourite daytime jogging spot of Sarkozy's, is a centre of the crackdown on prostitutes' vans. Elizabeth has had more than 60 parking tickets this year. "I'm considering a hunger strike against the idea of criminalising clients," she said. "If clients risk prison, sex work will be forced underground and into apartments, pimps will benefit, sex workers' security will be compromised. Already the mere talk of clients being criminalised means there are less customers on the street."

For Elizabeth, transsexual sex work is a reflection of daily discrimination. "As a transsexual, you can't find work, no one will rent you an apartment, it's a difficult existence. Often this seems the only option," she said. Two months ago, Jasmine, 30, started working on a road in the Bois de Boulogne after leaving Algiers. "I can't go back to Algeria because of the way I look. My parents think I'm waiting tables here. I just want a normal life as a transsexual, to run a shop or a hairdressers. But I have to pay ¤40 a night to live in a dire hotel room with no toilet. This is the only way I can get the money. I work a few hours a night, 11pm until 2am. I try to choose men in their 40s, who I think are safe. I'm really scared on the street, but I'm most scared of the police."

The government estimates there are 20,000 prostitutes in France, with between 5,000 and 8,000 in Paris. A parliamentary report last year by a rightwing and a Socialist MP who proposed criminalising clients said 90% of street prostitutes were foreign and 80% of sex workers in France were victims of sex trafficking. Where 20 years ago the majority of street prostitutes were French, most are now foreign and criminal networks are increasing, most recently involving Nigerian women or Romanians trafficking Albanians or Moldovans.

In July, six Romanians appeared in court outside Paris charged with pimping: accused of beating women, confiscating their passports and forcing them to work as prostitutes. Last November a similar Romanian network was dismantled, including minors made to work in the Bois de Boulogne. The paper Le Progrès reported that this summer in Lyon police discovered a Chinese woman in her 30s shut in an apartment she hadn't left for three weeks, forced to sell sex according to a "menu" of services translated into Chinese. Clients had replied to a small ad for "massages". But far from trusting the police to protect sex workers, the atmosphere is one of fear and hostility. Some sex workers complain of being insulted and assaulted: in Colmar in 2010, two police officers and a train-worker for the SNCF national rail were convicted of raping a Romanian sex worker. Other allegations of rape are going through the courts.

Meanwhile the state is under pressure to do more against trafficking and sexual slavery. Rights groups say not enough support and protection has been given to trafficked women who cooperate to denounce their abusers.

"Instead of grandstanding about abolishing all prostitution, why don't they immediately end the prostitution of minors and human trafficking? They've already got all the laws to stop that, yet it still exists," said a male sex worker in his 20s, who works nights in the forest of Fontainebleau outside Paris.

There is fierce debate in France over whether all sex workers should be considered victims, or whether "independents", without pimps and beginning to be unionised, should be viewed as separate. Pro-abolition feminists say the act of paying for sex is always an act of violence, forcing the sex worker to anaesthetise themselves and cut themselves off from their own body to endure it. "Slavery hasn't been eradicated, but it has been abolished. The same choice for prostitution would be an advance for civilisation," said the feminist Sylviane Agacinski. Another high-profile feminist, Elisabeth Badinter, co-wrote a counter-argument saying talk of abolishing prostitution was based on "two debatable assumptions: that charging for sex is an affront to women's dignity and that all prostitutes are victims of their bastard clients". She said a woman selling sex was "not necessarily a victim of male oppression". And not all clients were "horrible predators or sexual obsessives who treat the woman as disposable objects".

Cloé Navarro, 27, spokeswoman for the Strass, the French sex workers' union, studied as a nurse and now sells sex on the street in the west of Paris to pay for her postgraduate studies for work with autistic children. She says she feels safer on the street, working in clients' cars or hotels, rather than on the internet, where she can't see the man before accepting an encounter. "This is not a job everyone can do, but it's a real job. You need a lot of empathy. People come to us with problems. Sometimes I think I've got the word 'nurse' stamped on my forehead," she said. She described clients as "everyone", from 20s to 70s, widowers, men with disabilities, "a high percentage" of new fathers with babies and toddlers. "This government is stigmatising sex workers. I work one street away from a police station. The abolitionist approach would push sex work into a no-man's land where we are more likely be attacked," she said.

The new face of the union is its leader, Morgane Merteuil, 25, a postgraduate literature student. She started sex work as a student in a hostess bar in Grenoble, but now works exclusively on the internet as a self-employed escort. A one-time anarchist activist and rebel from a conservative provincial family, she has just published what she calls a feminist sex workers' manifesto. She balks at "media cliches" that sex work divides between low-class work on the street or high-class five-star luxury: "I don't think I've ever met a client in anything more than a cheap hotel costing ¤60 a night," she said. She rails at the new leftwing government for "morality politics" and "paternalism", describes sex-work as a job – "a necessity, like any other job" and demands the immediate scrapping of the law against soliciting.

In Lyon, Karen was preparing to lock up her van and go home to her boyfriend. "It's not possible to abolish prostitution," she said. "Look at the death penalty, did that stop murder?"

Anti-Gay Skinheads

JUNE 27, 2013

SKINHEADS IN PARIS: THE DEATH OF A STUDENT AND THE RISE OF THE FRINGE

POSTED BY EMILY GREENHOUSE

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Clément Méric was nineteen years old, a student. He’d moved to Paris from Brittany—where his parents had, until recently, taught law—to attend Sciences Po, a prestigious public university. He was, according to his former teacher Amaury Chauou, exceptional and strong-willed, qualities that helped when he suffered from leukemia some years ago. And he was an activist. At Sciences Po, Méric had joined a progressive student union that worked to combat the rise of the far-right in France. In April, during a swell of demonstrations, he’d marched in support of gay marriage, which the country legalized in May. Wearing a red bandana over his face, his mousy-brown hair cropped close, he held up a banner that read “L’Homophobie tue” (“Homophobia Kills.”) But, Chauou said later, he was not a militant or an extremist. After Méric was dead, Chauou called him “a young intellectual and a citizen of the world.”

Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, June 5th, Méric stopped into an exclusive clothing sale in Paris’s haute Ninth Arrondissement with some friends. Around 6 P.M. that evening, another group, made up of a few young men and one young woman, arrived; their swastika tattoos and sweatshirts with white-power logos gave them away as skinheads. Insults and invective flew, and spiralled into a brawl on the street below. Reports vary as to how many people were involved in the fight, and what exactly happened to Méric. Initial accounts said that he had not yet started to swing when he was knocked down by multiple blows (some witnesses say he was hit with brass knuckles, known in French as coup-de poing américain). But this week, the French radio station RTL reported that surveillance videos showed Méric approaching one of the skinheads from behind, as if to strike, before the man turned and felled him with a single punch to the face. Either way, Méric was rushed to the hospital unconscious and put on life support; the next day, he was pronounced dead.

Eight suspects were arrested in connection with Méric’s death; three were released almost immediately, and five, between the ages of nineteen and thirty-two, were charged with various crimes. The main suspect, a twenty-year-old security guard named Esteban Morillo, stands accused of manslaughter. Another suspect, a woman named Katia, has admitted to membership in the far-right Revolutionary Nationalist Youth (J.N.R.), part of the ultranationalist “Troisième Voie” or “Third Way” movement. France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, linked all five to the country’s resurgent neo-Nazi movement. “An extreme right is at the heart of this,” Valls said of the incident. “There is a discourse of hate, and a climate that favors this discourse.”

France, home of the Enlightenment, with larger Muslim and Jewish populations than any other European nation, is having something of a crisis of tolerance. The World Values Survey Association recently found that almost one in four French people—a wealthy, educated, Western population—wouldn’t want a neighbor of another race. (Residents of former Soviet states were considerably more open-minded.) There is clear discomfort that Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a French-Congolese tennis player, bested Roger Federer at the French Open, and that the recent winner at Cannes, Abdellatif Kechiche, is a French-Tunisian who dedicated the coveted Palme d’Or prize to the young people of the “Tunisian revolution.” Xenophobic feeling, often targeted against Muslim immigrants, or, closer to home, French citizens descended from Arab states that were once French colonies, is increasingly commonplace.

French authorities are seeking to crack down on this rightward motion. Following Méric’s death, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced his decision to break up all groups of “fascist and neo-Nazi inspiration,” and ordered Valls to immediately “proclaim the dissolution of the Revolutionary Nationalist Youth.” Earlier this month, a European parliamentary committee unanimously revoked the immunity from prosecution that Marine Le Pen, a far-right politician, held as a member of the European Parliament. In late 2010, this immunity shielded her when she likened Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation of France. She may now face criminal charges for the incitement of racism.

Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, in 1972, founded the far-right Front National party. The elder Le Pen, who has been convicted of racism and inciting racial hatred through Holocaust revisionism, as well as of multiple counts of assault, passed the party leadership to Marine in 2011. She has since worked to “de-demonize” the party—she condemned Méric’s’s violent death as “unacceptable”—but is perceived by many on the left as legitimizing or “banalizing” the extreme right. Indeed, she has benefitted from the rise in extreme-right fervor. Last April, Le Pen won eighteen per cent of the vote in the first round of France’s presidential election, the highest percentage the F.N. has ever received. In parts of Picardy, in northern France—where skinhead graffiti calls for death to blacks and Jews, and heils Hitler, and where Esteban Morillo is from—she won nearly thirty per cent. Earlier this month, the F.N. humiliated the Socialist party in a parliamentary by-election, an embarrassing repudiation of President François Hollande.

