SS officer Erich Priebke commanded the unit that was responsible for the Ardeatine massacre in Rome on March 24, 1944, in which 335 Italian civilians were killed in retaliation for a partisan attack on an SS regiment. Their careers, actions, attitudes, quirks and foibles are recounted with journalistic precision, and hint at a fascinating variety of personal psychopathologies. Johann Reichhart was a state-appointed judicial executioner in Bavaria from 1924 until the end of the war in Europe. Written by ( two) noted Dutch historians, (it) reveals the truth behind the fascade of the Third Reich and is an important contribution to the literature of the Nazi era. A key figure in the development of the concentration camps (he was appointed commandant of Dachau in 1933, the first camp to be built in Nazi Germany), Theodor Eicke later became commander of the feared SS Division Totenkopf of the Waffen-SS on the Eastern and Western fronts.

The plotters were then forced to listen to a speech given by Hitler on the radio, confirming that the fuhrer was indeed still alive and well. Göring, meanwhile, was organizing the Luftwaffe, while Goebbels spread Nazi propaganda across the globe. Himmler rounded up European Jews and shipped them off to concentration camps as part of Hitler's "Final Solution. yeah im sure the people who saw their jewish neighbours become subject to increasingly restrictive racial laws, who were inundated with anti-semitic propaganda comparing jews to vermin, who voted into power a government whose platform essentially boiled down to blaming jews for everything - those people clearly mustve thought that the nazis were forcefully deporting jewish people from germany to send them all on a fucking pool-side vacation with ice cream.He controlled the administrative apparatus for carrying out the extermination of European Jewry in 1943–45. Speer - arhitekt, kes aitas Hitleril disainida, projekteerida ja ellu viia kolossaalseid ehitusprojekte.

This book does a good job of showing how Hitler's personal 'charm' could drag these men in and hook them firmly to him even as the obviously catastrophic nature of his rule became obvious. While the sections that place the photographs in context is interesting, this is first and foremost a collection of photographs. The wartime career of this cruel and capable man is captured brilliantly with contemporary fully captioned images in this Images of War series work.Among his victims were those involved in the 1944 plot against Hitler and the White Rose resistance group (led by siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl). He nurtured his taste for killing as an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program, a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia. And showing that they were - Himmler and Hess's odd interests aside - normal men who were convinced to commit extraordinary crimes. The one chapter I felt did not really cover very much was the one on Albert Speer, it was a bit sparse and did not really go into his background much which was disappointing.