This first socio-organizational history of the Gestapo, the SD, and the regular detectives of the Third Reich, 1932-1937, this book explores the roots of their roles in police terror and programs of mass murder. These personnel helped to form the character and missions of their organizations, which were not simply created from above by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich. Hitler's Enforcers is based on research at 34 archives in Germany and the United States, including the personnel files of over 1,000 former members, and is the first such study to benefit from the German documents captured by the Soviets and Poles and kept secret until recently.
After three years service in Air Force intelligence, I pursued graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where I focused on police and security agencies in the modern western world. Working under Robert Koehl, an expert on the SS, I ended with a focus on the Nazi police and security agencies, which was the only one for which much primary source material was available. Since then, I taught mostly at the State University of New York at Fredonia, from which I retired in 2000, to resettle near family in Germantown, Tennessee.
I have researched and written about the Nazi Police state now for 47 years. I continue pursuing this interest since retirement, but now it shares my attention with others. When I began, I was an early participant in what soon came to be called the debate between intentionalists and functionalists. Before such labels were applied to the participants, I had called my position evolutionism. All such terms referred to the arguments over how much or how soon Hitler had planned the Holocaust or any other aspect of the Third Reich, including WWII.
As time passed, I became more interested in what has now become a booming subfield among scholars in Germany - Taeterforschung, or the study of Holocaust perpetrators.
Readers of my two books on the subject will be able to see where things stood in these developments among the students of the Third Reich toward the end of the last century. I hope to finish a third book that will incorporate the subsequent research and writing and focus on the contribution of Sipo and SD to the evolution of the Holocaust.
