Polish-German assassin and political prisoner Herschel Grynszpan was BOTD in 1921. Born in Hanover to Polish Jewish immigrants, he was the youngest of six children, only three of which survived childhood. He attended a state primary school until age 14, when anti-Jewish discrimination made it difficult for him to remain at school. He was sent to a yeshiva in Frankfurt where he studied Hebrew and the Torah, with the intention of becoming a rabbi, and applied to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine, though was turned down for being too young. He moved to Paris in 1936 to live with relatives, eventually becoming stateless when his Polish passport was revoked. Unable to live or work legally in France and at risk of deportation, he went into hiding, depending on friends to survive. In November 1938, he learned that his parents had been sent to Poland, as part of the Nazi Party’s mass deportation of all German-based Jews. A few days later, he purchased a revolver and went to the German embassy in Paris and asked to speak to the ambassador. He was given an audience with junior embassy official Ernst vom Rath, shooting him five times in the stomach. Vom Rath died of his wounds two days later, despite the intervention of Adolf Hitler’s personal surgeons. Grynszpan was immediately arrested after the killing and confessed to murder, insisting that his motives were to avenge the Jewish people against Nazi occupation and brutality. Vom Rath received a state funeral in Düsseldorf, attended by Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. In his eulogy, Ribbentrop described the killing as an attack by Jews on the German people. That evening, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made an inflammatory speech at a beer hall in Munich, inciting German citizens to take the law into their own hands and attack Jewish homes, businesses and community centres. Within hours Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel (SS) forces launched a widespread attack on Jewish communities throughout Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia, which became known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass, causing property damage of over a billion Reichmarks (US $8.93 billion in modern currency). Over 90 Jewish citizens were killed, with a further 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps. Within days of the killing, rumours began to circulate that Grynszpan had met vom Rath at a gay bar in Paris and that they were lovers. Historians have since debated whether Grynszpan had posed as gay to win vom Rath’s affections and help secure his parents’ release, or whether the story was invented to help his defence. Grynszpan spent nearly two years in prison while his lawyers argued over the correct procedure for his trial. Largely shunned by Hamburg’s Jewish community, who viewed him as an immature teenager whose actions had unleashed mass terror, he received substantial support from Jewish and human rights groups elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. His French lawyers eventually proposed running the argument that he had killed Rath following a lover’s quarrel, in the hope he would be acquitted or receive a reduced sentence. In 1940, he was extradited to Germany and imprisoned by the Gestapo, while Goebbels planned a show trial to prove an international Jewish conspiracy to murder vom Rath. The trial was postponed, likely due to Hitler’s and Goebbels’ fears of public embarrassment about a Nazi diplomat having a sexual relationship with a younger Jewish man. Grynszpan was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. He is thought to have died, possibly via execution, at Sachsenhausen in 1942, though a photograph taken at a Bavarian refugee camp in 1946 suggests he may have survived. In 1952, German journalist and Nazi sympathiser Michael von Soltikow published a series of articles claiming that Grynszpan was alive and living in Paris and repeated the story about his and vom Rath being lovers. Subsequent searches throughout the 1950s revealed no evidence that Grynszpan was alive. A memorial for Grynszpan and his sister (who was murdered in the Soviet Union in 1942) was established at their last home in Hamburg. The killing of vom Rath and the subsequent events of Kristallnacht inspired Michael Tippett‘s 1952 oratorio A Child of Our Time.