Muslim immigrants are by no means all that is fuelling intolerance in France. When such turmoil strikes, the root tends to be an economy in crisis. France today is officially back inrecession. Hollande has announced that he expects zero economic growth in 2013. The unemployment rate is at 10.4 per cent, a fifteen-year high; young men like Morillo and Méric face a youth unemployment rate of 26.5 per cent. As a result, young men and women have started, in the grand tradition of French history, to turn toward political extremes. As the far-right has gained ground, so has the far left. Nicolas Sarkozy—“President Bling-Bling,” of the center-right—ushered in the recession and cracked down on minorities and immigrants, and so gave way to Hollande, who is even less beloved; he has become the least popular President in the history of the Fifth Republic. The country’s embittered left is turning toward the new Front de Gauche (Left Front) party, founded in 2008 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former teacher and Trotskyist, to bring together the members of the country’s various anti-capitalist factions—of whom there are more and more. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the hero of the 1968 student protests, has said, Mélenchon has “succeeded in restoring national nostalgia for old-time class conflict and statist tradition.” In so doing, he has made the Front de Gauche a powerful force in French politics, if not quite as powerful as the Le Pens’ Front National.

Mélenchon’s popularity owes as much to the growth of the far-right as it does to the impotence of the center left. He has called the extreme right “professional racists,” and referred to Marine Le Pen as “half-demented.” Since Méric’s death, more and more young people—students, syndicalists, and worker, queer, and immigrants-rights groups—describe themselves as antifascists or “antifa,“ an identity formed in opposition that can only lead to greater confrontation.

Le Pen and Mélenchon have little in common, but both they and their supporters see Hollande as useless and ineffectual: that he mustered the power to legalize gay marriage infuriated and baffled a fair portion of the populace. In the spring, graffiti all over Paris read: “We want jobs, not gay marriage” (in French it rhymes). Roaring marches against marriage equality featured some participants waving the flag of the monarchy. Protests againstParliament turned violent, and anti-gay demonstrators disrupted the French Open. (They plan to do the same at the Tour de France, which begins later this week.) Extremists in neo-Nazi masks filmed themselves vandalizing an L.G.B.T. center in Paris. In Paris, Bordeaux, Nice, and Lille, gay men were brutally attacked. Last week, a twenty-three-year-old Parisian student named Nicolas Bernard-Buss was sentenced to four months in prison (two were suspended) for rebelling against the police and giving a false identity at a large anti-gay rally; thousands demonstrated in Lyon and a few hundred in central Paris on his behalf.

The frustration and despair is felt at every level. Dominique Venner, a seventy-eight-year-old historian, committed suicide in May in the eight-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, as a show of protest against the direction he thought France was taking. He abhorred the legalization of gay marriage and, even more, the declining white birthrate in France, which he called a “catastrophic peril for the future.”

Venner was a military man, and his reactionary gusto came to mind when, two weeks after his death, a journalist named Jean-Dominique Merchet published a much-discussed piece in which he accused the extreme right of having “fantasies about a military coup d’État.” Another French Revolution seems a way off, but there is a through-line connecting Venner with Méric and Morillo. France’s economic circumstances, and those of a greater Europe, make it easy for its residents to feel suffocated, and to turn, in a desperate search for a solution, toward a politics of the extreme. There are leaders there waiting to welcome them.

On Twitter, after Venner’s suicide, Marine Le Pen praised him. “All respect to Dominique Venner whose final, eminently political act was to try to wake up the people of France,” she wrote in one tweet. In another, she said, “It is in life and hope that France will renew and save itself.”

Above: A demonstration in Paris against same-sex marriage, in March. Photograph by Philippe Wojazer/Reuters.

