Herschel : The Boy Who Started World War II

One bright November morning in 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old German Jew hiding in Paris, walked into the German embassy and gunned down Baron Ernst vom Rath, the highest ranking Nazi diplomat he could find. Herschel had finally reached a breaking point when he heard that his family had been expelled from Germany. The SS had beaten and bullwhipped them across the border into Poland and now they were starving to death. Thus begins one of the most remarkable, dramatic, and true accounts of World War II. The Baron died two days later - Hitler sent his own doctors to make sure of it - and Kristallnacht, long-planned but unleashed because of this murder, was set in motion by the hight German command. What followed The Night of Broken Glass is known to history, but what remains to be told is the astonishing story of Herschel Grynszpan. The assassination made front page news around the world. Vom Rath - a member of the Nazi party - was posthumously promoted and given a state funeral. But was he in reality an anti-Nazi agent? Was he Herschel's lover? Why was Herschel treated like a VIP in the Sachsenhausen camp? When he mysteriously disappeared was he executed, or did he survive the war to begin a new life, with a new identity?