HITLER'S FIRST VICTIMS

This is the story of the first four victims of the Holocaust— Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, Arthur Kahn and Edwin Kahn—and the Munich prosecutor who sought to bring their SS killers to justice.

Shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of April 13th, 1933, Joseph Hartinger received a call that four men had been shot in a failed escape from the recently erected Dachau Concentration Camp in the isolated moorlands north of Munich. At the scene, Hartinger immediately suspected murder. FIRST VICTIMS traces the deadly cat-and-mouse game between the prosecutor and the commandant, as Hartinger seeks to bring Commander Wäckerle to justice. It is an uneven struggle by every measure. FIRST VICTIMS shows in precise and dramatic detail—specific times, specific places, specific individuals—how the Holocaust began, and more important, how it could have been prevented and almost was in those tenuous first months of Nazi rule. Like Oskar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg, Hartinger demonstrated the potential of individual determination in a time of collective human failure, and this story concludes with a surprising and uplifting dramatic twist that underscores the enduring and transcendent power of justice. If anyone asks how the Holocaust could have happened, this book tells exactly how it happened, the exact time, place and circumstances, and most important, how it could have been prevented and almost was. The New York Times visited Dachau in 1933 a week after the murders. The reporter interviewed the SS commandant and described him as a "quiet-mannered, blond, blue-eyed" young man. The NYZ literally missed the story of the century. These murders in Dachau in Spring 1933 became crucial evidence twelve years later at the Nürnberg Trials. American-born German scholar Timothy Ryback is the author of the acclaimed HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY: The Books That Shaped the Man (Knopf, 2010); THE LAST SURVIVOR: Legacies of Dachau (Pantheon, 1999); and essays published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.