More on Vom Rath

Quick navigationMr Irving, take me to ...... your main alphabetical index... your Hitler index... your Auschwitz index... your Goebbels index... your main alphabetical index... your current newsletter... where you will be speaking... news on your legal battles... you and your family... your career so far... how to buy your books... how to help your fighting fund... your publishing Home Page Alphabetical index (text) October 31, 2001 All illustrations are added by this website, from David Irving, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. Did gay affair provide a catalyst for Kristallnacht? Historian says Jewish boy killed his Nazi lover Kate Connolly The Guardian THE assassination of a top German diplomat which triggered Kristallnacht, the organised Nazi pogrom against Jews across Germany, was not politically-motivated, as commonly believed, but the result of a homosexual love affair between a Nazi diplomat and a young Jewish man, according to a leading expert on the Third Reich. Hans-Jürgen Döscher, considered Germany's foremost authority on the events of November 9, 1938 following the publication last year of his definitive history,Reichskristallnacht, has gathered scores of documents and eyewitness accounts, including the diaries of the French writer André Gide, to support the theory. On November 7 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jew, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat (right), five times. Vom Rath died two days later. Nazi propagandists condemned the shooting as a terrorist attack to further the cause of the Jewish "world revolution", and the pogrom was launched. The attacks -- called Kristallnacht (crystal night), an ironic reference to the broken glass left on the streets -- led to the murder of 91 Jews, the arrests of 26,000 others and the destruction of 177 synagogues. Until now, it was widely believed that Grynszpan had intended to shoot the ambassador, Count Johannes Welczek, in protest at the SS's expulsion of his parents to Poland. But according to Professor Döscher, who teaches modern history at Osnabrück University, Grynszpan's actions were a spontaneous expression of anger over the broken promises of his lover, Vom Rath, not a political gesture. In the updated edition of Reichskristallnacht, due to be published in November, Prof Döscher claims that Vom Rath was nicknamed Mrs Ambassador and Notre Dame de Paris as a result of his homosexual antics. He and Grynszpan -- a "boy with a beautiful penetrative gaze" -- met in Le Boeuf sur le Toit bar, a popular haunt for gay men in the autumn of 1938 and became intimate. Grynszpan, who was in his late teens, had been living illegally in Paris, and Prof Döscher states that 29-year-old Vom Rath agreed to use his influential position to secure official papers for his friend. When Vom Rath went back on his word, Grynszpan reacted by storming into the German embassy on rue de Lille 78, demanding to see him, and opening fire on him with a revolver. Grynszpan was arrested and languished in jail in France until 1940, when he was handed over to the Nazis, who planned a show trial which would be used to justify the outbreak of the second world war. A combined report from the German foreign, justice and propaganda ministries in January 1942 declared: "The purpose of the trial should be to clarify to the German people and the world that the international community of Jews is to blame for the outbreak of this war." According to Prof Döscher, when Grynszpan learned of this motivation for the trial in the early 40s, he revealed the real truth to his Nazi captors. Fearing embarrassment and humiliation, they then stripped Vom Rath of his martyrdom and scrapped their plans. Grynszpan was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then disappeared. He was declared dead in 1960. Prof Döscher gleaned his previously unpublished evidence from court archives, reports from the propaganda ministry, letters, diary extracts, and interviews with diplomats of the time. Most startling are the diaries of Gide, in which the writer expresses his amazement that the scandal failed to gain public attention. Vom Rath, Gide wrote, "had an exceptionally intimate relationship with the little Jew, his murderer". Referring to the fact that Vom Rath was both gay and had an affair with a Jew, Gide later said: "The thought that a such highly-thought of representative of the Third Reich sinned twice according to the laws of his country is rather amusing." But that was not what amazed him most. "How is it that the press failed to bring this scandal into the open?" he asked. David Irving comments: VERY interesting, but hardly new; I deal with this allegation in my biography, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich, (London, 1996) [click for relevant excerpt]. The homosexual allegations were referenced in Joseph Goebbels' diaries and the Reich Chancellery files, and this is why the trial of Grynszpan was abandoned -- because although Goebbels knew the allegation to be untrue, it would be headlined by Germany's enemies worldwide. Rather spookily, like Banquo's ghost, Grynszpan hismelf survived the war and turned up at the post-war Hamburg (?) trial of Leopold Gutterer, Goebbels' state secretary, as the late Gutterer told me when I interviewed him (right) at length on my last trip to Germany on June 30, 1993. Herschel Grynszpan was pointed out to him, standing in the back of the courtroom, observing the proceedings. Of course like the German "scholar" who recently "proved" that Hitler was homosexual, Professor Döscher is at little risk of prosecution for this further dismantling of German pre-war history. Conformism, however toe-curling, does have its benefits. What demolishes this "scholar's" theory, in my view, is that the wartime court documents make plain that Grynszpan first accosted the ambassador in the street outside the embassy, and demanded to know "where he could find the German ambassador". Count Welczek, sensing trouble, did not identify himself but helpfully directed the stranger into the First Secretary's office, where the assassin, who was well-heeled with both money and an expensive gun that he had just bought for cash, pumped the bullets into Ernst vom Rath, believing him to be the ambassador. Hardly indicative of an intimate previous relationship between the two men, one might think. The unemployed wastrel and illegal immigrant Grynszpan had checked into an expensive hotel just round the corner from the offices of LICA, the forerunner of the modern Jewish activitist group LICRA, and it was LICA who at once hired one of the foremost barristers in Paris, and paid his legal costs when he was arrested. People are entitled to draw their own conclusions. Hanging on my study wall at this moment incidentally is -- not the lifesize Adolf Hitler painting about which Deborah Lipstadt fantasized in her libellous volume -- but the original front page of the Völkischer Beobachterreporting the death of Vom Rath from his injuries, printed on the morning of Reichskristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass: cause and effect.

