The murder of a German diplomat in Paris, behind which was Polish Jew Herschel Greenspan, served as an excuse for Nazis to conduct the Crystal Night (Kristallnacht), violent Jewish pogrom that took place on the 9th of November 1938.
It was believed for a long time that Greenspan, who is causing controversy to this day, was killed in a concentration camp in the forties of the last century, but judging from the photo that was found in the archives of the Jewish Museum in Vienna, he survived the war.
Video from 1946 shows the then 24-year-old man in a group of displaced persons, and the discovery of these photographs reveals one of the biggest mysteries of the Nazi era.
“It is very important because the fate of Alan Greenspan has been a mystery for a long time, but the question whether he survived the war and the Holocaust had no response for more than 70 years,” said Armin Fuhrer, German historian and journalist who found the photo.
About 100 Jewish people was killed during the “Kristallnacht” , while 30,000 of them were sent to concentration camps. Many historians consider this for the beginning of the Holocaust in which was killed six million Jewish people.
On the photograph, Greenspan was participating in demonstrations of surviving victims of the Holocaust against the British authorities, who refused to allow them to immigrate to Palestine. Protesters were guarded by armed soldiers of the US military police.
British historian Roger Moorhouse says:” If the man in the photograph is really Herschel Greenspan, it would mean that one of the biggest mysteries of the Third Reich is finally solved”. “Given that Greenspan was notorious, it’s hard to believe that they just let him survive.”
Over the years, there were different arguments about Greenspan: some said that he changed his name and started a family, the other that he had a gas station near Paris, and the third that he worked in the import-export company.
“It was extremely unusual for someone who is so notorious to survive, and there is a doubt that, in some way, he actually collaborated with the Nazis.”
Fuhrer does not exclude the possibility that Greenspan, who is still a matter of controversy among Holocaust survivors, might still be alive. “It is not excluded. He would be now 95 years old. Maybe he lives under a new name in Israel or the United States.”
(Source: fokus.ba)
