ABSTRACT

This chapter recounts this troubled month during which Bernard Lecache's anti-Hitlerian organization, the International League against Anti-Semitism (LICA), worked tirelessly to address what the violence of Kristallnacht meant for Jews in France as well as abroad and to motivate the government to abandon its efforts to seek peace at all cost with Germany. The LICA's ninth congress began two days after the announcement of the visit of the German minister to Paris. German newspapers and French anti-Semitic publications wasted no time in reminding their readers of the cases of Samuel Schwartz-bard and David Frankfurter, two Jews who had murdered politicians they believed were responsible for anti-Jewish violence. The activist Georges Zerapha again accused Jewish circles of fearing public opinion. Grynszpan's act gave the diverse organs of the French press the opportunity to express their opposition to the presence of immigrants, who were considered to be partly responsible for the economic and political difficulties in France.