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

Christian Ingrao’s Believe and Destroy, adapted from his 2001 dissertation, offers a new entry into the study of perpetrator motivation by examining a group of eighty men who entered the Security Service (SD) prior to the start of World War II and who eventually became primary actors in mass murder as leaders within the Einsatzgruppen. As the subtitle of the work implies, Ingrao takes the academic and intellectual training and aspirations of this cohort seriously. According to the author, “These young men provide no evidence at all for the clichéd image of the thuggish Nazi activist. … Nor were they the bad boys of a science that they ‘perverted’” (p. 32). He also takes issue with “one of the most stubborn prejudices about the history of academic knowledge” in the Third Reich: the claim that “one discipline, either ‘technical’ or ‘objective,’ resisted the rise of the Nazis and their racial paradigms, while another, ideologically more ‘susceptible,’ fell prey to the elaborations of Nazi doctrine” (p. 38). In this sense, one of his most insightful findings involves the contention that men who earned advanced degrees in a variety of academic disciplines not only expressed their beliefs in a “politicization of knowledge,” but even more important, as in the case of “technical” knowledge, expressed their activist mentality “mainly by the invasion of the political field by expertise, not by the invasion of the scholarly field by ideology” (p. 42).

To many, the concept of SS intellectuals may seem to be the ultimate oxymoron; however, Ingrao’s study of members of the SD argues that many within this group not only achieved academic success, but that “some of them even enjoyed a reputation for brilliance” (p. 37). Although Ingrao’s cohort missed their baptism of fire in the Great War, he contends that they carried the trauma of German defeat and the memory of the war with them into the halls and seminars of German universities after 1918. For these men of the “war youth generation” born between 1900 and 1910, right-wing organizations and universities, especially the “border universities” of Bonn, Strasbourg, Königsberg, and Leipzig, became their “battlefields” as they embraced völkisch ideology, intellectual activism, and political militancy—all factors that facilitated their journey into the ranks of the SS. These university graduates included lawyers, economists, philosophers, historians, linguists, and geographers who eventually rose to key positions within the ranks of Heinrich Himmler’s Black Corps; they played a crucial role in the formulation and exposition of the SS belief system, and an active role in mass murder in the occupied Eastern territories.

Part I, “The Young Men of Germany,” focuses on “the pervasive importance of the memory of the Great War, and its role in the biologization [sic] of systems of representation and in [the growth of] a radical anti-Semitism” (p. 26). According to Ingrao, these future leaders of the SD suffered from a “quasi-apocalyptic anguish” that shaped their “belief in the more or less imminent disappearance of Germany, [not only] as a state … but also as a biological entity” (pp. 15–16). This apocalyptic belief in an existential battle drove these men into the ranks of intellectual activism and student militancy prior to the Third Reich, and led them to embrace the concept of the Volkstumskampf as Germany’s salvation.

Part II, “Joining the Nazis: A Commitment” shows the ways in which these men and their SS peers developed and used a “raciological interpretive grid” (p. 52). According to Ingrao, this interpretive framework “gave history its meaning, guiding its course and leading inexorably to the reign of the race, in an unpartitioned country, and regenerated in Germandom” (p. 56). In this sense, these SD intellectuals, along with other SS organizations, played a crucial role in developing the overarching concepts and plans for the “Germanization” of the conquered Eastern territories. In his discussion of the ties that bound this cohort to...