The German Officer’s Boy by Harlan Greene

Some believed that the whole thing was just made up by the French Attorney General to discredit the Germans at the time. It is enough to know that he was not interred with the rest of the Jewish victims and was given his own room with some fetching and carrying work to do for some of the soldiers. He may have lived after the war or he may have joined the other concentration camp victims. So the facts will possibly never be known. The author is reading a lot into it because it was not in Germany's interest at the time to have the German Officer publicly accused of soliciting a Jewish boy for sexual favours - even if that teenager was used to it and slept with others to get money to feed his relatives. But the structure of the book is based on facts all in the public domain so they are not largely disputed. Who is to know what was said between the two of them. The first thing to remember is that a lot of it is speculation as to what happened behind closed doors. This isn't a long book and you could read in in a few hours but what it lacks in length it makes up for in depth. In spare, vivid, and compelling prose, Greene imagines their world, their relationship, and their last horrific encounter, as they tried to wrest love and meaning from a world that would itself soon disappear in a whirlwind of disaster and madness.

Historians have tried to explain away Herschel Grynszpan's claim that he was involved in a love affair with vom Rath Greene, instead, traces the lives of the underprivileged and persecuted Herschel Grynszpan and the wealthy German diplomat Ernst vom Rath as they move inevitably towards their ill-fated affair. In this historical novel, award-winning writer Harlan Greene may be the first author to take the Polish Jew at his word. Lost and overlooked in the aftermath is the arresting story of Herschel Grynszpan, the confused teenager whose murder of Ernst vom Rath was used to justify Kristallnacht. What really happened that afternoon in November 1938, when the young Polish Jew walked into the German embassy in Paris and shots rang out? The immediate consequence was concrete: Nazi Germany retaliated with the 'Night of Broken Glass,' recognized as the beginning of the Holocaust.

The German Officer’s Boy by Harlan Greene