Premeditation and Blind Hatred in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XXXI

Remarks on Premeditation and Blind Hatred Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2002, 964 pp.

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.