Erich Krause murdered dozens and tortured hundreds as the brown-shirted commandant of a “wild” concentration camp in Berlin during the early days of the regime. Then, as a military policeman in the eastern theatre during the war, he sent correspondence home stamped with the postmarks of a town known to have housed a prominent Jewish ghetto that served as a way station for the Final Solution’s gas chambers and crematoria. Having joined the Mormon Church in 1923 and the SA in 1928, Krause validated, in an extreme way, the concept that one could strive to serve both the Mormon Church and Nazi Party.

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Erich Krause, holding the rank of SA Obertruppenführer and wearing a brown shirt with “red collar patches and two stars with a braid,” reserved some of the worst treacherous excesses for himself. He beat prisoners with a rubber truncheon and an iron bar. He sliced open the soles of their feet and packed pepper into the wounds. He made other barefooted prisoners run outside on gravel. He gave one man a rope and told him to hang himself; presumably weary of the torture, the emotionally drained prisoner went into the lavatory and complied. Krause exercised prisoners to the point of exhaustion and extreme thirst, and then made them drink a concoction of wastewater and human feces. He told one prisoner that he was free to go, and then had him shot as an escapee on his way out. He staged “sporting nights,” when his drunken SA companions made prisoners run a gauntlet of clubs and batons. A number of prisoners died of gunshot wounds, which he never inflicted in front of others—but he made other prisoners fall to their hands and knees and lick up the spilled blood with their tongues.

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The first Feldpost cards arrived from Poland, where Krause’s MP unit had followed behind the September 1939 invasion. He also dispatched cards from France, Yugoslavia, and the Ukraine, as the Wehrmacht advanced relentlessly. Then the postmarks became more disturbing. In 1944 a card arrived from Lodz, the site of Poland’s second-largest Jewish community after Warsaw. It was also the location of a ghetto from which Jews were dispatched to Auschwitz and  Theresienstadt. As Fridtjof Krause said of his father: “One only chose the most trusted of Nazis to break up the ghettos.”