Hitler's Pawn

Discover a little-known chapter in Holocaust literature with this “riveting tale” of the 17-year-old Jew who was the first to take up arms against the Nazi regime (Wall Street Journal).

“Reads like a thriller.” —New York Journal of Books

After learning about Nazi persecution of his family, Herschel Grynszpan (pronounced Greenspan) bought a small handgun and on November 7, 1938, went to the German embassy and shot the first German diplomat he saw. When the man died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels made the shooting their pretext for the state–sponsored wave of Antisemitic terror known as Kristallnacht, still seen by many as an initiating event of the Holocaust.

Overnight, Grynszpan, a bright but naive teenager, was front–page news and a pawn in a global power struggle.