the crisis that had driven the German population to take violent reprisals against them. The SS leadership were clearly haunted by the fear that Germany might find itself engaged in a major war with hundreds of thousands of Jews still in the country. It was the fear of ‘Jewish subversion’ that led the SS in late October to carry out the brutal expulsion from Germany of 70,000 Polish Jews, including the parents of Herschel Grynzspan, the young man whose botched assassination attempt on the German ambassador in Paris provided the immediate trigger for the November pogrom.
