Scott Andrew Selby's "The Axmann Conspiracy"

Scott Andrew Selby is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. He also has a master’s degree in Human Rights and Intellectual Property Law from Sweden’s Lund University. He is licensed to practice law in California and New York. He previously co-wrote Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History.

Selby applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Axmann Conspiracy: The Nazi Plan for a Fourth Reich and How the U. S. Army Defeated It, and reported the following:

I’ve never done the page 99 test before, to my book or any other. I’ve heard of it, but I tend to go with the jacket copy and blurbs, then read the first few pages to decide if I want to buy a book.

For my new book, the page 99 test is not that accurate as it is a page of background information on the mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzsgruppen, the Nazis used on the Eastern Front. Ironically, the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps’ main informer in the operation to dismantle a conspiracy of former Hitler Youth leaders who wanted to bring back the Reich was a former member of one of these murderous groups. The page before discusses his time in a mobile killing squad, which he left owing to an injury.

Page 99 of The Axmann Conspiracy:

In August 1941, he was shot in his right knee and so left the Einsatzgruppe.

The Einsatzgruppen were groups which followed the Nazi advance eastward to eliminate Jews, gypsies, the insane, and Soviet political officers. The International Military Tribunal (“IMT”) in 1946 held them “responsible for the murder of two million defenseless human beings.”⁴³ At a trial of prominent figures from the Einsatzgruppen, the IMT pointed out that “no human mind can grasp the enormity of two million deaths because life, the supreme essence of consciousness and being, does not lend itself to material or even spiritual appraisement.

It is so beyond finite comprehension that only its destruction offers an infinitesimal suggestion of its worth. The loss of any one person can only begin to be measured in the realization of his survivors that he is gone forever. The extermination, therefore, of two million human beings cannot be felt. Two million is but a figure.”⁴⁴

This case was known as the Einsatzgruppen Case, and the court explained that “when the German Armies, without any declaration of war, crossed the Polish frontier and smashed into Russia, there moved with and behind them a unique organization known as the Einsatzgruppen.As an instrument of terror in the museum of horror, it would be difficult to find an entry to surpass the Einsatzgruppen in its blood-freezing potentialities. No writer of murder fiction, no dramatist steeped in macabre lore, can ever expect to conjure up from his imagination a plot which will shock sensibilities as much as will the stark drama of these sinister bands.”⁴⁵

“Under the guise of insuring the political security of the conquered territories, both in the occupational and rear areas of the Wehrmacht, the Einsatzgruppen were to liquidate ruthlessly all opposition to National Socialism— not only the opposition of the present, but that of the past and future as well. Whole categories of people were to be killed without truce, without investigation, without pity, tears, or [from page 100] remorse.

Learn more about The Axmann Conspiracy at its website.

--Marshal Zeringue