Hitler's First Victims

first generation of state prosecutors trained in the processes and values of a democratic republic. He pursued communists and National Socialists with equal vigor, and since Hitler s appointment as chancellor had watched the ensuing chaos and abuses with the confidence that such a government could not long endure. The Reich president, Paul von Hindenburg, had dismissed four chancellors in the past ten months: Heinrich Brüning in May, Franz von Papen in November, and Kurt von Schleicher just that past January. There was nothing preventing Hindenburg from doing the same with his latest chancellor Adolf Hitler.
 
Until then, Hartinger s daily commerce in crime involved burned barns, a petty larceny, an occasional assault, and, based on the remnant entries in the departmental case register, all too frequent incidents of adult transgressions against minors. Forty-one- year-old Max Lackner, for example, was institutionalized for two years for sexual abuse of children under fourteen. Ilya Malic, a salesman from Yugoslavia, was arrested after he forced a fourteen- year-old to French-kiss. Hartinger spoke discreetly of juvenile matters. Homicides were rare. The only registered murder for those years was a crime of passion committed by forty-seven-year-old Alfons Graf, who put four bullets into the head of his companion, Frau Reitinger, when he discovered her in the back of his company car with another man.
 
But that year, following Hitler s January appointment as chancellor and the dramatic arson attack a month later that saw the stately Berlin Reichstag consumed in a nightmare conflagration of crashing glass, twisted steel, and surging flames, the jurisdiction was swept by an unprecedented wave of arrests in the name of national security. In Untergrünberg, the farmer Franz

their professional duty with equal moral compass.
Raymond Bonner, author of Anatomy of Injustice

This is an extraordinary, gripping, and edifying story told extraordinarily well by Timothy Ryback. I read it with a sense of amazement at the capacity of one good man to stand tall in the face of evil, and at the capacity of others to fall into unspeakable barbarism.
Richard Bernstein, author of China 1945

In this finely researched and deeply disturbing account of how Jews and Communists murdered in Dachau in 1933 became Hitler s first victims, Timothy W. Ryback finds a rare point of light in the courage of an obscure Bavarian prosecutor who tried to fight the escalating Nazi savagery with the rule of law. Thanks to his documented record of the atrocities taking place at Dachau, Ryback can now demonstrate how, within weeks of coming to power, the Nazis had already set off along the dark path that would lead to genocide.
Alan Riding, author of And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.

Timothy Ryback s Hitler s First Victims is a significant addition to the Holocaust canon. The story of the first four Jews murdered at Dachau, as well as the astonishing account of the German prosecutor (surely a precursor of Claus von Stauffenberg) who, in 1933, attempted to charge the vicious Nazi concentration camp commandant with murder, form the heart and soul of Ryback s amazing book. The author s research is prodigious and his accumulation of new details make the reader feel as if he is observing the first spreading of the Nazi plague through a microscope. This is history come alive in your hands.
Robert Littell, author of The Amateur

In this horrifying and heartbreaking account of Dachau s early days, Timothy Ryback restores, to the murderers and the murdered alike, something crucially, necessarily missing from most Holocaust histories: their individuality. Then, by capturing, meticulously and understatedly, the retail barbarity of the place, he helps anticipate the wholesale annihilation to follow. And by recounting the striking heroism of two men a local prosecutor and a medical examiner, simply trying to do their jobs he  allows us at least to ponder whether, had more such good Germans come forward, it all might just have been stopped.
David Margolick, author of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink

Timothy W. Ryback s gripping account of one man s fight against Nazi atrocities holds important lessons for us. Experience demonstrates that the authors of genocide and crimes against humanity frequently test the waters before fully implementing their murderous plans. The Holocaust was no exception. Ryback shows how this genocidal act may have been averted had more people acted with vigilance and determination. Our challenge today is to act on Ryback s historical insights before new rounds of mass atrocities unfold.
Kenneth Roth, executive director, Human Rights Watch