Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht was a massive act of antisemitic violence that was named for the shards of glass left littering the streets in more than a thousand cities and towns in the German Reich. NOTE: This episode is not appropriate for young children.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I know
I've said this a number of times lately. It is
a byproduct of working on a daily podcast, but today's

(00:23):
episode has been on my list of two dues for
a really long time, and we're coming up on its
eightieth anniversary, which moved it up to the top of
the list. Crystal Knock, or the Night of the Broken Glass,
took place on November ninth and tenth of nineteen thirty eight,
and we've mentioned it in some previous episodes about the
Holocaust and about World War Two, and it has also
come up as a listener request. This was a massive

(00:46):
act of anti Semitic violence, and it was named for
the shards of glass that were left littering the streets
and more than a thousand cities and towns and the
German reich Nazis burned hundreds of synagogues, vandalized and looted
thousands of homes and businesses, raped and murdered people, and
made about thirty thousand arrests, mostly of Jewish men. And

(01:06):
those men were then sent the concentration camps. I don't
think I've ever given a warning the strong on the
show before, but this is just not an episode for
young children. We're going to be discussing everything that I
just said in a lot more detail, and then in
the third part of this episode, after the second ad break,
we are going to be discussing a rape investigation that
had horrifying elements on his own. I did want to

(01:29):
make one note on language before we start. Over the years,
we've gotten a couple of notes from listeners who've told
us that they don't prefer the use of the word
Jew because it's of its history as an anti Semitic slur.
But then we've also heard from other listeners that avoiding
the word j you has its own baggage because it
suggests that there's something wrong with being Jewish or that
we're uncomfortable with it. Plus, it means that adherence to

(01:51):
all the other religions can be referenced with nouns like
Christians and Muslims and Steaks and Buddhists, and Jews are
the only ones that are only allowed the adjective of
jew Ish. So these listeners have encouraged us to use
the word too. It is really not possible for us
to reconcile these two points of view, but I didn't
want to acknowledge that that's a discussion that happens before
we get into this episode. And if folks are wondering

(02:13):
about the timing of this episode given the shooting at
the Tree of Life Synagogue on October, we scheduled this
episode to come out today back in August, and it
was researched and written before the shooting happened, but it
is being recorded in the shootings immediate aftermath. So to
get into the background. We talked a lot about Adolf

(02:34):
hitler'sh rise to power in our previous episode on the
Night of the Long Knives, so we are not going
to repeat all of that today, But briefly, in ninety three,
Germany's President Paul von Hindenberg named Hitler as Chancellor, hoping
to appease the Nazi Party as it gained power in
the reichs Dog that's the German Parliament. UH. And then
when Paul von Hindenbergh died in nineteen thirty four, Hitler

(02:57):
became president as well as Chancellor, making him the fewer
or supreme ruler of Germany, and a big part of
his platform, which was also a big reason for his popularity,
was his vocal, vehement anti Semitism. Jews had been living
in what's now Germany for more than a thousand years,
and of course anti Semitism existed long before Hitler came

(03:18):
to power, but it was really after nineteen thirty three
that Germany started implementing a whole new wave of laws
that specifically targeted the Jewish population. As part of a
process of arianization. The Nazi Party called for a boycott
of Jewish businesses, and by nineteen thirty five, non Jewish
businesses were announcing that Jews were no longer welcomed there

(03:40):
as customers. Jews were also barred from holding civil service jobs,
and anyone who was already in a position like that
was fired. Then the Reich's dog passed the Nuremberg Laws
on September fift nineteen thirty five. These included the Law
for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor and
the Reich Citi and Ship Law. These laws outlined German

(04:02):
racial policy, and they were rooted in the idea that
Jews and Germans were different, that Jewish blood was inferior
to quote true German or Aryan blood, and that it
was necessary to ban contact between Jews and Germans for
the sake of racial purity. On top of preserving the
idea of this so called racial purity, these laws were

