Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice

Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal.

Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau Concentration Camp became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a state detention center for political prisoners, subject to police authority and due process. The camp began its irrevocable transformation from one to the other following the execution of four Jewish detainees in the spring of 1933. Timothy W. Rybackâ€™s gripping and poignant historical narrative focuses on those first victims of the Holocaust and the investigation that followed, as Hartinger sought to expose these earliest cases of state-condoned atrocity.

In documenting the circumstances surrounding these first murders and Hartingerâ€™s unrelenting pursuit of the SS perpetrators, Ryback indelibly evokes a society on the brinkâ€”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.

We see Hartinger, holding on to his unassailable sense of justice, doggedly resisting the rising dominance of Nazism. His efforts were only a temporary roadblock to the Nazis, but Ryback makes clear that Hartinger struck a lasting blow for justice. The forensic evidence and testimony gathered by Hartinger provided crucial evidence in the postwar trials.

Hitlerâ€™s First Victims exposes the chaos and fragility of the Nazisâ€™ early grip on power and dramatically suggests how different history could have been had other Germans followed Hartingerâ€™s example of personal courage in that time of collective human failure.
Country USA
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2014-10-21
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9780385352918

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2014-10-21
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9780385352918

Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice

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