"This is an important and original study of ideology and experience rather than yet another catalogue of crime, and it therefore offers a different and powerful explanation for how educated men became perpetrators of mass murder." Richard Evans, University of Cambridge "How did highly educated German intellectuals of a certain generation make themselves into believing Nazis, career-minded ideologues, and practitioners of terror? In compelling detail and in a manner consistent with the best accomplishments of recent scholarship, Christian Ingrao guides us astutely and assuredly through this shockingly normalized interior world." Geoffrey Eley, University of Michigan

Christian Ingrao is the director of the Institut de l'histoire du temps present. A specialist in Nazism and war studies, he also teaches at Sciences-Po. His previous work, Les Chasseurs Noirs , was an international success.

Foreword Acknowledgments Glossary PART ONE: The young men of Germany Chapter 1: A 'world of enemies' (I) The outbreak of war The silence of the Akademiker The 'time of troubles': an experience of war? Chapter 2: Constructing networks Places to study Places of association Networks of solidarity Chapter 3: Activist intellectuals The construction of academic knowledge Knowledge and activism (1919-1933) 'Combative science' and SS intellectuals in the Third Reich The shadow of the Great War PART TWO: Joining the Nazis: a commitment Chapter 4: Being a Nazi The foundations of the doctrine The origins of Nazi fervour: planning a sociobiological re-establishment The appropriation of a system of beliefs Chapter 5: Entering the SD Whether to enter the Party or not? Towards the SD: Nazi careers Recruitment: a social mechanism of enlistenment Chapter 6: From struggle to control From the 'Security Department of the SS' (SD) to the 'Reich Security Main Office' (RSHA) A 'world of enemies' (II) Control PART THREE : Nazism and violence: the culmination 1939-1945 Chapter 7: Thinking the east, between utopia and anxiety The curse of Germanic isolation The Nazi project for a sociobiological re-establishment Redevelop and settle: forms of Nazi fervour Chapter 8: Arguing for war: Nazi rhetoric From the reparative war to the 'Great Racial War' From the discourse of security to the discourse of genocide Expressing violence: defensive rhetorics, utopian rhetorics Chapter 9: Violence in action The experience of violence Demonstrative violence, violence of eradication A transgressive violence Violence as rite of initiation Chapter 10: SS intellectuals confronting defeat Defeat rendered unreal Finis Germaniae. The return of the old anxiety The denouement Chapter 11: SS intellectuals on trial Strategies of negation Strategies of evasion Strategies of justification: the Ohlendorf case Conclusion: Memory of war, activism and genocide Notes Sources and bibliography A piece of research and its context A specific conceptual framework List of archival collections consulted Printed sources Bibliography