(04:23):
also meant to ostracized Jews and to speed up the
process of forcing them out of German society. Hitler and
the Nazi Party wanted to make Germany udn rhyme or
cleansed of Jews. Although legislators had already started doing research
and drafting language for these laws, the final legislation was
written over the span of just two days, and this

(04:45):
was because Hitler ordered for them to be finalized on
September so that he could present them at an annual
rally in Nuremberg on the fifteen. The Nuremberg Laws banned
Jews from holding German citizenship. This stripped them of the
rights and actions that German citizens were entitled to under
the law, and then it also excluded them from voting
and from holding public office. Both sex and marriage between

(05:09):
Jews and non Jews were outlawed. Jews were also banned
from employing German women under the age of forty five
as maids. The laws didn't define who was and wasn't
considered Jewish when it came to marriage, so the Reich
Ministry of the Interior issued a supplemental document outlining different
rules for people whose ancestry was half or quarter Jewish.

(05:32):
It detailed which populations were allowed to intermarry given how
much Jewish ancestry they had. Persecution of Jews in the Reich,
which had been going on through this whole time, continued
to escalate after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, and
a lot of people who had the means to do
so left the country. In March of nineteen thirty eight,

(05:52):
Germany annexed Austria, which put about a hundred and eighty
five thousand Austrian Jews under German rule and subject the
Nuremberg Laws. Then, on April eleventh, eight the government further
tightened their definition of who was and wasn't Jewish. So
called non arians were defined as anyone who was descended
from non Aryan parents or grandparents. People were required to

(06:16):
prove their ancestry through birth certificates and family records. Before
Germany annexed Austria, about a quarter of the nation's Jewish
population had fled, which had created a refugee crisis in
other nations. Most nations had immigration quotas in place, and
in many cases those quotas had already been reached even
before Germany annexed Austria. So after the annexation, other nations

(06:41):
were really anxious about the possibility of so many more
Jewish refugees. So in July a conference was held in
evy On, France to try to seek an international solution
to this problem, but the conference was completely unsuccessful. Although
most of the delegates expressed sympathy for German and Austrian Jews,

(07:01):
none of them offered to actually do anything about it.
The Dominican Republic was the only nation that offered to
relax its immigration policies to allow more refugees, and Hungary
and Poland were both more interested in finding a way
to remove their own Jewish populations than in bringing in
Jewish refugees. Although there were some individual diplomats and philanthropists

(07:23):
and religious and humanitarian organizations who were trying to help,
at the national level, virtually no one was willing. After
the Avian conference, the Polish government issued a decree that
any polls who had been out of the country for
more than five years would have their passports revoked unless
they got a stamp from a Polish official before October

(07:44):
one night, and this prompted Germany to expel its population
of Polish Jews back to Poland. Hitler ordered this expulsion
with forced evictions on October. Those expelled were allowed to
take only one suitcase each, and their belongings left behind
were confiscated by the government and in some cases stolen

(08:08):
by neighbors. Between twelve thousand and seventeen thousand Jews who
had been born in Poland were ordered to leave German
territory during this expulsion, but once they got to the border,
most of them weren't allowed to cross into Poland. Many
of them wound up at a makeshift refugee camp near
Spaljean on the Polish border. Because they had been allowed

(08:29):
to take only one suitcase each, the people trapped at
the border had virtually no food or supplies. They also
weren't permitted to take valuables or large amounts of money
out of Germany, so those who had brought money with
them had it confiscated. Conditions were appalling and members of
the shoot staffle or SS harassed and beat many of

(08:50):
the people who were being forced to relocate. There were
reports of suicides as a result of all of this.
Included among the people trapped at the border was the
family of seventeen year old Herschel Grinspun. The family were Polish,
but they've been living in Germany since the early nineteen teens,
while the rest of the family had been living in Hanover.
Herschel had fled in nineteen thirty six, first to Belgium

(09:13):
and then to France. On November three, he got a
postcard from his sister Berta, describing how she and their
parents had been forced out of their home and were
now trapped at the border with virtually nothing. Her postcard
was brief, but the next day Herschel also read a
thorough account in a Jewish newspaper that described the conditions
along the border as horrific. Harschel was already desperate when

(09:37):
he got this postcard from his sister. After leaving Germany,
he had crossed the border from Belgium into France illegally.
His repeated attempts to formally seek asylum in France had
all been turned down, and in July eight he had
been ordered to leave the country, but he had nowhere
else to go. His own Polish passport had expired, so

(09:58):
for about three months before getting the snews from his sister,
he had been in hiding, sheltered in a maid's quarters
in an attic and going out only at night. On
the morning of November seven, he wrote a postcard to
his father and placed it in his wallet. Written in Hebrew,
it said, with God's help, I couldn't do otherwise. My
heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy and that

(10:20):
of the twelve thousand Jews. I have to protest in
a way that the whole world. Here's my protest, and
this I intend to do. I beg your forgiveness. Then
he bought a gun and five bullets. He went to
the German embassy in Paris and was admitted into the
building after saying he had an important document to deliver.
His plan had been to assassinate the German ambassador, but

(10:43):
instead he was directed to the office of Third Secretary
Ernst von Rat. Herschel fired all five of his bullets,
hitting the secretary twice. Vom Rat initially survived and was
taken for medical care, and Herschel was taking into custody
by French authorities, and he went with them willingly, where
taliation against the Jewish community began immediately, with Jewish newspapers

(11:04):
and other publications being shut down on November eight and
Jewish cultural activities being suspended. On the same day, the
announcement came that Jewish children could no longer attend Aryan schools.
The shooting was also used as the justification for Crystal Knox,
which we will talk about after a quick sponsor break.

(11:30):
The shooting of Ernst von Rapt took place the day
before the fifteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Pushed that
was a failed attempt to start a violent insurrection against
the German government that took place in ninete. The primary
instigators of the Beer Hall Pushed were Adolf Hitler and
Eric Ludendorff. Both men were arrested and tried, and Ludendorff

(11:51):
was acquitted, but Hitler was convicted and he spent nine
months in prison, during which time he wrote most of
Mind comp Because of the anniversary, Nazi Party leaders were
gathered in Munich. Most of them saw an editorial in
the Nazi Party's newspaper that described herschel Grin spawn as
quote a criminal tool of international Jewish murderers, And on

(12:13):
the afternoon of the ninth they also got word that
vom Ratt had died of his injuries. This was not
the first time that a Jewish person had killed a
Nazi official. In nineteen thirty six, a Jewish student named
David Frankfurter assassinated Vilhelm gustlaffen Davos, who was the leader
of the Nazi Party in Switzerland. But that time Hitler

(12:33):
had forbidden any kind of retaliation for the assassination that
had happened during the lead up to the nineteen thirty
six Berlin Olympics, which were facing ongoing protests and threats
of boycott's and demands for the games to be canceled
or moved somewhere else, so Hitler didn't want to give
that movement anymore fuel. But things were different in ninety eight.

(12:54):
The Olympic Games were long over and the Nazi government
was increasingly direct in its anti is Semitism, so the
assassination of Ernst von Rat became the justification for mass
violence sanctioned by Adolf Hitler and coordinated by Nazi officials.
We should stress Herschel Grinchbahn's killing of Ernst bomb Rat

(13:14):
did not cause crystal knot that simply gave the Nazi
government a convenient rationale to carry it out. Reinhardt Heidrich,
chief Lieutenant of the s S, called for demonstrations against
the Jewish population on November nine at the commemoration of
the Beer Hall push. On the ninth, Reich Minister of
Propaganda Paul Joseph Grebbel's carefully planted the idea of a

(13:37):
purportedly spontaneous uprising. He framed it this way, quote, the
fere has decided that demonstrations should not be prepared or
organized by the party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously,
they are not to be hampered. Just before midnight on
the ninth, Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller sent this telegram quote,

(13:58):
in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues
will take place in all of Germany. These are not
to be interfered with. So this idea that purportedly spontaneous
demonstrations might just happen and that officials shouldn't interfere with
them if they did happen, was totally fabricated. Nazi officials

(14:19):
were directly involved in planning this and carrying it out.
Party leaders called or went back to their local offices
that night, and they called for this demonstration. Although civilians
were involved, including a large number of schoolboys, the s
S and the Essay, which was also known as the Stormtroopers,
were major instigators. So were the Gestapo and the Hitler youth.

