Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes

by Michael Wildt

Am 27. September 1939 entstand unter der Führung von Reinhard Heydrich aus Geheimer Staatspolizei, Kriminalpolizei und Sicherheitsdienst der SS das Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Es verstand sich als der exekutive und konzeptionelle Kern einer weltanschaulich orientierten Polizei, die ihre Aufgabe in der »Reinhaltung des deutschen Volkskörpers« sah. Sie sollte in dem von Hitler beschworenen »Schicksalskampf« die Gegner des auf Rasse und Volk begründeten NS-Regimes – in erster Linie die Juden als Verkörperung der »Gegen-Rasse«, des »Anti-Volkes« – vernichten.

Michael Wildt hat anhand umfangreicher neuer Quellen die Konturen des Reichsicherheitshauptamtes als »Institution neuen Typs« herausgearbeitet, die sich flexibel veränderten Situationen anzupassen verstand.

Sein verstörendes Bild der leitenden Akteure läßt sich in das bisherige Profil der NS-Täter nicht einordnen: Es waren keine »gescheiterten Existenzen«, keine »Mitläufer«, keine »ordinary men«, sondern in der Mehrheit akademisch gebildete junge Männer, die ihre politische Weltanschauung schreckliche Wirklichkeit werden ließen.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, Germany

964 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Shachar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am generally susceptible to the argument that there was something specific about this generation of Nazi leaders that provided the ingredients to make them the executioners of genocide on a scale unprecedented previously. I was convinced that these men lost faith in their government’s ability to function, and saw themselves as the leaders of tomorrow. I am not so much convinced that they saw World War I as a game. I understand how missing the chance to demonstrate your love of country could be devastating. But Wildt acts as if the men that fought, were maimed or died in the Great War were somehow geographically separated from those men born after 1900. Weren’t these men from the same towns? Didn’t they belong to the same families? Were they not brothers or cousins to men sent to the front? Wouldn’t see the devastating effects of the war make them less convinced that maybe just maybe it was not a war worth fighting for?

I understand Wildt’s insistence on the fact that these men were educated, and were not some simple hooligans ready to murder. But I don’t think many people nowadays think that a doctorate degree makes you more human. Especially if you acquire that degree in a university that has become radical, and teaches hatred.

While I was aware of the postwar realities of de-Nazification and the abysmal results of the trials, but reading about just how well-integrated these ex-Nazis were into Germany society was horrific. The clemency petitions, the German public buying into their arguments, the Americans making the decision to commute sentences. I don’t know what I would have wanted the fates of these Nazis to be, but it surely wouldn’t be to be in charge of publishing houses, and law enforcement. It is no wonder it has taken so long for Holocaust consciousness to arise in Germany with these men still out there, molding public opinion.

[FellowBibliophile KvK · Rating 4 out of 5]

All-in-all, a generally meticulously researched examination of the extraordinary law enforcement organisation that was the RSHA.

However, Wildt failed to mention RSHA alumnae like Wilhelm Beisner and Otto Skorzeny running guns to FLN terrorists. This is a most curious oversight.

[Jed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sans value judgement…extremely impressive feat of political organization. Admirable, even.

[Schopfi · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 different angle, one that offers many benefits of clarity: the Angle of looking at the specific national socialist institutions, more specifically the RSHA.
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.

one must not only imagine a police force where the top levels are non comprised of administrative lawyers bound by the justice system of a state but rather of radical political activists bound by nothing but their ideology:
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: for one, within germany the concept of the volksfeind or volksschädling, social outsiders that before at least had been citizens of the state, redefined as enemies or parasites of the nazi collective, become as a group the legitimated target of persecution by the police. but much more important were the implications once the war started and the borders of other nations were crossed. racist ideology mixed with absolute (in the original sense of the word "unbound") executive power in zones beyond the state made the holocaust a reality.

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.