Herschel Grynszpan, 17-year-old Polish Jew, whose murder of a third secretary in the German Embassy here caused the Nazi Reich’s worst outbreak of anti-Semitic persecution, today said: “I did it all as though I were in a dream.”
“I only awoke after I pulled the trigger,” the boy declared in explaining to an examining magistrate how he shot Ernst vom Rath, the Embassy secretary, on Nov. 7.
“The idea to go to the German Embassy came to me after I bought the revolver,” he said. “From that moment on, I acted automatically, under the power of some sort of suggestion that dictated my acts, and I accomplished the deed as though I were in a hypnotic trance.”
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