Hitler's First Victims

From Third Reich expert and critically-acclaimed author of Hitler’s Private Library: the remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first Nazi killers of the Holocaust. Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a legal state detention center for political prisoners. In 1933, that began to change. Timothy W. Ryback investigates the beginning of the Holocaust, through the four Jewish detainees who became the first prisoners murdered by the Nazi state; and the courageous prosecutor, Josef Hartinger, who risked everything to bring the SS perpetrators responsible for the killings to justice, through the very legal system that was about to disappear. Ryback indelibly evokes a society on the brink—one in which civil liberties are sacrificed to national security, in which citizens increasingly turn a blind eye to injustice, in which the bedrock of judicial accountability chillingly dissolves into the martial caprice of the Third Reich. Exposing the chaos and fragility of the Nazi’s early grip on power, Hitler’s First Victims also suggests how different history could have been had other Germans followed Hartinger’s example of personal courage in that time of collective human failure.