Herschel Grynszpan

His parents, Zindel and Rivka, were Polish Jews who had emigrated in 1911 and settled in Hanover.

Zindel opened a tailor's shop, from which he earned a modest living.

His parents' first child was stillborn in 1912.

Because of the German Citizenship Law of 1913, based on the principles of jus sanguinis, Grynszpan was never a German citizen despite his birth in Germany.

The family became Polish citizens after the First World War and retained that status during their years in Germany.

Grynszpan was the youngest of six children, only three of whom survived childhood.

Their second child, daughter Sophie Helena (born in 1914), died of scarlet fever in 1928.

A daughter (Esther, also known as "Berta") was born on 31 January 1916 (she was murdered by the Nazis in 1942 or 1943), and a son (Mordechai) on 29 August 1919.

A fifth child, Salomone, was born in 1920 and died in 1931 in a road accident.

The Grynszpan family was known as Ostjuden ("Eastern Jews") by the Germans and many West European Jews.

The "Ostjuden" usually spoke Yiddish and tended to be more religiously observant, impoverished, and less educated.

Herschel dropped out of school at age 14.

Grynszpan was considered by his teachers to be intelligent, if rather lazy, a student who never seemed to try to excel at his studies.

He later complained that his teachers disliked him because he was an Ostjude, and he was treated as an outcast both by his German teachers and fellow students.

As a child and a teenager, Grynszpan was known for his violent temper and his tendency to respond to antisemitic insults with his fists and was frequently suspended from school for fighting.

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (Yiddish: הערשל פײַבל גרינשפּאן; German: Hermann Grünspan; 28 March 1921 – last rumoured to be alive 1945, declared dead 1960) was a Polish-Jewish expatriate born and raised in Weimar Germany who shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris.

Grynszpan was born on 28 March 1921 in Hanover, Germany.

Grynszpan attended a state primary school until 1935 (when he was 14) and later said that he left school because Jewish students were already facing discrimination.

He was an intelligent, sensitive and easily-provoked youth whose few close friends found him too touchy.

Grynszpan was an active member of the Jewish youth sports club, Bar-Kochba Hanover.

When he left school, his parents decided that there was no future for him in Germany and tried to arrange for his emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine.

With financial assistance from Hanover's Jewish community, Grynszpan was sent to a yeshiva (rabbinical seminary) in Frankfurt and studied Hebrew and the Torah; he was, by all accounts, more religious than his parents.

After eleven months, he left the yeshiva, returned to Hanover and applied to emigrate to Palestine.

The local Palestine emigration office told Grynszpan that he was too young and would have to wait a year.

He and his parents decided that he should go to Paris and live with his uncle and aunt, Abraham and Chawa Grynszpan, instead.

Grynszpan obtained a Polish passport and German residence permit and received permission to leave Germany and go to Belgium, where another uncle (Wolf Grynszpan) lived.

He did not intend to remain in Belgium and entered France illegally in September 1936.

(Grynszpan could not enter France legally because he had no financial support; Jews were not permitted to take money from Germany.)

In Paris, he lived in a small Yiddish-speaking enclave of Polish Orthodox Jews.

Grynszpan met few people outside it, learning only a few words of French in two years.

He initially lived a carefree, bohemian life as a "poet of the streets", spending his days aimlessly wandering and reciting Yiddish poems to himself.

Grynszpan's two greatest interests, other than exploring Paris, were spending time in coffeehouses and going to the cinema.

He spent this period unsuccessfully trying to become a legal resident of France, because he could not work nor study legally.

Grynszpan's German re-entry permit expired in April 1937 and his Polish passport expired in January 1938, leaving him without papers.

The Nazis used this assassination 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 further fate remains unknown.

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.

However, this remains a matter of dispute: Kurt Grossman claimed in 1957 that Grynszpan lived in Paris under another identity.

It is generally assumed that Grynszpan did not survive World War II, and he was declared dead in absentia by the West German government in 1960.

This was done at the request of his parents, who said they had not heard anything from him in over 15 years, which was out of character for him.