© Focal Point 2002    write to David Irving

Possible Film Narrative: Ernst Vom Rath, believed homosexual

The Mysterious Murder of Ernst vom Rath
by Herschel Grynszpan
– The Nazis’ Smokescreen for Pogrom Night, November 9/10, 1938

Meier Schwarz

Just days before Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany were devastated in the pogrom of November 1938, Ernst vom Rath, a low-ranking Nazi diplomat, was allegedly gunned down in his Parisian office by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Polish Jew. It was vom Rath’s murder which sparked the “spontaneous” outburst of violence against the Jews, or so the Nazis said. The Nazis’ actions in 1938, however, suggest that they were preparing their most ruthless anti-Jewish operation yet - and vom Rath’s assassination was a convenient catalyst for such a strike. Inconsistencies surrounding the assassination itself raise doubts about Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels’ account of the incident. Nevertheless, his version of events is generally accepted by historians, even today. Could it be that the Nazis had a hand in vom Rath’s death?

The events of November 9/10, 1938, often referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass” or “Crystal Night,” marked a turning point in the Nazis’ policy toward the Jews. The magnitude, brutality and highly organized execution of the pogrom delivered a clear message to Germany’s remaining Jews - they had to get out, and fast. The extraordinary historical importance of that fateful night makes the way in which post-war historians have dealt with it all the more astonishing. For years, no one questioned the Nazis’ statistics on the number of Jews killed, synagogues destroyed and Jewish businesses plundered and looted. Likewise, Goebbels’ account of vom Rath’s death has largely gone unchallenged, despite the Nazis’ deserved reputation for engineering “spontaneous” events as pretexts for their own aggressive actions. (For example, the Reichstag or “German parliament” fire of 1933.) These factors give cause for a closer examination, at the very least, of the events surrounding Pogrom Night.

The Fateful Year of 1938

In 1938, the German Reich finally implemented its policy of stripping Jews of their financial resources and forcing them out of the country. The circumstances of Germany’s Jews were already extremely grave. Between 60 and 70 percent of Jewish businesses had been “aryanized” and unemployment among Jews had doubled within just a few months. Meanwhile, the Nazis’ last potential opponents, the Conservatives, were removed from government in February, leaving Hitler’s men free to settle the “Jewish Question” once and for all. Indeed, throughout the fateful year of 1938, the Nazis introduced, step by step, a series of measures which would make the pogrom in November look like the sudden climax of a catastrophic chain of events.

Hermann Goering, who was commissioner for Hitler’s Four Year (economic) Plan, launched several decrees to impoverish Germany’s Jews. In April, it became a crime for any German to disguise the fact that a business was owned by a Jew. Jewish businesses and stores now had to display an identifying symbol as a “prelude to the fundamental solution of the Jewish question in the economy” (quote taken from the Salzburger Zeitung). In another decree, issued in cooperation with the Interior Ministry, Goering ordered the registration of all Jewish-owned property and assets; allowing the Nazis to find out just how much wealth was in Jewish hands.

The relevant institutions worked with remarkable haste. In August, the Nazi leadership instructed the tax authorities, the Security Police, the Gestapo and the Chamber of Commerce, as well as its advisers in the building sector, to speed up the process. The registration of all Jewish property had to be completed before September 30 at all costs, even if this meant taking on additional staff. At the same time, legal measures to alienate the Jews were reinforced. Jewish citizens were forbidden to work in more and more professions and had to have a large “J” stamped in their passports. They were also forced to adopt easily-recognizable “Jewish” names, and their original ID cards were replaced by cards specifically for Jews.

That year also saw the Nazis develop a more aggressive foreign policy, which met with no meaningful resistance from Germany’s neighbors. The annexation of Austria was greeted more or less with silent acceptance, despite the anti-Jewish operations that began there. Then Britain, France and Italy approvedGermany’s annexation of the Sudetenland at the Munich conference of September 1938. As if all this was not enough, in July, at an international conference in Evian (France), not one country said it was prepared to take in Jewish refugees from Germany. “No one wants them” read the headline of the Nazi newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter. It was true.

Germany’s largest expulsion of Jews up until that point took place at the end of October 1938, when the Polish government said it would cancel the passports of Polish Jews who had been living abroad for more than five years. This would have affected approximately 50,000 people in Germany. The Gestapo was therefore instructed to deport them within 14 days, before they became “stateless” and could no longer be moved. Seventeen thousand Jews were expelled during this operation, before an agreement was reached with Poland. Once again, the international community did not really protest.

