In May 1962, the defendant Alfred Filbert unsettled a packed Berlin courtroom when he complained bitterly in his opening statement that he had endured a “very, very difficult life” (100). A former Schutzstaffel (SS) officer in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office, or RSHA), Filbert was on trial for the murder of more than eleven thousand civilians as commander of SS-Einsatzkommando 9, a mobile killing squad that had operated behind German lines on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1941. Never before had a German court sat in judgement on a ten-thousand-fold murderer. Yet, Filbert remains an obscure figure even in the specialist literature on the Holocaust. Michael Wildt's excellent monograph on the RSHA, Generation des Unbedingten (2002), accorded him a prominent role, but Alex J. Kay now offers the first full, if slender, biographical treatment (almost half the volume consists of endnotes). A rather desultory opening attempt to mobilize Søren Kierkegaard and Pierre Bourdieu for methodological succor notwithstanding, this is a decidedly old-fashioned biography which makes little attempt to embed the protagonist's deeds in social and cultural context. But it is an impressively researched piece of scholarship, drawing on personal interviews and documentation from more than thirty archives.

Kay uncovers little evidence of a “very, very difficult life.” The son of a career army officer, Filbert trained initially as a banker before enrolling in 1927 as a law student at the Hessian Regional University in Giessen, where he earned a doctorate eight years later with a thesis on bankruptcy law. Like most university campuses of the era, Giessen was a hotbed of völkisch sentiment. Filbert joined the SS and the Nazi Party in August 1932, just after the latter's strongest electoral performance during the Weimar Republic but well before its “seizure” of power in January 1933. This provided valuable career capital in the SS. He secured a full-time post in Reinhard Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in March 1935 and rose rapidly to the SS rank of Obersturmbannführer (colonel). Filbert's increasingly lucrative career was rocked in November 1939 when his brother Otto was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to four years in Dessau Prison for “malevolence” (Heimtücke). Otto had only recently returned to Germany after twelve years in the United States and was less enamored than his brother of the new wind blowing through the Reich. He was denounced by a workmate for commenting, in the wake of Georg Elser's failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, that it was a “pity the scoundrel didn't perish” (37).

Alfred Filbert received no further promotions after this family disgrace. Consumed by bitterness and self-pity at his stalled career, he hoped to clear his name by zealous service to Heydrich. This contributed to his decision, in the spring of 1941, to volunteer for the Einsatzgruppen. His Einsatzkommando was among the most murderous in the early months of Operation Barbarossa; it was pioneering, in fact, in expanding its genocidal remit in late July to include Jewish women and children. Kay's forensic trawl through the scattered documentation reveals that the postwar prosecutors seriously underestimated Filbert's criminality. During his four-month tenure as its commander, SS-Einsatzkommando 9 accounted for 18,071 victims.

Kay's account of these months spares no harrowing detail. Yet, his detached, factual chronology is light on analysis and seldom contextualized within the abundant research on National Socialist perpetrators. Wildt is subjected to occasional criticisms in the main text, but the detailed, scholarly endnotes engage with the minutiae of the specialist literature rather than with its overarching conclusions and interpretations. Not until the brief “Concluding thoughts” at the end of the book does Kay seek to weigh the contribution of familiar explanatory factors (such as careerism, ideology, and social incentives) against the particulars of family disgrace when trying to explain Filbert's murderous ardor. Even here the discussion is not embedded in the wider literature of recent decades. Kay's contention that racial ideology was a primary motivating factor is far from being the boldly iconoclastic position he implies: Ulrich Herbert's influential “Ideology and Dictatorship” project in the mid-1990s, from which Wildt's monograph emerged, had already established its salience for a wide range of SS perpetrators. And on the particular side of the ledger, the fact that almost all Einsatzkommando leaders demonstrated a chilling enthusiasm for killing calls into question the importance Kay accords to Otto's imprisonment. Here the institutional culture of the SS and RSHA deserves much greater attention. Kay does not, for example, consider the salience of conceptions of masculinity even when noting that Filbert's commando was praised for its “soldierly bearing” (62) during shooting operations.

Like most RSHA personnel, Alfred Filbert slunk back without difficulty into a comfortable civilian life following German defeat. After lying low under an assumed name in Saxony for six years, he was able to resume his banking career—using his real name—with the Braunschweig-Hannoversche Hypothekenbank in Hanover, where he was rejoined by his wife and sons. In 1958, he was promoted to manager of its Berlin branch. But that same year, the German police were belatedly stirred into action by the creation of an agency in Ludwigsburg to pursue Nazi-era crimes. An investigation into Einsatzkommando 9 soon led them to Filbert. At his trial, he sought to evade legal responsibility with the customary “superior orders” defense favored by SS perpetrators—if one distinguished by an unusually gargantuan element of self-pity. Filbert's sensitivity about his personal and familial discomforts was not matched by any recognition of the torments of his victims. The court, noting the voluntarist zeal and creativity he had shown as an Einsatzkommando leader, sentenced him to life imprisonment. He was released in 1975 because of ill-health but would live for another fifteen years.

Filbert's career as an SS killer had a curious postscript. In 1983, he was approached by the left-wing filmmaker Thomas Harlan, the son of Veit Harlan, the director of the notorious Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (1940). Playing skilfully on Filbert's frustrated ego and self-importance, Thomas Harlan was able to entice him into playing the lead role of an SS mass murderer in his movie Wundkanal (1984). Throughout the production, Filbert continued to present himself as a victim of history: of the arbitrariness of the West German courts and of the original fraternal indiscretion that had damaged his career. Dining between scenes in a Jewish couscous restaurant in Paris apparently elicited no qualms or emotions on his part. Yet, one might doubt that Filbert's lovingly honed sense of victimhood casts much light, as Kay suggests, on his participation in—as opposed to his later rationalization of—RHSA criminality. As is so often the case with research on mid-level perpetrators, the sources for Filbert's subjective life overwhelmingly come from postwar judicial investigations rather than from contemporary documentation. All in all, Kay nevertheless provides an extremely interesting and exhaustively researched perpetrator case study that will be essential reading for specialists—even if it lacks the analysis and engagement with wider literature that would have allowed the author to capitalize fully on the prodigious archival work behind it.