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Herschel Grynszpan, Apprehended Shortly after Assassinating Ernst von Rath, the Legation Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris (November 7, 1938)

The family of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan (also written as "Grünspan" in German) was caught up in the brutal deporations of foreign Jews. Grynszpan himself was in Paris, but his parents, Polish citizens, had been living in Germany since 1911. In October 1938, the couple was abandoned on the German-Polish border with their two daughters. After learning of their fate, Grynszpan decided to commit a spectacular assassination to draw the world's attention to the suffering of the Nazis’ Jewish victims. On the morning of November 7, 1938, he entered the German embassy in Paris and shot the Legation Secretary Ernst Eduard vom Rath, who died of his injuries two days later. Grynszpan was arrested at the scene and handed over to French police. After the German invasion of France in 1940, he was transferred to Germany and imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was most likely murdered. The circumstances and date of his death are not known.

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Herschel Grynszpan, Apprehended Shortly after Assassinating Ernst von Rath, the Legation Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris (November 7, 1938)

© Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz