Hitler's enforcers

In Hitler's Enforcers: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution, George C. Browder offers the first examination of the combination of police culture and SS social engineers out of which arose the Nazi police state. Beginning in the Weimar Republic, Browder's work carefully reconstructs the lives of the men, from the homicide detective to the diverse recruits of the SS Security Service who participated in the birth of the Nazi police state, and gives a vivid account of the origins of Nazi atrocities and the logic that legitimated them. Since they acquired responsibility for the Final Solution and other Nazi racial programs, including the elimination of all sources of "degeneracy," these men contributed to the development of programs of mass murder which they then executed. As the keystone of police state terror, these organizations earned a reputation for all-seeing efficiency and sadistic inhumanity. Such reputations are tested against available evidence and the growing body of scholarship. Some do not survive the test, while others are redefined. These new insights into Gestapo, Kripo, and SD grew from research at 34 archives in Germany and the United States, including the personnel files of over 1,000 former members. This is also the first such study to benefit from the German documents captured by the Soviets and Poles and kept secret until recently. Hitler's Enforcers sheds new light on the early decisive steps that carried Germany to programs of ethnic cleansing and to total war. It will be invaluable to scholars and students of German history, along with anyone interested in the origins of Nazism.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.