Ausbildungsziel Judenmord? "Weltanschauliche Erziehung" von SS, Polizei und Waffen-SS im Rahmen der "Endlösung" (review)

Historians long assumed that the Nazi architects of genocide were driven by banal motives. Duty, loyalty, blindness, or ambition—rather than a genuine faith in a Nazi Weltanschauung—were seen as the keys to the Third Reich's murderous machinery. In recent years, however, scholars have recast the perpetrators as more committed and sincere. Some have noted the significant proportion of Nazi killers with a clear predisposition to racial ideology or right-wing activism before 1933. Others have examined the way in which the Nazis succeeded in forging a new societal consensus after coming to power. But surprisingly little attention has been paid to ideological education within the institutional settings of the SS and the police. Ausbildungsziel Judenmord? seeks to fill that gap. Richard Breitman analyzes Himmler's commitment to antisemitic indoctrination, Jürgen Matthäus the significance of the "Jewish question" in SS training, and Jürgen Förster the ideological schooling of the Waffen-SS. Somewhat off the book's main track, Konrad Kwiet contrasts the role of ideology and conviction during the war with Nazi perpetrators' self-presentation in postwar trials.

There is no doubt that Heinrich Himmler and his leading lieutenants devoted enormous energy to providing comprehensive ideological training for their followers. Even before Himmler took over the SS, he noted in the margins of his copy of Mein Kampf the importance of "Erziehung von SS und SA." In the second half of the 1930s the training apparatus was increasingly centralized and professionalized. The goal was to instill in recruits acceptance of the regime's central shibboleths—especially those related to the Jewish question. Indoctrination aimed, too, at melding disparate recruits into a single organization of political soldiers or "Weltanschauungskrieger." The idea of unifying disparate elements took on particular significance for the wartime Waffen-SS, as its militarized arm was forced to resort to an ethnically increasingly diverse intake. In perhaps the most interesting part of his essay, Jürgen Förster demonstrates that trainers in the Waffen-SS had to find a new language—one that emphasized greater Germania and European questions—as the leadership struggled to maintain an esprit de corps among a heterogeneous body of men.

Within the SS indoctrination program as a whole, the Jewish question enjoyed growing significance. In an early speech to the Gestapo in 1934, Himmler was at pains to emphasize the importance of racial-biological categories and to insist that the Jews were the worst enemy of the German people. As Matthäus demonstrates, the precise content of such indoctrination evolved over time. Training materials through much of the 1930s presented Jews as economic parasites, defilers of the German race, and so on—but by and large without the pornographic excesses of Der Stürmer and without concrete indications of what policy should be. The materials even contained acknowledgements that Jews were "auch Menschen," and that German Jews at least sometimes presented a "harmless" face (although this merely concealed the malicious intent of world Jewry as a whole). Violence was implicit in the invocations of the Jews' alleged crimes of ritual murder and world conspiracy. From 1938 onwards, the language would become harsher. By 1941, training materials contained hints of the coming genocide. Förster does show for the Waffen-SS, however, that after 1942 the Jewish question slipped down the priority list in the training programs. The top priority now was forging and maintaining soldierly qualities.

If the significance that Himmler and the SS leadership attached to indoctrination emerges clearly, the book is less conclusive—as the introduction readily acknowledges—about what indoctrination achieved in terms of motivating and radicalizing actions in the field. Historical research into perpetrators long remained at the level of unsubstantiated generalizations or monocausal explanations; the empirical research that would allow more well-founded conclusions is only now under way. Yet...