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 state-sponsored 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 front-page news and a pawn in a global power struggle.