(14:41):
Although some people remained in their uniforms, a lot of
them changed into civilian clothes to reinforce this idea that
this was a spontaneous civilian uprising that was just being
carried out by local residents, not a coordinated attack by
the Nazi government. The violence started in Germany, then spread
into Austria as well as Sudetenland, which Germany had recently

(15:03):
annexed from the Austro Hungarian Empire. There were attacks in
parts of East Prussia near the Reich border as well.
Instructions were to destroy Jewish property while leaving everything else untouched.
Synagogues were to be destroyed, with their archives confiscated beforehand.
As many young, healthy Jewish Men as possible were to
be arrested, as long as they weren't foreigners. Foreigners weren't

(15:26):
supposed to be harmed, even if they were Jewish, to
avoid prompting a response from their home country. Any fires
that started were supposed to be allowed to burn unless
they threatened to spread to buildings that weren't owned by Jews.
At about one twenty a m. On the tenth, Reinhard
Hydrich sent telegrams forbidding looting, but by that point looting

(15:49):
was well underway and his direction was mostly ignored. Most
of the violence took place on November ninth and tenth.
Gebels called for an end to the violence on the tenth,
although there were attered incidents after that. During that time,
more than a thousand synagogues were damaged and at least
two hundred sixty seven were completely destroyed. More than seven

(16:10):
thousand Jewish businesses and homes were vandalized, and many of
them were also looted. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. At least
ninety one Jews were killed, and an unknown number were humiliated, beaten,
sexually assaulted, and raped. Thirty people, most of them young
Jewish men, were arrested and deported to concentration camps, including

(16:31):
Dakau Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. This represented about a third of
the Jewish Men still in Germany. Most of them were
held for about three months, but ultimately released only if
they agreed to leave Germany immediately. Although support for this
program wasn't universal among the government, it was overwhelming. A

(16:51):
very few officials returned to their local offices and either
refused to participate or issued counter orders. In a few towns,
parish easts and mayors managed to mostly prevent the violence,
but aside from these isolated exceptions, every Jewish community in
the Reich was affected. The public response of Nazi Party
leadership after Crystal Knock was shocked. After all, this was

(17:14):
a supposedly spontaneous wave of righteous indignation. At the same time,
they didn't present this as a problem. Hitler and Gubbles
held a press conference on November eleven, and Gebbs told
reporters quote, it is an intolerable state of affairs that
within our borders and for all these years, hundreds of
thousands of Jews still control whole streets of shops, populate

(17:37):
our recreation spots, and as foreign apartment owners pocket the
money of German tenants while their racial comrades abroad agitate
for war against Germany and gunned down German officials. Up
till this point, the Nazi policy of arianization was largely
framed as voluntary. Jews were being quote encouraged to sell

(17:59):
their homes and business as to non Jews, but this
encouragement was rooted in harassment, discrimination and persecution. There wasn't
much of an actual choice about it. But after Crystal Knocked,
this shifted from a plan that was supposedly voluntary to
one that was definitely forced. On November twelve, the German
government issued a decree on the elimination of the Jews

(18:21):
from economic life, and this forbade Jews from owning or
managing businesses, working as foreman or managers, working as craftspeople,
taking part in trade, selling goods, basically every possible way
of earning a living. Jewish owned businesses were confiscated and
turned over to non Jews. Even more laws targeting Jews

(18:45):
were passed immediately after Crystal Knocked, including bands on possessing weapons,
shopping in most stores, and using most public facilities like theaters.
Also on the twelfth, her Moan Goring announced that the
Jewish community was going to be find for all the destruction.
That fine was set at one billion reich marks and
called an atonement tax. He also announced that any insurance

