Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (German Edition)

Chapter 6 also gives an account of the SD's rise from inauspicious, cash-strapped beginnings in a Munich apartment which served both as the service's central office and the Heydrichs' family home to an incredibly powerful multi-departmental security service, comprising the eyes, ears, and later the elite execution-squads of the Third Reich. Chapters discussed in more detail below then go on to explore correlations between the rhetoric and action of SD violence, while chapters explore SS intellectuals' reactions to defeat and post-war trials, attempting to 'draw up a typology of the behaviour of SS intellectuals when facing…their own deeds and guilt' p.

In general terms, three themes bulk particularly large within Ingrao's investigation as a whole. The first, fuelled by the defensive rhetoric employed during World War I and the trauma and violence which followed in the wake of Germany's defeat, is the SS leaders' conviction that they were surrounded by a 'world of enemies', involved in a conflict whose stakes were eschatologically high, and to which only Nazism could provide a victorious solution.

Ultimately, Ingrao argues, constant childhood exposure to propaganda against foes who were portrayed as uncivilised or even in the Russian case subhuman, followed by such a catastrophic loss of sovereignty, inspired these men to dedicate themselves to careers of 'defensive activism', first, academically and bureaucratically, with the pen; later, genocidally, with firearms.

In this context, the growing racialisation and biologisation of conceptions of Nazism's enemies formed part of a 'raciological interpretative grid' of ideological discourse p. These ideological, perceptual and emotional links could lead very quickly to a terrifying escalation of violence on the ground, once World War II was underway. A toxic mixture of atavistic fears of the wild wild East and its 'Judaeo-Bolshevik' hordes, a terror of snipers and partisan attacks which had been ingrained in the German collective military imagination since at least if not long before , and the conviction that this was a just and lawful war being fought against a barbaric enemy, or even a 'symbolic reparation' for the travails of , combined to effect a swift transition 'from the discourse of security to the discourse of genocide' p.

Annihilation could always be justified in the name of pacification, and the massacre of Jews in ever-increasing numbers was seen as a perfectly legitimate response to the danger supposedly presented by Jewish rabble-rousers, arsonists and franc-tireurs. Ingrao argues that the SS' 'system of representations' was absolutely critical to the escalation of genocidal action, with the physical neutralisation of potential opponents increasingly being both perceived and portrayed as a crucial security measure, rather than as an act of barbarism.

Secondly, we have the theme of ritual, where Ingrao most clearly acknowledges his debt to the anthropologists.

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He argues that the commanders of the SD Einsatzgruppen tended to codify or 'ritualise' the practice of mass shootings in an attempt to spare their men psychologically, instigating shifts so that guilt might be distributed equally amongst all members of the unit, or allocating two soldiers to shoot each victim one for the head and one for the heart , or making sure that the order to shoot took the form of a military command rather than the timing being left to an individual's discretion - in short, physically distancing the victims from their executioners, and collectivising the act of violence.

Ingrao sees the development of such standard procedures for massacre as '[forming] a set of murderous skills whose major invariants comprised the essence of the Nazi violence of elimination'. These 'collective ritualistic frameworks' thus represent 'the cultural construction of a violence conditioned by representations' p.

The final element in the SS intellectuals' world view comprised what Ingrao terms 'millenarian' or utopian racial hopes of creating a brave new German world in the newly-conquered Eastern territories, involving the opportunity to build 'an ideal society based on racial determinism' p.

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Again, such visions can be seen as a projection and magnification of interwar tensions and anxieties, which mourned the fate of volksdeutsch communities marooned in a sea of hostile and inferior Slavs. From this perspective, genocide could simply be portrayed as a necessary evil; an essential precondition of Germanisation, without which the Nazi utopia could never be safely or adequately realised.

Ultimately, this racial fundamentalism left the SS completely at a loss as defeat loomed ever nearer; their worldview was utterly unable to cope with the colossal mismatch between their biologically- and historically-determined expectations regarding the subhumanity of the Russians, and their own inexplicable failure against Soviet forces on the ground. Thus, in complete denial that defeat was even conceivable, the SS Personnel Department continued to dish out promotions and decorations to its staff even as April drew to a close p. Meanwhile, other divisions determined to fight to the bitter end, with RSHA Amt VI forming 'sabotage schools' intended to create guerrilla forces behind Allied lines, with teaching on how to handle explosives, conduct interrogations, and other such skills and tactics p.

Even the other stock SS reaction, the attempt to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies in the name of a 'Western crusade' against Bolshevism, was still informed by unquestioned racial assumptions. In this context, genocide appeared to be merely one front in a war in which everything was at stake, or, as Ingrao puts it: At the center of both theory and practice of persecution and genocide in Nazi-occupied Europe, these young men of the RSHA—none of whom envisioned the systematic annihilation of the European Jews—became radicalized.

Wildt also discusses the postwar careers of the members of the RSHA. Strikingly, he shows how the leaders of the RSHA evaded the consequences of their actions under the Nazi regime and went on to have important careers in the rebuilt West Germany. Paperback , George L.

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Mosse Series , pages. Published January 11th by University of Wisconsin Press first published To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

To ask other readers questions about An Uncompromising Generation , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about An Uncompromising Generation. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. The image of the perpetrators of the holocaust we form is often as one-dimensional as it is contradictory. Were they cold, pragmatic bureaucrats, wheels in a machinery - or radical antisemitic mass murderers taking joy in their atrocities?

Was it ideology, a concious choice intentionalist school or various factors within a society in a state of a war of extermination culminating in radicalization structuralist school that led to genocide? Wildt approaches the question from a slightly differe The image of the perpetrators of the holocaust we form is often as one-dimensional as it is contradictory. Wildt approaches the question from a slightly different angle, one that offers many benefits of clarity: The RSHA, a hybrid organisation of SD and Security police, was led chiefly by young academics with a radical worldview, but it was the structure of the institution itself, its dynamics of deregulation and expansion, that gave those radicals the opportunity to implement their "all or nothing" worldview.

The redefinition of the police as a force itself as representing the "security" interrests of a volk or race rather than a state had severe consequences: The RSHA was an adaptive Institution with a tendency to cross boundaries wherever they could, but the ideological foundation would never change, the realities and problems that these people faced would not have the effect of "pragmatization" observed in other institutions. Rather the answer to any problem was a more radical version of the original solution, which in turn would radicalize the worldview as well as it would result in a deregulation and radicalization on an institutional level that would correspond.

This description does a good job in combining overcome and simplified intentionalist and structuralist explanations in a more convincing synthesis. Idgiesmom Shotsky rated it really liked it Jun 13, Dirk-Jan rated it it was amazing Mar 12, Robert rated it liked it Aug 15, Timothy Isenmann rated it it was amazing Dec 28, Frank Auletto rated it really liked it Jun 03, Allison rated it liked it Apr 01, Coltrane rated it really liked it Jul 17, Peter rated it it was amazing Mar 28, Jeffrey rated it really liked it Mar 05, Brick Wahl rated it really liked it Sep 10, Phillip Tigue rated it it was amazing Apr 08, Krista rated it it was amazing Oct 01, Jody Manning rated it it was amazing Sep 20, Eryk rated it really liked it Dec 12, Molly rated it it was amazing Jan 29, Shelly rated it it was amazing May 05, Morten Ildal rated it liked it Mar 16, Yinzadi marked it as to-read Aug 05,