Believe and Destroy (PDF)

There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated;
they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power.
Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy
and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to
join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the
Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party's elite protection
unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of
twenty million individuals of allegedly 'inferior'
races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads
known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a
million people.

Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the
gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the
networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they
moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the
'world of enemies' which, in their view, threatened
them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed,
and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this
pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to
believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so
destructive.

The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs
in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal
experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.