MURDER IN THE BLACKOUT

The infamous S-Bahn murderer was a serial killer who killed women by throwing them off the trains of Berlin's S-Bahn during 1940-41. From his chancellery in Berlin, even Adolf Hitler started to worry about what the case would mean for his new empire as the senior officers of Berlin's police, especially Reinhard Heydrich and Arthur Nebe, were simultaneously planning the Holocaust.

This book uses the case to explore the larger role that German criminology and forensic science played in the conception and execution of the Holocaust. It is a story that brings together a riveting real-life detective story with a new history of the techniques of mass murder and their genesis. It will tell the story of the hunt for the S-Bahn murderer in a way that it has never been told before, following Hitler's police as they piece together the clues, and seeing the case through their eyes as they navigate the vicious labyrinth of Nazi politics. The book delivers an entirely new interpretation of the Holocaust. The Nazis' genocidal racism, as the book shows for the first time, was directly rooted in decades of German criminology and forensic science. The Nazis became murderers of Jews, Roma, and people with disabilities because they had first painted ordinary criminals as a separate race requiring extermination. The Holocaust itself was carried out with scientific tools and ideas rooted in German criminal policing, including the analysis of blood and even poison gas. German scientists thought the same analysis of blood types and fingerprinting that could identify criminals could also help them identify Jews and other undesirables. And it was the Nazis themselves who first saw the connection between the hunt for the S-Bahn murderer and their own deadly racism. The narrative revolves around complicated and very different characters: the notorious Reinhard Heydrich, the main architect of the Holocaust, the picture-book Nazi whom even Hitler could call "the man with an iron heart"; the mysterious Arthur Nebe, chief of the criminal police in Nazi Germany, a dark figure and zealous Nazi who joined the anti-Nazi resistance, a skilled detective and a modernizer of Germany's criminal police who became a mass murderer; detective Wilhelm Lüdtke, a figure straight out of film noir the classic good cop in a bad system, and the best homicide detective in Germany; and the S-Bahn murderer himself, Paul Ogorzow, a Stormtrooper who embodied the Nazi Party in his hatred of women and his enthusiasm for violence; and finally, Berlin, a left-leaning city captured by the Nazis but never entirely Nazified. In the atmosphere of early 1941, the people of Berlin could never shake the sense that the good news from the war was transitory, and something terrible was coming which, of course, it was. This is a work of deep archival research, bracing analysis and riveting narrative. It is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust. Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholars of Nazi Germany and a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Toronto. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has been very active during the 2024 election campaign as a speaker for a non-partisan initiative called "Democracy First," which draws on prominent historians (among them Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Heather Cox Richardson) to speak in swing states on the threats to American democracy. He has published several books.