About this item

A remarkable story of a forgotten seventeen-year-old Jew who was blamed by the Nazis for the anti-Semitic 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") , an impoverished seventeen-year-old Jew living in Paris, 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 great state-sponsored wave of anti-Semitic terror known as Kristallnacht, still seen by many as an initiating event of the Holocaust. Overnight, Grynszpan, a bright but naive teenager -- and a perfect political nobody -- was front-page news and a pawn in a global power struggle.