Although his Jewish family had to move from Frankfurt to France in 1933, he focused on Franco-German cooperation after World War II, was instrumental in the Élysée Treaty in 1963, and writing books towards better understanding between the Germans and the French.

He was professor at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris from 1955 to 1995, and contributed to newspapers and broadcasts including La Croix and Ouest-France.

A director of a children's hospital in Frankfurt, socialist, freemason, and Jew,[2] he was forced to immigrate to France in 1933[1] due to the increasing antisemitism in Nazi Germany.

[3] Alfred, his mother, Lily Grosser, and his sister were given French citizenship in 1937[3] through a decree by the Minister of Justice, Vincent Auriol, in 1937;[2] as a result, they were spared possible internment in a French camp following France's declaration of war on Germany, in September 1939, when, under the government of Daladier, German refugees from Nazism were treated as enemy aliens like other German residents.

[5] In 1944 Grosser lived in Marseille and taught at a Catholic school;[6] he learned then that part of his family in Germany had probably been deported to Auschwitz, but refused to think of a collective German guilt.

[3] He received the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 1975 for his role as "middle man between French and Germans, non-believers and believers, Europeans and people from other continents";[9] this gave him an early opportunity to speak at St. Paul's Church.

[5] He later turned to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, arguing that exactly because his parents and four grandparents were Jewish he felt more strongly that Israel's settlement policy violated human rights.

[7] He was invited to deliver the keynote for a yearly memorial event for the November pogroms of 1938 at St. Paul's Church in 2010, which caused controversy already when it was announced.

He stated that the editor had reluctantly published his positive critique on a book that criticized Israel, while later printing multiple readers' letters attacking Grosser.

[15] Grosser was invited by the city of Frankfurt to give the main speech at a Kristallnacht commemorative meeting on 9 November 2010 at St. Paul's Church.