The persecution certainly did not end there. Pogroms against Jews had been happening all over the country ever since the 1937 Christmas boycott of Jewish businesses, organized by Julius Streicher, a Nazi politician and owner of the anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Stürmer. One of the biggest pogroms took place in June 1938 in Berlin. Fearing that a favorable resolution of the so-called Sudeten Crisis could be jeopardized by the violence, the police intervened only after several days to prevent the total destruction of Jewish stores and businesses.

Therefore, after several years of covert but effective oppression and displacement of the Jews, in 1938, the Nazis had launched their final push to squeeze Jews out of economic life altogether. The reaction of world opinion ranged from trade embargos against Germany to total apathy. The next course of action was summed up by the Nazis’ “Jewish Council” in Reinhard Heydrich’s Reich Security Office in 1937: the “most effective tool” for speeding up the “solution of the Jewish question” was the “anger of the people […] which manifests itself in riots […] because the Jew has learned a lot from pogroms, and he fears nothing more than a hostile atmosphere, which can spontaneously turn against him.”

Goebbels, Grynszpan and vom Rath - The Key Players

While the historical background to the pogrom tells us much, it is also important to look at those who played a crucial role in the events leading up to that night.

Joseph Goebbels - without doubt, Goebbels was a major force behind Pogrom Night. As minister for propaganda and Hitler’s personal confidant, he held a prominent position in the Third Reich leadership. He was, however, under severe pressure from above. Hitler himself had blamed Goebbels for failing to exploit the propaganda potential of the Sudeten Crisis, not to mention his extra-marital affair with a Czech actress, Lida Baarova. Goebbels had even considered divorcing his wife Magda, but Hitler had forbidden him to do so. Not only did Magda Goebbels have a close relationship with Hitler, she was also seen as the quasi “First Lady” of the German Reich. Baarova was by far not the only woman with whom Goebbels was conducting an affair, another fact for which he was criticized within the party. Therefore in November 1938, he needed to win back Hitler’s good favor, and a decisive strike against the Jews must surely have seemed a good way to go about it.

However, Goebbels’ was opposed by Goering, who was interested in the value of Jewish property, and by Heydrich, head of the SS Security Service. The SS had wanted full control of “Jewish Policy” for sometime, and as such, the behavior of its members was noticeably restrained throughout the pogrom. The organization also voiced heavy criticism of Goebbels when the violence was over. Heydrich himself was in Paris one week before vom Rath’s death, although the reason for and details of his trip are unknown. As leader of the Nazis’ quasi internal secret service, he would have been well informed about the victim of the assassination.

Ernst vom Rath - vom Rath joined the Nazi party in 1932, shortly after finishing his law degree. He began working for the Foreign Office in 1934. In 1935/6, he served as personal secretary to the German ambassador in Paris, who was his uncle. He was then sent to Calcutta but was recalled after one year, suffering from a bowel disorder contracted, according to his Jewish doctor, Dr. Pomeranz, as a result of having homosexual intercourse. (Dr. Pomeranz had conferred with one Dr. Grumpert, a specialist in sexually transmitted diseases. It was Grumpert who had originally sent vom Rath to her.[1]) Vom Rath returned to work in mid-July, this time back to the embassy in Paris. He was promoted to legation secretary in October. Hans-Jürgen Döscher is one historian, among others, who suspects that vom Rath and Grynszpan must had known each other through the homosexual scene before their encounter at the embassy. Grynszpan was known to have visited various public houses mainly frequented by homosexual customers.[2] Furthermore, in 1941, while in prison in Germany, Grynszpan claimed to have known vom Rath for a long time, and to have been sexually abused by him. This was one reason why Goebbels decided not to give Grynszpan a show trial.

Herschel Grynszpan - Grynszpan was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Hanover in 1921. He studied at a Yeshiva in Frankfurt and eventually ended up inParis in 1936, where he resided illegally. His family was among the 17,000 Jews whom the Gestapo deported to Poland in October 1938. Grynszpan received a postcard from his sister on November 3, describing the catastrophic conditions in which the refugees were being forced to live in no-man’s-land between the two countries.

