Hitler S Last Victims

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal. At 9 am on April 13, 1933, deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger received a telephone call summoning him to the newly established concentration camp of Dachau. Four prisoners had been shot. The SS guards claimed that the men had been trying to escape. But what Hartinger found when he arrived convinced him that something was terribly wrong. All four victims were Jews. Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a legal state detention center for political prisoners. In 1933, that began to change. In Hitler’s First Victims, Timothy W. Ryback evokes a society on the brink—one in which civil liberties are sacrificed to national security, in which citizens increasingly turn a blind eye to injustice, in which the bedrock of judicial accountability chillingly dissolves into the martial caprice of the Third Reich. This is an astonishing portrait of Hitler’s first moments in power, and the true story of one man’s race to expose the Nazis as murderers on the eve of the Holocaust.

The Nazis' Last Victims articulates and historically scrutinizes both the uniqueness and the universality of the Holocaust in Hungary, a topic often minimized in general works on the Holocaust. The result of the 1994 conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, this anthology examines the effects on Hungary as the last country to be invaded by the Germans. The Nazis' Last Victims questions what Hungarians knew of their impending fate and examines the heightened sense of tension and haunting drama in Hungary, where the largest single killing process of the Holocaust period occurred in the shortest amount of time. Through the combination of two vital components of history writing—the analytical and the recollective—The Nazis' Last Victims probes the destruction of the last remnant of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 put tens of thousands of American civilians, especially Jews, in deadly peril, and yet the US State Department failed to help them. Consequently many suffered and some died. Later, when the United States joined the war against Hitler, many American and, in particular, Jewish American soldiers were captured and

6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, but this is only half the story. Doris Bergen reveals how the Holocaust extended beyond the Jews to engulf millions of other victims in related programmes of mass-murder. The Nazi killing machine began with the disabled, and went on to target Afro-Germans, Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles, French African soldiers, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexual men and Jehovah's Witnesses. As Nazi Germany conquered more territories and peoples, Hitler's war turned soliders, police officers and doctors into trained killers, creating a veneer of legitimacy around vicious acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Using the testimonies of both survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as a wealth of rarely seen photographs, Doris Bergen shows the true extent of the catastrophe that overwhelmed Europe during the Second World War, in a gripping story of the lives and deaths of real people.

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.

The appalling story of Hitler's murderous policies aimed at the disabled including tens of thousands of children killed by their doctors. Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazi regime systematically murdered thousands of adults and children with physical and mental disabilities as part of its 'euthanasia' policy. These programmes were designed to eliminate all people with disabilities who, according to Nazi ideology, threatened the health and purity of the German race. Hitler's Forgotten Victims explores the development and workings of this nightmarish process, a relatively neglected aspect of the Holocaust. Suzanne Evans's account draws on the rich historical record, as well as scores of exclusive interviews with disabled Holocaust survivors. It begins with a description of the Children's Killing Programme, in which tens of thousands of children with physical and mental disabilities were murdered by their doctors, usually by starvation or lethal injection. The book goes on to recount the AktionT4 programme, in which adults with disabilities were disposed of in six official centres, and the development of the Sterilisation Law, which allowed the forced sterilisation of at least half a million young adults with disabilities.