Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was a Polish-Jewish expatriate born and raised in Weimar Germany who shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris. The Nazis used this assassination as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo after the Fall of France and brought to Germany; his further fate remains unknown.

Ernst Eduard vom Rath was a member of the German nobility, a Nazi Party member, and German Foreign Office diplomat. He is mainly remembered for his assassination in Paris in 1938 by a Polish Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, which provided a pretext for Kristallnacht, "The Night of Broken Glass". Historians consider Kristallnacht the beginning of the Holocaust.