Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine by Christian Ingrao (review)

This book offers extraordinary insight into the Nazi horror system by tracking eighty university graduates from their youth during World War I to their entry into the ss murder machine and eventually to the trials that several of them underwent after World War II. On the basis of extensive research in the archival and published sources that are reflected in the extensive notes and bibliography, Ingrao combines anthropological and sociological insights with a detailed study of the university and ss-organization records and the reports of the murderous commando operations in which the intellectuals participated during the campaigns in Poland and the Soviet Union.

The book provides a stark sense of how these individuals came to see the world as filled with enemies of the Nordicist Germany that they envisioned. They were fully prepared to plan and personally engage in whatever horrors that they deemed necessary to accomplish what they defined as the new demographic order of Europe and possibly the world. This work vividly portrays the reality of the time; to the best of this reviewer’s knowledge, it is the only work to clarify a critical aspect of the first stage of the Holocaust. The fact that in the early weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, an Einsatzkommando (murder commando) advanced, on average, 50 miles a day, quickly killing primarily Jewish men before returning later to kill women and children, has been ignored in too much of the relevant literature (162).

As Germany’s situation in the war deteriorated, these ss intellectuals refused to recognize the possibility of defeat until literally the last moment; they had been just as unwilling to accept Germany’s defeat in 1918. They attempted to escape justice afterward, and those who were put on trial invented a variety of exculpatory tales and explanations for their actions. In view of the importance of Otto Ohlendorf, commander of the Einsatzgruppe D, in this account, Ingrao’s inability to take advantage of Hilary Earl’s excellent study The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial 1945–1958 (New York, 2009), which postdated Ingrao’s work, is unfortunate.

The one aspect of the German population policy that Ingrao failed to capture is the large-scale kidnapping of children thought to look Germanic—the Heuaktion, or Hay Operation, which was designed to weaken the Slavic and increase the Nordic population. In any future edition of this book, the collapse of the German Army Group Center should be moved from May to June–July 1944 (209). But these criticisms are minor. Those who hope to understand how Germany turned away from civilization for a dozen years to become a morass of evil can find in this book a most thoughtful and helpful guidance.