Auszüge:

....told Officer Autret that he had shot a man in order to avenge his parents, who were suffering at the hans of the Germans and that he did not regret it. Three days later, when questioned by Judge Tesnière, he had said that he had not acted out of personal hatred for vom Rath, or from a desire for vengeance against any particular person. "I dit not wish to kill him," he had told the examining magistrate, "When I committed that act, I was obeying an overwhelming an inexplicable force." Then he had added a fresh detail: vom Rath, he declared, "called me a dirty Jew".

"Was that before or after the shooting?" Judge Tesnière had asked.

"I couldn't tell you exactly," Herschel had replied. "I was overcome by emotion."

Later, it occured to Herschel that vom Rath had struck him when he called him a dirty Jew, and that that was why he had shot him. It had been an instinctive act, an act almost of self defence. He had intended, he explained, to shoot himself in front of a portrait of Adolf Hitler. It seemed he was sticking to this version in court.

Judge Tesnière proposed to retain the photograph found in Herschel's pocket at the time of his arrest as an exhibit for the forthcoming trial, believing that the words written on the back - "I have to protest in such a way that the whole world hears my protest, and this I intend to do" - indicated premeditation of murder. Moro, however, contended that the words indicated that Herschel concluded in an eighty-four-page report delivered at the end of February 1939 that Herschel had not been in a hypnotic state, nor had he intended to commit suicide, but that he "should be considered entirely responsible mentally" for his actions.

Judge Tesnière concluded the preliminary hearing on 25 November by notifying Herschel that he would be required to appear in court again the following Wednesday, when Uncle Abraham and Aunt Chawa were tried for aiding an abetting his innegal entry and residence in France.

After the Public Prosecutor had rather ineptly presented his case and demanded the heavies penalty for the accused - under Article 4 of the Penal Code - this was one year in prison.