Hitler's First Victims is about the murders of several Jewish prisoners in the first weeks of the Dachau concentration camp's existence in April 1933, and about the efforts of Josef Hartinger, a Bavarian deputy state prosecutor in Munich, to investigate these killings and bring the SS (Schutzstaffel) murderers, including the commandant of Dachau, to justice.

History is not written only by academic historians. Many of the bestselling and best known history books are written these days by journalists like Timothy Ryback, who has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Ryback has written other successful histories: The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau (2000) and Hitler's Private Library (2010). Hitler's First Victims provides a clear example of some differences between how academic historians and other writers of history present and approach their subjects. These differences are not necessarily in quality or depth of research, faithfulness to sources, standards of objectivity, or other fundamental qualities of any good work of history.

One obvious difference is in marketing. While every writer of history seeks readers through various marketing techniques, such as the creation of an attention-grabbing title, journalists appear to be willing to go further in claiming their subject's unique importance. Ryback's title is catchy but inaccurate. The claim that his subjects were the “first victims” is false. Otto Selz, a Jewish businessman, was murdered on March 15, 1933 (see the contemporary report by the Bavarian District President in Steve Hochstadt, ed., Sources of the Holocaust [2004]). One of the remarkable Stolpersteine of Gunter Demnig has been laid in Kassel in memory of Max Plaut, who was beaten so badly by the Sturmabteilung (SA) that he died two weeks later on March 31.

Journalists may also be better connected. Would not any academic historian be overjoyed to have the opportunity to announce his or her book in a New York Times Op-Ed column, as Ryback did on January 3, 2012, two years before its publication? Ryback used that forum to advance his claim that the murders he writes about represent the beginning of the Holocaust during Easter Week 1933, which “almost was” prevented by Hartinger. Hartinger and every one of his allies were stopped in their tracks, including his close collaborator, the medical examiner Dr. Moritz Flame, who died in 1934 after several unsuccessful SS attempts to kill him. Ryback's judgment that history might have been “vastly different” (9) appears unrealistic.

One reason why journalists like Ryback may be more successful in selling their books is that they are better at telling stories. The interlocking stories about the murders at Dachau and Hartinger's investigations of them are masterfully constructed: the use of flashbacks, the alternation of focus, and especially the detailed descriptions of the remarkable violence at Dachau represent the work of a master storyteller. Journalistic practice may better prepare one to write good historical narratives than graduate training. Ryback's microhistory of individual murders demonstrates the wrenching transition in matters of law and justice in the first months of the Nazi regime. Hartinger was brave, persistent, and professional, but ultimately unsuccessful in using the legal system to prevent state-sponsored killing.

The most significant difference between academic historians and others who write history may be their relationship to historiography, the wide stream of work on their subjects that has come before and will later be written. Perhaps as a nod to marketing, Ryback dedicated his book to the four murdered men on whom he focuses: “In memory of the first four victims of the Holocaust.” He specifies more precisely his use of the term Holocaust by arguing that these murders “involved the constituent parts of the genocidal process—intentionality, chain of command, selection, execution—we have come to know as the Holocaust” (8). The historical literature about when the Holocaust began is enormous and detailed, but 1933 is not cited as the beginning. The four criteria Ryback lists are not sufficient to demonstrate that the isolated murders of 1933 are fundamentally similar to the mass murders after 1941, or even 1939. Academic historians pay more attention to the multiple layers of theorizing about historical processes, and thus recognize the interpretive ramifications of moving the date of the beginning of the Holocaust to 1933.

Ryback's distance from other historians of Nazi Germany is also apparent in the style of his notes. Like many journalists, he offers sources for the quotations he uses. He thereby assures us that his work is well founded in documentary sources. But he offers little help to future historians who might wish to follow up on his analysis. For example, a paragraph on page 150 about the relationships between the local population of Dachau and the nearly all-male staff at the camp offers tantalizing hints about physical battles in local bars between the SS and local men, about sexual relationships between the SS and local women, and about the economic impact of a growing prisoner population on a town suffering from the Depression. But the only citation is for a quotation by a prisoner, who was not in a position to observe those relationships. Academic historians cite sources, but also write footnotes to elucidate the connections between their work and other relevant histories.

In his 1945 essay “Good Bad Books,” George Orwell noted that in some books “detail is piled on detail… and in the process an effect of terrible grinding cruelty is slowly built up” (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, ed. George Packer [2009]). Ryback is skilled at this method of accumulation. The details he has unearthed from the sources display the remarkable personal sadism that was required and cultivated by the SS leadership, directed especially at Jews and leftists, long before a Holocaust was contemplated. Rather than conflating all Nazi behavior into the Holocaust, we understand the later Holocaust better by observing, with Ryback's help, both the terrible grinding cruelty of Nazi policy and behavior right at the beginning, and the means by which they effectively neutralized all opposition to these acts, at home and abroad.

More important than the disinterest in theory, which may be the source of key differences between academic and other historians, is Ryback's attention to detail. The daily bureaucratic process by which Nazi leaders, especially Heinrich Himmler, dismantled the rule of law in and around Dachau and implemented the Gleichschaltung of the legal system is nowhere better discussed.