Hitler's First Victims: And One Man's Race for Justice

Forensically researched and grippingly told, Hitler's First Victims is a fast-paced narrative reconstruction of six dramatic weeks in 1933 that tells the astonishing true story of a German prosecutor, Josef Hartinger, and his race to expose the Nazis as murderers on the eve of the Holocaust. At 9am on 13 April 1933 deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger received a telephone call summoning him to the newly established concentration camp of Dachau, where four prisoners had been shot. The SS guards claimed the men had been trying to escape. But what Hartinger found – a barbed wire cage in a sprawling industrial wasteland, the men’s corpses dumped on the floor of an ammunition shed, precision gunshot wounds to the backs of their shorn heads, all of them Jews – convinced him that something was terribly wrong. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor only six weeks previously but the Nazi party was rapidly infiltrating every level of state power. Soon they would have a stranglehold on the entire judicial system. In the weeks that followed, Hartinger was repeatedly called back to Dachau, where with every new corpse the gruesome reality became clearer: contrary to the guards’ claims, prisoners were being systematically executed and tortured to death. Hitler’s First Victims is the story of Hartinger’s race to expose the Nazi regime’s murderous nature before it was too late. Reconstructed here in gripping detail, it is at once a tragic legal drama that shows precisely how the Holocaust that followed became possible and an astonishing portrait of a man willing to sacrifice everything in his unflinching pursuit of justice, just as the doors to justice were closing.