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(Wednesday, November 9, 1938, approximately 4:30 p.m. Western European Time) — German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, shot Nov. 7, 1938, at the German embassy in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, 17, whose Jewish parents were among those recently deported from Germany to Poland, died this afternoon at the Clinique de l’Alma.

Rath’s shooting and death provided 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 today through Nov. 10, 1938.

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

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

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

Additionally, 30,000 Jewish men were 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.