Author(s): Timothy W. Ryback

World History

Description: 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.

Review: "Amazing ... This is history come alive in your hands" -- Robert Littell, author of The Company "An extraordinary, gripping and edifying story told extraordinarily well. I read it with a sense of amazement at the capacity of one good man to stand tall in the face of evil" -- Richard Bernstein, author of Dictatorship of Virtue "Horrifying and heartbreaking ... By recounting such striking heroism, he allows us at least to ponder whether, had more good Germans come forward, it all might just have been stopped" -- David Margolick, author of Beyond Glory "Inspiring ... In the gathering shadow of the Holocaust, Josef Hartinger's dogged decency may redeem the German race" -- Geoffrey Robertson QC, author of Crimes Against Humanity "All the more startling and important for bringing to life an episode so little known" -- Raymond Bonner, author of Anatomy of Injustice

Author Biography: Timothy W. Ryback is the co-founder of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at Leiden University in The Netherlands. His previous books include the highly acclaimed Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life, which has been translated into more than twenty languages and was described by Ian Kershaw as 'elegantly written, meticulously researched, fascinating', andThe Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000. He has been involved with several institutions involved in international affairs and served as a lecturer in the Concentration of History and Literature at Harvard University. He has also written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times. He and his wife reside in Paris.

Promotional Information: Forensically researched and grippingly told, the astonishing attempt by a German prosecutor to expose the Nazis as murderers on the eve of the Holocaust