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

"Frighteningly compelling ... the feel and pace of a court-room thriller. As it approaches its climax, you almost believe this dogged, decent man is going to win through ... superbly researched and tautly written" (Dominic Sandbrook Daily Mail Book of the Week)

"Tremendous ... Ryback's tenacity as forensic researcher and huge storytelling flair make this a compelling page-turner" (Independent)

"Gripping – and thoroughly chilling ... The haunting question at the heart of this book is this: if there had been a few more like Hartinger ... was there any way the Nazi terror might have been averted? ... a fascinating reconstruction" (Telegraph)

"The genius of the book is to present Ryback’s thorough research as a kind of duel between Hartinger and Wäckerle, adopting some of the conventions of modern crime drama ... few [Germans] have been held up as war heroes. Ryback’s brilliant book makes a powerful case for honouring Hartinger, an honest man in dishonest times" (Roger Boyes The Times)

"Gripping ... anyone who thinks that Nazism came to power legally and without violence needs to read this account" (Guardian)

Hitler's First Victims is a fast-paced narrative reconstruction of six dramatic weeks in 1933 that tells the astonishing true story of one man’s 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 an industrial wasteland, the men’s corpses dumped in an ammunition shed, precision gunshot wounds to their heads, all of them Jews – convinced him that something was terribly wrong.

Hitler had been appointed Chancellor only six weeks previously. Soon the Nazis would have a stranglehold on the entire judicial system. Hitler’s First Victims is the story of Hartinger’s race to expose the Nazi regime’s murderous nature before it was too late. It is the story of a man willing to sacrifice everything in his pursuit of justice, just as the doors to justice were closing.