Between Law and Murder

About the Book

Konrad Morgen, the SS, and the Limits of Justice in Nazi Germany

Konrad Morgen wore the uniform of the SS. Yet at the height of the Third Reich, he investigated, arrested, and prosecuted members of the SS for corruption, brutality, and murder—following trails that led from Buchenwald and Lublin to Auschwitz and into the highest ranks of Heinrich Himmler’s organization.

That contradiction lies at the heart of Between Law and Murder.

Drawing on Morgen’s extensive surviving papers—including investigative material, diaries, private correspondence, and postwar testimony—historian Christian Hardinghaus reconstructs the life of one of the most difficult figures to classify in Nazi Germany.

Morgen was neither a resistance hero nor simply another obedient functionary. He was an ambitious jurist who believed in law while serving a regime that had turned law itself into an instrument of persecution and mass murder. He prosecuted concentration-camp personnel for crimes the SS considered “illegal,” while confronting a system in which genocide itself had been authorized from above.

His investigations brought him into conflict with powerful figures within the SS. He pursued the murderous corruption surrounding Buchenwald commandant Karl Otto Koch, investigated crimes committed by camp personnel, encountered the machinery of extermination at Auschwitz, and later became an important witness at the Nuremberg trials and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.

But the archival record reveals another, intensely private story as well: Morgen’s long struggle to marry Maria Wachter and their confrontation with the racial bureaucracy of the SS. Their surviving correspondence opens an intimate window onto a man whose private life, professional ambitions, moral convictions, compromises, and contradictions became inseparable from the dictatorship he served.

Between Law and Murder does not offer a convenient hero or villain. It asks the harder question: What does justice mean when the law itself has become criminal?

A deeply researched biography for readers interested in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the SS, war crimes, legal history, Nuremberg, and the moral choices of individuals living inside a dictatorship.

Part of the series World War II from a German Point of View (Volume 7).