Herschel Grynszpan (28 March 1921-1942) was a Polish Jew who killed the diplomat Ernst vom Rath from Nazi Germany in Paris in 1938, leading to the Kristallnacht across Germany. Grynszpan probably died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942.
Biography[]
Herschel Grynszpan was born on 28 March 1921 in Hanover, Germany to a family of Polish Jews. In 1935, he left school in Nazi Germany alongside other Jewish students because they were persecuted by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party government, and he lived with his uncle and aunt in Paris, France as a student and an exile. In 1938, Grynszpan decided to assassinate a Nazi diplomat in Paris to fight in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews in the country, and on 9 November 1938 he shot diplomat Ernst vom Rath after claiming that he was going to give the German ambassador Count von Welczek an important document. Grynszpan killed Vom Rath and turned himself in to French police, and Hitler decided to let Germans across his empire attack Jewish synagogues and businesses in Kristallnacht. He did not live past World War II, being arrested and probably dying at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942 during the Holocaust.