On November 9, 1938, a teenager living in Paris named Herschel Grynszpan, furious at the deportation of thousands of Polish Jews, including his family, from his native Germany, bought a small revolver, went to the German embassy in the French capital and shot the first diplomat he saw, Ernst vom Rath. When he died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels took this act as a pretext for the great wave of terror and anti-Semitic violence known as the Night of Broken Glass, which many continue to see as the beginning of the Holocaust. Overnight, Grynszpan, a brilliant but naive boy who was nobody in politics, appeared on the front pages of the newspapers and became the pawn in a global power struggle. When France fell, the Nazis captured Grynszpan after a savage chase and sent him to Berlin. The young man became a prisoner of the Gestapo while Hitler and Goebbels plotted a mass trial to blame the Jews for starting World War II. Prisoner and alone, Grynszpan grasped Hitler's intentions and deployed all of his wits to sabotage the trial, knowing with certainty that even if he succeeded, he would be killed.