Jody - # 1 Wildt

Title: Wildt, Michael. An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009);

 

Question: With the numerous recent questions concerning Holocaust perpetrators (forced to commit murder or willing and eager; did they have to or do so because they were allowed to?), Wildt looks at the RSHA asking who and what made up this group that implemented genocide and what happened postwar? What answers about the Holocaust and the Nazi regime can be derived from looking at this institution?

 

Method: Uses social and institutional historical analysis of Nazi records of RSHA as well as testimonies, trial documentation, and secondary academic literature to paint a picture of the leadership of the RSHA through numerous biographies and analyses.

 

Historiography (how it fits in): Challenges and backs up scholarship previously published about the RSHA. Too detailed to accurately explain, though most intriguing is the challenge to "desk murderer" - shows there is not (inactive) bureaucrat RSHA member.

 

Summary of Argument: Explicates 3 key areas: Generation, Institution, and War that shaped RSHA to its genocidal end. Beginning with its members, and unlike other Nazi leadership, they possessed generational homogeneity and academic training with an ideology of absoluteness. Their generation was shaped by WWI and they became a "generation" unto themselves. University, while playing a key role in shaping their notions of "shaping society through action (revolution)," only set the necessary stage for these self-viewed future elites that the institution of the RSHA provided "which provided their ideological absoluteness with an adequate and unbounded structure and thus created the necessary prerequisite for the actual implementation of the RSHA elite's racist ideas for reordering Europe" (426). The institution gave them opportunity to feed their yearn to intervene in events. Traditional boundaries were dissolved and they attained power from a guiding (racist) idea that shaped structural form.  "The reality was intended, and the ideology was part of the institutional character" (435). Thus becoming a type of political 'fighting administration'.  In essence, with no RSHA, no Holocaust. Through action they were no longer just cogs but tied themselves (actively) to the events on the ground. Experience of war (beginning with Polish genocide and security actions/reactions) radicalized action. Barbarossa brought more radicalization, even to the point where decisions (stated that while there was no concrete decision to murder there was always understanding that genocide was a possible and plausible 'solution') to kill were left to decisions locally. In other words, "they developed ideas for the mass murders, constructed the apparatuses to carry them out, and then operated the machines themselves" (444). Postwar, inevitably, the RSHA leaders got off light - few committed suicide and most returned to relative normal life by 1960s. The only comprehensive trial was the Einsatzgruppen trial in '47-'48. And when there were stirs of more trials in the 1960s, there was (non-intentional) legal blockage due to lack of legal overview and the fact that it was better for society if they just quietly fell back into society to add to the new and recovering economy. Wildt does remind us though that "the power of institution" is a major finding for the academic and ought be explored and analyzed.

 

Comment: Great overview of RSHA-though dry and longwinded to get to point. And while I completely agree with "the power of institution" (see Westermann), the work lacks comparison. Rarely, does Wildt compare this with other Nazi institutions and structures. Is this structure, as stated, really so unique? And where are motives of individual?: Just because leaders have desire to racially change society does not mean that ALL individuals wrapped up in the institution do - or does it?  Doubtful. And what does this say about uniqueness of Jewish genocide? Did their need to change society just start with Jews?  Is this reflection of Thomas' understanding of "creating" community/society?

 

Argument (Chapter Outlines):

PART I: GENERATION

1. The Experience of War

2. Student Radicalism

3. A Young German Elite: The Black Hand in Leipzig

4. 1933

 

PART II: INSTITUTION

5. Conceptualizing the Reich Security Main Office

6. Structure and Staff

 

PART III: WAR

7. Poland, 1939: The Experience of Racist Mass Murder

8. Expulsion, 1940

9. Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union

10. Zenith and Decline

 

PART IV: EPILOGUE

11. Postwar: Back in Civil Society

12. Prosecution

 

Notes:

• RSHA: 27 September 1939 - 23 April 1945
• Thesis (18): RSHA members designed and justified murder
• Study of radicalized policies of RSHA
• Experience of WWI shaped RSHA members - 77% born after 1900 (23)
• Experience of political activism and A/S militancy learned at university (46)
• Did not want to be M.C. but wanted to be leaders and revolutionaries to overthrow society (76)
• Bride schools opened to train wives [?!?!?] (111)
• RSHA members predominantly had small families [against Reich suggestion] (113)
• Politics as active in shaping/forming and being decisive to deeds (121)
• RSHA not unified legally but the enforcement of racial order (164)
• RSHA -> dissolution of boundaries (166) Became political institution for racial reordering of Europe
• "gas testing" before Chelmno at Sachsenhausen (186)
• RSHA members worked through their own deeds to find "solutions" (187)
• Gestapo and SS leaders were young, racist, and A/S (199)
• RHSA as new "movement" not just office/institution (210)
• Einsatzgruppen from SS and police - leaders from RSHA (219)
• Himmler extends EG directives to kill Poles (223)
• Poles kill ethnic Germans in Bydgoscz (225) "Operation Tannenberg" as "retaliation"
• Polish Jews EXPELLED to S.U. (235)
• Liquidation of Poles on 14 October 1939
• Poles deported and then returned as forced laborers [changed policy unlike Jews - ?] [see Rutherford's work on subject] (245)
• RHSA deployed were young activists (273)
• Heydrich left decision to kill to EG leaders, with a guideline though (279)
• NKVD kills off all non-deportees to East (284)
• Order to kill Jews unless skilled laborers (287)
• RSHA contributes to FS (313)
• U.S. entry into war furthers radicalism of FS (316)
• Kaltenbrunner takes over after Heydrich (347)
• Even when breaking up at end of war - killing kept going (351)
• Postwar: EXPECTED to be punished but most served small/light sentences (366)
• Nuremberg sentences were publically "unpopular" (375)
• By 1950s Criminal Police division mainly all back to previous jobs and Gestapo heads chiefly became lawyers or private business entrepreneurs (378)
• Alterations to penal code prgh 50 abandons trials in 1960s (417)
• Not intentional blockage of justice but lack of overview of laws (418)
• Overview of postwar period and political issues (419ff)

5 Main Points:

1. RSHA members designed and justified murder

2. wanted to be leaders and revolutionaries to overthrow society

3. RSHA members worked through their own deeds to find "solutions"

4. RHSA as new "movement" not just office/institution

5. Postwar: EXPECTED to be punished but most served small/light sentences