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 convinced him that something was terribly wrong. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor only ten weeks previously but the Nazi party was rapidly infiltrating every level of state power. In the weeks that followed, Hartinger was repeatedly called back to Dachau, where with every new corpse the gruesome reality of the camp became clearer. Hitler’s First Victims is both the story of Hartinger’s race to expose the Nazi regime’s murderous nature before it was too late and the story of a man willing to sacrifice everything in his pursuit of justice, just as the doors to justice were closing.
