Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice - Softcover

Ryback, Timothy W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804172005 ISBN 13: 9780804172004

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Timothy W. Ryback is the author of Hitler’s Private Library, which was named to the Washington Post Book World Best Nonfiction list in 2008, and The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, a New York Times Notable Book. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He lives and works in Paris.

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1

Crimes of the Spring

Thursday morning of Easter Week 1933, April 13, saw clearing skies that held much promise for the upcoming holiday weekend. Mild temperatures were foreseen for Bavaria as they were throughout southern Germany, with a few rain showers predicted for Friday, but brilliant, sunny skies for the Easter weekend. Previous generations hailed such days as Kaiserwetter, weather fit for a kaiser, a playful gibe at the former monarch’s father, who appeared en plein air only when sufficient sunlight permitted his presence to be recorded by photographers. In the spring of 1933, some now spoke in higher-spirited and more reverential tones of Führerwetter. It was Adolf Hitler’s first spring as chancellor.
 
Shortly after nine o’clock that morning, Josef Hartinger was in his second-floor office at Prielmayrstrasse 5, just off Karlsplatz in central Munich, when he received a call informing him that four men had been shot in a failed escape attempt from a recently erected detention facility for political prisoners in the moorlands near the town of Dachau. As deputy prosecutor for one of Bavaria’s largest jurisdictions—Munich II—Hartinger was responsible for investigating potential crimes in a sprawling sweep of countryside outside Munich’s urban periphery. “My responsibilities included, along with the district courts in Garmisch and Dachau, all juvenile and major financial criminal matters for the entire jurisdiction, as well as all the so-called political crimes. Thus, for the Dachau camp, I had dual responsibilities,” he later wrote.
 
Deputy Prosecutor Hartinger was a model Bavarian civil servant. He was conservative in his faith and politics, a devout Roman Catholic and a registered member of the Bavarian People’s Party, the centrist “people’s party” of the Free State of Bavaria, founded by Dr. Heinrich Held, a fellow jurist and a fierce advocate of Bavarian autonomy. In April 1933, Hartinger was thirty-nine years old and belonged to the 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 Sales Mendler was arrested for making disparaging remarks about the new government. Maria Strohle, the wife of a power plant owner in Hergensweiler, told a neighbor that she heard Hitler had paid 50,000 reichsmarks to stage the arson attack on the Reichstag; she was sentenced to three months in prison, as was Franz Schliersmaier in Bösenreutin, who put the amount at 500,000. One Bavarian was indicted for comparing Hitler to Stalin, and another for calling him a homosexual, and still another for suggesting he did not “look” German. “Hitler is a foreigner who smuggled himself into the country,” Julie Kolmeder said at a Munich beer garden a few streets from Hartinger’s office. “Just look at his face.” A Munich coachman crossed the law with the indelicate aside, “Hitler kann mich im Arsch lecken.” Euphemistically: Hitler can kiss my ass. More than one person was prosecuted for calling a Nazi a “Bazi.”1 Thousands of others were taken into Schutzhaft, or protective custody, for no apparent reason at all.
 
The shooting of four men in a failed escape from the Dachau Concentration Camp must have struck Hartinger’s Roman Catholic sensibilities as particularly unfortunate, coming as it did just two days before Good Friday and amid an appeal by the archbishop of Munich and Freising for an Easter amnesty. “In the name of, and on behalf of, the Bavarian bishops, I have the honor, Your Excellency, to extend the following request,” the stately and imperious Cardinal Faulhaber had written Bavaria’s Reich governor on April 3, “that the investigation procedure for those in protective custody be expedited as quickly as possible in order to relieve the detainees and their families from emotional torment.” Faulhaber expressed the desire that the detainees could be home in time for the Easter weekend, reminding the governor that there was no occasion more sacred to Christians than the Eastertide. “If because of time constraints the investigations cannot be completed by Good Fri­ day,” Faulhaber proposed, “then perhaps out of pure Christian and humanitarian grounds, an Easter amnesty can be granted from Good Friday until the end of Easter.” The cardinal reminded the governor that in December 1914 Pope Benedict XV had invoked a Christmas armistice that stilled weapons on both sides of the front. What worked in a time of war must certainly work in peacetime, was the suggestion. Indeed, the previous month Chancellor Hitler himself had stated that his “greatest ambition” was to “bring back to the nation the millions who had been misled, rather than to destroy them.” What better way to instill a sense of national loyalty than through a gesture of Christian clemency on the holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ? In this deeply Catholic corner of the country, when the archbishop of Munich and Freising, the oldest and most powerful of the state’s bishoprics, spoke, the vast majority of Bavaria’s four million Catholics listened, and on this occasion so did its political leadership.
 
A week later, the state interior minister, Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, responded on the Reich governor’s behalf.2 “Most Honorable Herr Cardinal, I have the honor of responding to your letter to the governor of April 3, 1933,” he wrote, “to inform Your Eminence that we are in the process of reviewing the cases of everyone currently in detention, and that by Easter more than a thousand individuals will be released from protective custody.” Wagner conveyed additional good news. The state government would permit Easter Mass to be celebrated among those practicing Roman Catholics who remained in detention as long as it did not constitute “a burden to the state budget.” Wagner recommended that “the responsible religious authorities...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804172005
• ISBN 13: 9780804172004
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar