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Remarks on Premeditation and Blind Hatred
Review article on
Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des
Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002)
Wildt’s valuable and important book
focuses on the few hundred SS officers who ran the departments of
the RSHA. This group was arguably one of the most important forces
that propelled the Third Reich to its criminal extremes. He found
them to be a selected elite of unusually well educated, capable and
ambitious men who purposefully determined to dedicate their careers
to promoting the ideology they had chosen to believe in. They
recognized no limits to their efforts, and once the war started,
they smoothly advanced to mass murder. The sole frame of reference
they ever recognized was the efficiency of their actions in
achieving their goals. The human cost of their actions never
interested them, nor was there anything their victims could have
done to make them desist from murder. |
