True. When Ernst vom Rath went to work on the morning of November 7, 1938, he had no idea he would soon be mortally wounded—or that his death would serve as the excuse for a two-day terror attack on German Jews. He was at work at the German embassy in Paris when Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, walked up to him and fired five times at close range. Days later, vom Rath was dead and the streets of Germany were littered with shards of broken glass. The young diplomat’s death was used as the excuse for Kristallnacht, a two-day, nationwide pogrom against Germany’s Jews that is now seen as a harbinger for the Holocaust.