(19:09):
settlements for the damage would be property of the state,
not of the people whose property had actually been destroyed.
Property that wasn't destroyed was also confiscated. The international response
in the first days after this happened was overall one
of shock and horror. Because World War Two had not
started yet in Europe, there were still a lot of

(19:30):
international reporters in German territory, and they were largely able
to move around and report relatively freely. So Crystal Knock
was widely and critically reported in the international press. For example,
in the United States, they got more news coverage than
any other single anti Jewish incident or policy during the
Nazi era. But in spite of the horror and outrage,

(19:53):
the international community did essentially nothing to help or to
protect Jews in Germany and German occupied territory. Nations that
had reached their quotas for immigrants and asylum seekers overwhelmingly
left those quotas unchanged. Several nations introduced proposals to raise
their quotas, but those proposals failed. Just as an example

(20:15):
of what happened on the national level, British Prime Minister
Nevill Chamberlain's set a limit of five hundred refugees per
week to Britain, but it refused to allow refugees from
Germany into the Palestinian territories, which were at that point
under British control. The Kinder transport program that we discussed
in a recent Six Impossible Episodes was only very reluctantly

(20:36):
approved after extensive lobbying. In the United States, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt recalled the American ambassador from Berlin as an
active protest, and he publicly denounced the attack, but he
didn't allow more Jewish refugees into the United States. Secretary
of Labor Francis Perkins did convince him to allow about

(20:56):
twelve thousand Germans who were in the U S at
the time, most of whom were Jewish, to stay indefinitely,
even after their visas expired. A bill introduced to Congress
to allow children under the age of fourteen to enter
the US, which would have been similar to Kinder transport,
was not passed. As had been true before Crystal Knack,

(21:17):
there continued to be individual diplomats and organizations that tried
to find asylum for Jews in German territory. Several Indian
princely states also offered asylum, but overall, nations still refused
to act, and the people who did manage to escape
from German territory generally faced anti semitism wherever they went.
As many Jews fled Germany in ninety eight and thirty nine,

(21:40):
as had between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty eight,
but this was a tiny, tiny fraction of people who
tried to escape. The general refusal to act came from
a lot of social and economic factors and anti semitism,
which wasn't at all unique to Germany or its Nazi government.
In the United States, for example, to any thousand members

(22:01):
of the pro Nazi German American Bund held an anti
Semitic Americanization rally in Madison Square Garden on February nineteen
thirty nine, just months after Crystal Knocked. Persecution of Jews
continued to increase in Germany and German occupied territory from
this point, and from there it starts to merge into

(22:21):
the general history of the Holocaust. On November twenty three eight,
the Los Angeles Examiner read the headline quote, Nazis worn world.
Jews will be wiped out unless evacuated by democracies. Over
the next few years, Germany invaded Poland, established ghettos and
death camps, and planned the final solution of the genocide

(22:43):
of Europe's Jewish population, along with targeting gay men, romani,
disabled people, Freemasons, and others. Two waves of investigations followed
Crystal Knocked, one carried out by the Nazi Party immediately afterward,
and the other by the German government after the end
of World War too, And we were going to talk
about those after we first paused for another sponsor break.

(23:12):
Shortly after Crystal Knock, the Nazi Party launched investigations into
the rapes and murders that had been committed on November
nine and ten, but neither of these were motivated by
seeking justice for the victims. One motivation was trying to
keep the investigation out of the German state court. That
was the primary reason for the murder investigations. The Nazi

(23:33):
government didn't really care about the murders, especially because the
victims were Jews, but officials knew that investigations and trials
carried out by the regular German police and courts would
unearth the fact that this was a planned and coordinated
attack of mass violence, not a spontaneous civilian uprising. The
rape investigations had another layer. They were ordered because the

(23:57):
rapes were a violation of the idea of racial purity
that was central to the Nazi ideology. In addition to
the racial purity standards in the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi
Party had policies about the racial purity of its members.
The Supreme Party Court had banned anyone who had a
trace of quote colored or Jewish blood from the party,

(24:18):
with that trace going back to their family tree to
eighteen hundred, and anyone who was married to anyone who
had a trace of such blood was also banned from
the party. So the men who had committed rape during
the pogram had violated this decree. Mass trials began on
December twenty eight and they ran through February nine nine.

