With financial assistance from Hanover's Jewish community, Grynszpan was sent to a yeshiva (rabbinical seminary) in Frankfurt and studied Hebrew and the Torah; he was, by all accounts, more religious than his parents.

Lonely and living in poverty on the margins of French life as an illegal immigrant, with no real skills, he grew increasingly desperate and angry as his situation worsened.

[14] Conditions for the refugees, trapped in the open on the German-Polish frontier, were extremely poor; according to a British woman who worked with the Red Cross, "I found thousands crowded together in pigsties.

[15] On 3 November, Grynszpan received a postcard from his sister in Zbąszyn dated 31 October recounting what had happened and (in a line which was crossed out) apparently pleading for help.

[6] Despite the efforts of French and German doctors (including Adolf Hitler's personal physician, Karl Brandt), the 29-year-old vom Rath died on 9 November.

That evening, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels – after consulting with Hitler – made an inflammatory speech to an audience of veteran Nazis from throughout Germany at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich, where the putsch had been organised.

In France, the Alliance Israélite Universelle "rejected all forms of violence, regardless of author or victim" but "indignantly protested against the barbarous treatment inflicted on an entire innocent population.

When the case became internationally known, the family sought a well-known lawyer and retained Isidore Franckel (28 November 1893 – 16 February 1965)[27] (one of Paris's leading advocates and president of the central committee of Hatzohar, the Union of Revisionist Zionists).

"[5] Franckel and Moro-Giafferi said that if Grynszpan was allowed to claim that he had shot vom Rath with such a motive, he would certainly be convicted and possibly executed (despite his being a minor); French law took a severe view of political assassination.

[29] Grynszpan was enraged by his lawyer's proposed crime passionel defense, insisting that he was not homosexual and had killed vom Rath as an act of political protest against the German government's antisemitic policies.

[30] The shy, socially-awkward Grynszpan confided to Moro-Giafferi that he had never had a girlfriend and was still a virgin, asking his lawyer to arrange a sexual encounter with a beautiful French girl in case he was sentenced to death.

Döscher quoted the diaries of French author André Gide, who wrote that vom Rath "had an exceptionally intimate relationship with the little Jew, his murderer": "The idea that such a highly thought-of representative of the Third Reich sinned twice according to the laws of his country is rather amusing.

[34] Döscher claims, in 2000, that by 1941, both the Ministry of Justice and the Reich Security Main Office were aware that Ernst vom Rath was apparently active in Paris’s homosexual circles and had likely met Herschel Grynszpan there.

In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1941, Grynszpan told fellow inmates that he intended to falsely claim at his trial that he had had a homosexual relationship with vom Rath.

Whatever the origins of the story, its utility was obvious: the murder could be presented not as a political act but as a crime passionel – a lover's quarrel, in which the German diplomat could be judged incidentally as having seduced a minor.

[40] Friedrich Grimm (a prominent German lawyer and a professor of international law at the University of Münster) was also sent to Paris, ostensibly representing the vom Rath family, but was widely known to be an agent of Goebbels.

Grimm and Diewerge, who were both antisemitic, were obsessed by the belief that Grynszpan had acted on behalf of unknown Jewish Hintermänner (supporters) who were also responsible for the assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff by David Frankfurter in 1936.

[43] Moro-Giafferi changed tactics and demanded an immediate trial when war broke out, confident that anti-German sentiment and German inability to present evidence would result in Grynszpan's acquittal.

The investigating judge had joined the army, however; the Ministry of Justice did not want the trial to proceed, and the Swiss lawyer engaged by the Germans employed a number of delaying tactics.

The Nazis were on Grynszpan's trail; Grimm, now an official in the German foreign ministry, and SS Sturmbannführer Karl Bömelburg arrived in Paris on 15 June with orders to find him.

Grynszpan received relatively mild treatment because Goebbels intended him to be the subject of a show trial proving the complicity of "international Jewry" in the vom Rath killing.

The indictment stated that Grynszpan's objective in shooting vom Rath was to "prevent through force of threats the Führer and Reichschancellor from the conduct of their constitutional functions" at the behest of international Jewry.

The trial was set for January 1942, with former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet scheduled to testify that "World Jewry" was responsible for dragging France into a war with Germany (its supposed political objective).

[50]Acting Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger wrote to Goebbels on 10 April demanding to know whether Hitler, when he had authorized the trial, had been aware that Grynszpan was planning to use a homosexual defence.

[4] In April 1952, German Nazi journalist Michael von Soltikow published two articles claiming that Grynszpan was living in Paris and repeated the theoretical 'gay lover' motive for vom Rath's murder.

[52] "Graf von Soltikow", as he liked to call himself (his real name was Walter Bennecke, and he was not an aristocrat), was a self-promoting former SS officer who had specialized in writing anti-Semitic tracts in Nazi Germany; after the war he engaged in sensationalist journalism, usually claiming that he was boldly revealing "secrets" which no one else dared to.

Not only did they not accept the verdict that war crimes had been committed, but they also expressed solidarity with those who had been convicted, protected them and demanded their release, preferably in the form of a general amnesty".

Sendel Grynszpan was present at the 1952 Israeli premiere of A Child of Our Time, Michael Tippett's oratorio inspired by vom Rath's murder and the ensuing pogrom.

[59] Grynszpan was widely shunned during his lifetime by Jewish communities around the world, who saw him as an irresponsible, immature teenager who (by recklessly killing a minor official like vom Rath) brought down the wrath of the Nazis in Kristallnacht.

"[52] In December 2016, a photograph found among a group of uncatalogued photos in the archives of the Jewish Museum Vienna by chief archivist, Christa Prokisch[60] led to speculation that Grynszpan could have survived the war.