An Uncompromising Generation

InAn Uncompromising Generation, Michal Wildt follows the journey of a strikingly homogenous group of young academics-who came from the educated, bourgeois stratum of society-as they radicalized and started to identify with the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft, which labeled Jews as enemies of the people and justified their murder. Wildtrs"s study traces the intellectual evolution of key members of the Reich Security Main Office from their days as students until the end of World War II. Established in 1939 this office fused together the Gestapo, the Criminal Police, and theSicherheitsdienst(Security Service) of the SS. Far from being small cogs in a big bureaucratic machine, Wildt finds that the people who made up the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) constructed the concepts and operated the apparatus that carried out the Holocaust. At the center of both theory and practice of persecution and genocide in Nazi-occupied Europe, these young men of the RSHA-none of whom envisioned the systematic annihilation of the European Jews-became radicalized. How this occurred is the central question of Wildtrs"s book. Finally, and strikingly, Wildt discusses the post-war careers of the members of the Reich Security Main Office and shows their importance in rebuilding West Germany.

Michael Wildt is a Research Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and an associate professor of modern history at the University of Hamburg.