(24:40):
The Gestapo was responsible for providing evidence, and jurors were
selected from the s s and the Essay, along with
some members of the Nazi Party, but most of the
trials led to acquittals. A lot of those who were
convicted of rape had a previous history of some kind
of involvement with the Jewish woman. Although a few men
were the prison most of the sentences that were handed

(25:02):
down were either a warning or ejection from the Nazi Party.
The second round of trials took place after the end
of World War Two, most of them between nineteen forty
six and nineteen fifty. These were separate from the more
well known Nuremberg trials. The Nuremberg trials were focused on
high ranking officials and military leaders, but almost none of

(25:22):
the leaders that we've named in this episode were put
on trial. Adolf Hitler took his own life on April ninety.
Joseph Goebbels did the same on the following day, along
with his wife, after poisoning their children. S s chief
Reinhard Heydrich, who was also the architect of the Final Solution,
was assassinated in nineteen forty two. It is unknown what

(25:46):
happened to Gestapo chief Einrich Mueller. Of the leaders we've
mentioned today, only Hermann Gering was tried at Nuremberg and
sentenced to death by hanging, but he took his own
life before being executed. The second wave of trials or
lated to Crystal Knock took place on a much smaller scale.
They were the results of individual victims bringing charges against

(26:06):
the perpetrators of specific crimes. So this was a collection
of individual court cases that were related to individual incidents,
not a large scale investigation into Crystal knocked as a whole,
and it involved only victims who had survived the Holocaust
and had the means and ability and frankly, the desire
to pursue this matter in court. These postwar trials were

(26:28):
also hampered by the fact that Germany had a tremendous
shortage of people at every level of the judicial system
after the war. The overwhelming majority of judges had Nazi ties,
and at first the Allies were trying to rebuild the
German judicial system without Nazi influence, and this involved convincing
judges who had retired before nineteen thirty three to return

(26:51):
to the bench, as well as appointing new judges. But
even with those steps, there just weren't enough people without
Nazi ties to fill all the necessary positions, and it
wasn't until the nineteen sixties that the proportion of judges
with Nazi ties really started to drop. All that together
means that most of the perpetrators of Crystal Knock were

(27:12):
never brought to justice in any way. And we're going
to close out this episode by returning to Herschel grindge Bomb.
As we said earlier, after shooting Ernst von Rat, he
was taken into custody by French authorities and he went
with them willingly. An investigation was conducted in Paris with
the presiding judge, one who often dealt with juvenile delinquency cases,

(27:33):
but his case never came to trial. German operatives were
dispatched to Paris to try to influence the proceedings, while
Jewish and philanthropic organizations came together in his defense. He
remained in prison until Germany invaded France in May of
nineteen forty, and then he was transferred into German custody
on July eighteenth of nineteen forty. The Nazi government planned

(27:56):
to put him on trial, a massive public show trial
that would work as dramatic anti Semitic propaganda, but this
plan ultimately crumbled, in part because of the actions of
Herschel himself. While Herschel was still in France, one of
his attorneys had latched onto rumors that vom Rat was homosexual,
and he tried to use those rumors to build a defense,

(28:18):
framing this shooting as the result of a lover's quarrel
in their words, but Herschel refused to accept this defense,
insisting repeatedly that it was not true at all and
that his actions were politically motivated. He said, it was
quote because of love for my parents and for my
people who were subjected unjustly to outrageous treatment. It is, not,

(28:39):
after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not
a dog. I have the right to live. My people
have a right to exist on this earth. But in
two after the German Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Propaganda, and
Ministry of Justice all started working together to plan this
huge show trial, Grinchbond finally agreed to the proposed defense.

