Ernst vom Rath

Ernst vom Rath was shot in the German embassy in Paris by a seventeen-year-old, and his death was used to organise a pogrom. He was a junior diplomat, a party member since 1932, and by several accounts privately critical of the regime's treatment of Jews - which makes the use made of him more grotesque rather than less. On 7 November 1938 Herschel Grynszpan walked into the embassy and shot him. Grynszpan's parents were among some twelve thousand Polish Jews expelled from Germany days earlier and left stranded at the Polish border, refused entry by both countries and living in a railway siding. Vom Rath died on 9 November, which happened to be the anniversary of the Munich putsch, with the Nazi leadership already gathered in the city. Goebbels told them that spontaneous demonstrations against Jews should not be discouraged, which the assembled Gauleiter correctly understood as an instruction. Orders went out through party channels that night. What followed was neither spontaneous nor a demonstration: some 267 synagogues burned, 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, at least 91 people killed outright, and about 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to camps. The Jewish community of Germany was then fined a billion Reichsmarks for the damage done to it. He was given a state funeral and posthumously promoted. Grynszpan was handed to Germany after the fall of France, kept for a show trial that was never held, and disappeared. The trial was abandoned because Grynszpan's defence intended to argue that he and vom Rath had known each other personally, which the propaganda ministry could not risk hearing in open court whether or not it was true.

• Lived: 1909 CE – 1938 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: politician