Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee whose family had just been deported from Germany to Poland under brutal conditions, shot German embassy official Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Vom Rath died two days later. Nazi propaganda seized on the killing to justify Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, in which mobs destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues and Jews were sent en masse to concentration camps.
Grynszpan's family had been among roughly 12,000 Polish Jews expelled from Germany in the days before, dumped at the Polish border in the Zbąszyń crossing where they were left stranded in no man's land without food or shelter as Poland refused them entry. Furious and desperate after learning of his family's plight from a postcard, Grynszpan bought a revolver and went to the German embassy, initially hoping to see the ambassador but shooting the first official who would receive him, junior diplomat Ernst vom Rath.
Joseph Goebbels used vom Rath's death, two days later, as the spark for an already-planned wave of violence. Propaganda framed the shooting as proof of an international Jewish conspiracy, and mobs across Germany and Austria burned synagogues, smashed Jewish shopfronts, and rounded up some 30,000 Jewish men for the camps in the pogrom that came to be called Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." Grynszpan was captured by the Gestapo after the fall of France; his ultimate fate remains uncertain, but he likely died in a concentration camp before the war's end, a teenager whose singular act of desperation was twisted into justification for one of the Holocaust's opening chapters.
Key people: Herschel Grynszpan, Ernst vom Rath