Nazi Preparations and Warnings to Jews

Against this background, any escalation of the Nazis’ action against the Jews, including a pogrom, would have seemed an entirely logical step and would have furthered the personal motives of some of those involved. Certain Jews were even warned that an attack had been planned. Professor Heinrich Hörlein, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and a Nazi Party member, reportedly spoke in 1938 of what would happen to the Jews, and the Jewish physicist, Lise Meitner, described his warnings in a letter to her colleague, Otto Hahn, in 1945.[3] Furthermore, in his article, “Die Vorplanung der Kristallnacht” (The Planning of Crystal Night), Dr. K.J. Ball-Kurdi mentions two similar cases in which Jews were warned of the danger. Berthold Löwenstein was a Jewish judge dismissed from his post in 1933. Nevertheless, his former colleague and brother mason, a man named Engelke, had always advised him to remain in Germany. Engelke suddenly changed his mind, however, following a meeting at the Ministry of Finance on October 29, 1938. He said something terrible would happen to the Jews in mid-November, and that Löwenstein must leave before November 5. A former Jewish police chief, Konrad Kaiser, told a similar story. He was informed by an ex-colleague that the SS had enlisted the help of the local and secret police, as well as the tax authorities, to prepare lists of Jews who were to be sent to concentration camps.

Preparations in the camps themselves began in the late summer of 1938. In Dachau, additional mass sleeping areas were added to recently-erected barracks, even though prisoner transports to Buchenwald were leaving the camp rather empty.[4] A former prisoner, Hans Schwarz, who was working in an office inDachau at the time, said he had seen a document that gave instructions to sew a Judenstern or Jewish star onto 5,000 prison uniforms.[5] Meanwhile, the prisoners who remained at Dachau were relocated within the camp. The result was that some barracks were filled to bursting point while others were left empty.

The Assassination

On the morning on November 7, four days after Herschel Grynszpan received his sister’s letter; he entered a gun store called “A la fine lame” and bought a wheel-lock revolver for 245 francs, including bullets. He then went to the German embassy, where at the front door he met the German Ambassador, Graf Welczeck, who was returning from his usual morning walk. According to Welczeck’s testimony, the ambassador directed Grynszpan to his doorman, Mathes. Grynszpan told the doorman that he had important document which he must give to a secretary.[6] Grynszpan was apparently not interested in speaking to the ambassador outside the building (from where, presumably, if he was planning an assassination, he would have had a much better chance of escape). Instead, he asked to speak to a secretary directly. It seems odd that he was allowed in without a passport check or any further questioning, and that the office assistant, Nagorka, announced Grynszpan’s presence to vom Rath without asking the visitor to enter his details on the required form. Vom Rath even invited Grynszpan into his office. All this, just to submit a document?

Shortly afterwards, Nagorka heard cries for help - but no shots.[7] He found vom Rath lying on the floor of the office. His reaction was to leave the injured man where he lay, grab hold of Grynszpan and hand him over to the French policeman on guard outside the embassy. In doing so, Nagorka decided against two more likely courses of action. Firstly, he did not help vom Rath, the victim. Bear in mind that Nagorka had not heard gunshots and therefore could not have known what had happened in the room. Secondly, he did not notify the SS storm troop leader Boemelburg, who was responsible for the ambassador while the latter was outside German territory. It also seems strange that even though the French policeman was alone on duty and must have been quite overwhelmed (arresting a would-be murderer on his own); he did not receive any assistance.

Moreover, Friedrich Kaul, an attorney who later examined the French case files, said the French commissioner, who entered vom Rath’s room shortly after the incident, found a revolver with all five bullets intact (the revolver used in the shooting would have contained at least some empty cartridges).[8] Was the revolver Grynszpan bought that morning the weapon used to commit the crime? Was Grynszpan even the perpetrator?

What we do know for certain is that Grynszpan was arrested and vom Rath was examined by the German ambassador’s trusted doctor, Dr. Claas. Claas was the first medic to treat vom Rath after the incident and afterwards he transferred the patient to the care of Dr. Baumgartner, a French Professor at the l’Almahospital, at number 166, Rue de l’Université. Even though the Nazi leadership had complete trust in Dr. Claas and expressed no doubts about Prof. Baumgartner’s abilities, Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Brandt, accompanied by one Prof. Magnus, flew to Paris on the night of November 7 in Hitler’s private plane. It is not clear why they were sent. Dr. Brandt was a confidant of Hitler, but was not especially accomplished in medical terms; he was actually an orthopedic surgeon. Shortly after they arrived, the two medics sent their first bulletin to Berlin regarding the patient’s condition: “Vom Rath’s […] condition […] should be considered serious. Dr. Baumgartner of Paris has administered the best possible care and treatment up until this point, and this gives us hope that he will make further progress.”[9] Welczeck, the German ambassador, mentioned that vom Rath had “made it through the night relatively well”[10] in his report on the incident, written, apparently, on the afternoon of November 8.  So as things stood, vom Rath was in a serious condition, but there was hope of recovery.

