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(Monday, November 7, 1938, approximately 9:45 a.m. Western European Time) — German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was shot today at the German embassy in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, 17, whose Jewish parents were among those recently deported from Germany to Poland.

The shooting and Rath’s death on Nov. 9, 1938, would provide a pretext for the Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass,” a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany carried out by SA paramilitary forces and German civilians.

Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools would be ransacked, as the attackers would demolish buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters would destroy 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses would either destroyed or damaged.

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Early reports estimated that 91 Jews would be murdered during the attacks, although modern analysis of German scholarly sources by historians puts the number much higher.

When deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll would climb into the hundreds.

Additionally, 30,000 Jewish men would be arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.

Grynszpan had purchased a revolver and a box of bullets in the morning, then went to the German embassy and asked to see an embassy official. After he was taken to the office of Ernst vom Rath, Grynszpan fired five bullets at Vom Rath, two of which hit him in the abdomen.

Vom Rath was a professional diplomat with the Foreign Office who expressed anti-Nazi sympathies, largely based on the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews, and was under Gestapo investigation for being politically unreliable.