A remarkable story of a forgotten seventeenyearold Jew who was blamed by the Nazis for the antiSemitic violence and terror known as the Kristallnacht, the pogrom still seen as an initiating event of the Holocaust
After learning about Nazi persecution of his family, Herschel Grynszpan (pronounced Greenspan) bought a small handgun and on November 7, 1938, went to the German embassy and shot the first German diplomat he saw. When the man died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels made the shooting their pretext for the statesponsored wave of antiSemitic terror known as Kristallnacht, still seen by many as an initiating event of the Holocaust.
Overnight, Grynszpan, a bright but naive teenager, was frontpage news and a pawn in a global power struggle.