That was until Hitler’s doctors spent half an hour alone with him. In their bulletin to Berlin on the evening of November 8, they expressed deeper concern. “His temperature has remained high. He is showing early signs of weak circulation.”[11] What Brandt and Magnus did to vom Rath while they were alone with him, we can only guess. It is safe to assume, however, that Brandt in particular would have had few scruples. As the Nazis’ most senior doctor, he was condemned to death in the Nuremberg doctor trials of 1948. He had taken part in experiments on concentration camp prisoners, among other crimes.

Vom Rath died the next afternoon, November 9, at 16:30. Before he passed away, his mother visited him at his sick bed, but was strictly forbidden to speak to him. Why? For the sake of his health, or for fear that he might give something away? Vom Rath’s father, who also worked in the diplomatic service, expressed doubts that his son really had been the victim of an assassination. He told his Jewish neighbor, a cantor called Magnus Davidson, that he sooner believed in a “creature hired by the Nazis than in a Jewish assassin,” and said that his son had known too much.[12] The Nazis may indeed not have had much sympathy for vom Rath. After all, he not was not particularly high in party rank, he was an aristocrat, and probably homosexual. He may even have been a thorn in their side. A Berlin journalist, Dr. Heinrich Muehsam, when asked at the time if vom Rath would die, answered, “Of course he will die. If not, the whole thing is worthless. […] The greater the mourning, the more fanatical the hatred will be.”[13]

The Aftermath

The way in which this “fanatical hatred” was unleashed on the night of November 9/10, 1938, has been documented many times. At least 1,500 synagogues were attacked. Some were set on fire, while others were partially destroyed or even demolished. Around 7,500 Jewish businesses were wrecked and plundered and at least 600 people were murdered either during the pogrom or in concentration camps during the days and weeks that followed. Some took their own lives in despair.

The Nazi leadership was ready with its response just one day after the riots subsided. Goering convened a conference of all the governmental institutions concerned with the “Jewish question,” and a new “Decree for the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life” was issued. Such a decree could not have been drawn up overnight; in fact, it would have required lengthily preparations. It seems likely, therefore, that it was prepared before November 9; perhaps even before November 7. Furthermore, institutions such as the Reich Chamber of Culture reacted very quickly to the new guidelines, which gave instructions to avoid “wild actions” against the Jews and instead manipulate the legal system as a tool for persecution. On November 12, Jews were forbidden to enter theaters, cinemas, concerts and exhibitions, and a flood of anti-Jewish laws were enacted in the following days, weeks and months.

Goebbels took part in Goering’s conference, but was visibly shaken. He was held responsible for the extensive damage to property inflicted during Pogrom Night and, once again, criticized for his extra-marital affairs.

It was clear that no one was interested in the actual victims of the pogrom.

Original German text summarized and edited by Daniel Poensgen

Translated into English and condensed by B. Clarke

Many thanks to Dr. Vincent C. Frank, whose research helped greatly with the writing of this article.

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[1] Vgl. Döscher, Hans-Jürgen: "'Reichskristallnacht'. Die November-Pogrome 1938.", Frankfurt (M), Berlin: 198, p.61

[2] Vgl. Döscher (1988), p. 65

[3] Fritz Krafft, "Im Schatten der Sensation, Leben und Wirken von Fritz Strassmann" Verlag Chemie Weinheim 1981, p. 181, quoted at http://www.falsifikation.ch/grynszpan/i_falsifikation.html

[4] Distel, Barbara: "Der Anfang vom Ende" in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, No. 258, November 9, 1978

[5] Schwarz, Hans: : “Wir haben es nicht gewusst. Erlebnisse, Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse aus dem KZ Dachau.“, Dachauer Archiv 21.523, quoted at http://www.falsifikation.ch/grynszpan/i_falsifikation.html [5]

[6] Report from Ambassador Graf Welczeck, taken on the 11.8.1938, quoted in Döscher (1988), p. 70

[7] “Anklageschrift des Oberreichsanwalts gegen Herschel Grünszpan, Okt. 1941”, quoted at http://www.falsifikation.ch/grynszpan/i_falsifikation.html

[8] Kaul, Friedrich: “Der Fall Herschel Grynszpan”, Berlin 1965, p. 8

[9] Quoted in: Döscher, Hans-Jürgen: "Reichskristallnacht. Die Novemberpogrome 1938.", Frankfurt/ Main, Berlin, 1988, p. 64

[10] Report of the German Ambassador Graf Welczeck, from November 8, 1938 on the attack on Legation Secretary vom Rath, quoted in: Döscher, Jürgen (Hrsg.): "Reichskristallnacht. Die Novemberpogrome 1938 im Spiegel ausgewählter Quellen.", Bonn 1988

[11] ebd., p. 64

[12] Benz, Wolfgang (Hrsg.): “Die Juden in Deutschland 1933-1945“, München 1989, p. 505

[13] ebd., p. 508