Nazi Germany, June 1943, Buchenwald concentration camp. Thelast place you’d expect to find any form of justice. And yet justice againstthe SS men who brutalised the prisoners here would be attempted by theunlikeliest of sources – SS officer Konrad Morgen. Nazi Germany, despite the atrocities it carried out on anindustrial scale, still had legislation and a legal system, and Morgen usedthese laws to bring individual members of the SS to justice for their crimes. He was a fearless investigating judge and police official, and when he crossedswords with more powerful forces inside the SS, he was demoted and sent byHeinrich Himmler himself to the Eastern Front as an ordinary soldier in theWaffen SS. But Morgen’s skills were still required and he returned tolaunch a series of criminal investigations in various concentration camps,including Buchenwald. As a direct result of his work, two concentration campcommandants were shot before the end of the war and he arrested three others. Targets of his investigations included Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects ofthe Holocaust, and Rudolf Höss, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz. Described by historian John Toland as ‘the man who did themost to hinder the atrocities in the East’, Konrad Morgen pursued NaziGermany’s worst murderers from inside the SS. This is his incredible truestory.