(29:01):
There is a bit of conjecture here, but it is
highly likely that he did this specifically to prevent the
trial from happening, because it would have had disastrous effects
on the Jewish community, which was already facing the Holocaust.
Homosexuality was abhorrent to the Nazi Party, as as we
said earlier, was sexual contact between Jews and non Jews.

(29:22):
So this defense also brought in the fact that grinch
Bond had only been seventeen at the time of the assassination,
while vomb Rat was nearly thirty, which would have made
him an alleged Peeder. Asked the political assassination of a
German official at the hands of a Jew was something
that the Nazi government could turn to its advantage, but
homosexual involvement between a German official and a minor Jew

(29:44):
absolutely was not. Grinch Bond accepted this defense at great
risk to his own life. He had only been kept
alive and been treated relatively well for the sake of
using his trial as a public spectacle, and after the
trial was called off in the spring of nineteen forty two,
he disappeared from the historical record. Although there were rumors

(30:05):
that he survived until the end of the war in
nineteen forty five and was rescued by the Allies, it's
overwhelmingly likely that Herschel Grinchbund was killed in a concentration
camp before that point. In nineteen fifty eight, his father
petitioned for reparations, and after an investigation, a death certificate
was issued for Herschel grinch Bun On June one of
nineteen sixty, so that is a heavy one. I feel

(30:30):
almost irreverent asking about listener mail, I did prepare some
listener mail, and I wanted to pick something that was
not too heavy based on the heaviness of this episode,
but also not too frivolous, since I don't want to
feel like we're making light of it. And I got
an email from Dave that's about our episode on Sir

(30:50):
Walter Raleigh. Uh and it is titled Raleigh Cobbam and
the Hearsay Rule, and Dave wrote, high, Holly and Tracy,
I loved the recent episode on or Walter Raleigh, especially
the story of his trial. One really interesting point that
you didn't really get to you stands out from my
evidence class in law school. It's one of the inspirations
for the hearsay rule, famous from any legal TV show

(31:12):
you've ever seen. Long story short. Hearsay is the rule
that any statement made out of court can't be admitted
into evidence to prove that it's true. Holly can say
History Stuff is the best podcast ever, but that can't
be admitted to prove that History Stuff is the best
podcast ever unless she showed up in court to say it.
Under oath. I like how I'm the one causing the
trouble in this letter. You're always the one causing the trouble.

(31:36):
That's definitely true. We disagree on whether that's true. At
Raleigh's trial, the only evidence against him was Cobham's confession,
and Cobham never appeared to testify our evidence. Professor Loved
to give a dramatic reading from the trial transcript where
Raleigh states, all this is but one accusation of cobhams.

(31:57):
I beseech you my Lord's let Cobham be sent or
charge him on his soul, on his allegiance to the king.
If he affirm it, I am guilty. Love the podcast,
Keep up the awesome work, Dave. Then he gives some
episode suggestions, but he didn't actually give episode suggestions, which
kind of delights me. So uh, thank you so much

(32:18):
for sending this email. UM. That is a fascinating story
about hearsay and Sir Walter Raleigh, and it led me
to go down the rabbit hole of where the hearsay
rule came from. UM this morning before we recorded, and
one of the things that I learned is that UM
Walter Raleigh's trial happened as opinions were shifting about this.

(32:39):
It was sort of in the mid fifteen hundreds that
in court people started bringing up the idea that maybe
hearsay evidence was was not okay, maybe that person should
actually be there to speak for themselves, And it continued
to come up more and more in the sixteen hundreds,
and then by the late sixteen hundreds and early seventeen hundreds,
it becomes more uh standard that hearsay evidence isn't admissible,

(33:02):
that maybe a sworn testimony that was given under oath
outside of the court is admissible. Um. But yeah, he
was sort of part of that arc of how those
rules evolved. So thank you so much Dave for sending
that note. If you would like to write to us
about this, certainty of our other podcast where at History
podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also all

(33:24):
over social media at missed in History. That's where you'll
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(33:47):
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