short, strange life of Herschel Grynszpan: a boy avenger, a Nazi diplomat, and a murder in Paris

On the morning of November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a desperate seventeen year old Jewish refugee, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, a Nazi diplomat. Two days later vom Rath lay dead, and the Third Reich exploited the murder to inaugurate its long-planned campaign of terror against Germany's Jewish citizens, in the mass pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht.