Herschel Grynszpan

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was a German-born Jew of Polish heritage. The Nazis used his assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo after the Fall of France and brought to Germany; his fate remains unknown. It is generally assumed that he did not survive the Second World War, and he was declared dead in 1960. A photograph of a man resembling Grynszpan was cited in 2016 as evidence to support the claim that he was still alive in Bamberg, Germany, on 3 July 1946. He is the subject of The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan, a book by Jonathan Kirsch and the novels Champion, by Stephen Deutsch and Everyone Has Their Reasons by Joseph Matthews.