In “The Perfect Nazi,” author Davidson examines truth about his German grandfather.

Shortly after the death in 1992 at age 85of his mother’s father, Martin Davidson began to probe deeply into the question that for years had haunted him and his sister, Vanessa: “What had Bruno Langbehn, our German grandfather, done during the war?” They knew that Bruno had been active in some way, and hints he had dropped over the years suggested that this was putting it mildly, but how and to what end were questions their mother and her two sisters had declined to answer.

Then, freed at last from her father’s rather ominous presence, their mother spoke. She “made the fateful admission” that “he was in the SS.” With that, Davidson, a producer and director for the BBC, was off and digging, often accompanied by Vanessa. What they found stunned them: “Neither a camp Kommandant nor an architect of the Holocaust, he was nevertheless an enabler of evil, one of its indispensable, and very active minions. . . . Bruno and his fellow early joiners [of the Nazi Party] provided the energy, the determination — and the violence — that overcame all obstacles to power. They formed the backbone of the apparatus of terror that ensured compliance in the new Third Reich and they were in the front line, fighting the war that erupted . . . later, regarding it as the final, great expression of Nazi values and its most important project.”

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Bruno’s story begins in Perleberg, “a small Prussian town in northeastern Germany,” where he was born in 1906, the son of Max and Hedwig Langbehn. His father was “barracks supervisor” at an army camp based in the town, which meant that the boy grew up among “thundering boots, marching columns, screaming sergeant majors, and endless drill,” all designed “to instill key Prussian values into the men.” To what extent Max directly instructed his son in these values is unclear, but Davidson is correct to say that, in effect, Bruno received “an unsentimental education steeped in an ethos of swagger, sacrifice, and male camaraderie that appeared to have stuck with [him] for the rest of his life.”

This was followed almost immediately by World War I’s endlessly bloody battle of the trenches, by Germany’s humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles, by the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and by the bitter political wars inside the Weimar Republic that accompanied it. Bruno, frustrated and angered, began looking for “a program of values around which an eventual government could emerge and one day take over running the country.” Violence was a sure path to the emergence of such a government, and Bruno was ready, indeed eager, to utilize it. He was also captive to the “new, virulent anti-Semitism” that swept through Germany in the postwar years: For Bruno, “a hatred for Jews was the major pillar of his nationalistic beliefs, an entirely non-negotiable theory about the world.”

In the mid-1920s, while studying toward a degree in dentistry, Bruno found his destiny. The first form it took was the Frontbann, a “paramilitary organization” whose mission “was to mobilize Germany’s extreme nationalists and turn them into a force to be reckoned with, operating at the very edges of the law.” It had some 30,000 members, many of them unemployed young men itching for the chance to give violent expression to their bitterness. Bruno stayed with the Frontbann until May 17, 1926, when he joined the Nazi Party as member No. 36,931, which marked him as one of the earliest Nazi recruits and, as time would reveal, one of the most zealous.