Murder in the Blackout is a taut true crime narrative, tracing the hunt for an infamous serial killer and teeming with richly realized characters and dramatic incident. And it's also a deeply researched and revelatory new take on one of the most thoroughly excavated historical events of the twentieth century - the Holocaust.
In 1940-1941, a figure known as the S-Bahn murderer killed eight women by throwing them from the trains of Berlin's commuter rail system. Wartime Berlin was a dark place, with blackouts instituted to hinder Allied bombing. But the darkness bred spikes in crime and fear that threatened the wartime effort, including among the working women who rode the S-Bahn and staffed German munitions factories. The Nazi authorities became desperate to capture the killer, spawning the largest police investigation Berlin had ever seen. The main players in the investigation include the head of the German police and a main architect of the Holocaust; the chief of Germany's criminal police, who pioneered the use of forensic science to racialize and criminalize undesirable populations before joining the anti-Nazi resistance; the brilliant anti-Nazi detective who ultimately caught the killer; and the killer himself, a Nazi Stormtrooper and longtime party member. Benjamin Hett draws out the history of German criminal science in the decades before the war, which he persuasively argues laid the groundwork for the Holocaust by painting 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 ostensibly identify criminals could also help them identify Jews and other "undesirables."