Hitler's Pawn

"In a work of fact that reads like fiction, with a novelist's relish for incident and character, [Koch] brings his troubled, troubling protagonist to life." -Ian Brunskill, The Wall Street Journal

After learning about Nazi persecution of his family, Herschel Grynszpan (pronouncedGreenspan) bought a small handgun and on November 7, 1938, went to the Germanembassy 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 ina global power struggle.