Part I – The question of why so many people willingly embraced Adolph Hitler’s worldview has been examined and debated endlessly. Some have asked how the Germans could have been so easily duped and manipulated into believing in the pseudo-scientific racial theory he espoused and his other radical National Socialist policies. Were they that naïve, ignorant and dim-witted?
Though it might be comforting to ascribe Hitler’s support to the unschooled, uninformed and marginal members of German society, this was not the case, as historian Richard J. Evans notes. In the 1920s university students were among those most inclined to be influenced by Hitler’s “blandishments” and the Nazi party.
Historian Benno Müller-Hill confirms the susceptibility of university students to Nazi ideology. Those who commanded the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and the leaders of the Kommandos, he said, had one thing in common: Most had enlisted in the SS, the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party’s initial paramilitary wing, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) at the earliest opportunity they could, reflecting the high regard the Nazis were held in among students of the Weimar Republic.
Most later joined the Ministry of the Interior to become public servants. From the ministry, they were randomly selected to be posted in the East. In Germany, not only lawyers, prosecutors and judges hold doctoral degrees in law.
The Commanders of the Einsatzgruppe A, B, C and D
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen were, for the most part, well-educated and recruited from Germany’s elite class and the upper echelons of the SS.
Einsatzgruppe A. After being promoted to the position of SS-Brigadeführer and major-general of police, Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker, a lawyer, was appointed commander of Einsatzgruppe A. It was attached to Army Group North, which operated from the Baltic States to the Leningrad area. It had approximately 1,000 men.
Einsatzgruppe B was commanded by Arthur Nebe (chief of Kripo, the criminal police) and later head of a division in the RSHA. He is alleged to have been “the author of a respected work on criminology.”
Einsatzgruppe C was commanded by SS General Dr. Otto Emil Rasch, who had two PhDs—one in law and the other in political economy. He was attached to the Army Group Center in northern and central Ukraine with 750 men. The Rev. Ernst Biberstein, a Lutheran pastor, was another commander of Einsatzgruppe C.
Einsatzgruppe D. In June 1941, SS Colonel Otto Ohlendorf, a student of sociology with a doctorate in jurisprudence and head of Amt lll of the Reich Main Security Office, was appointed commander of Einsatzgruppe D attached to the 11th Army assigned to southern Ukraine, Crimea and Ciscaucasia. It had about 600 men.
They were not “hoodlums, delinquents, common criminals or sex maniacs,” declared historian Raul Hilberg. Yet undeniably, they sought a degree of influence, recognition and accomplishment, but they did not actively pursue a position in a Kommando. Whatever background, training and abilities they had acquired, these skills facilitated them in becoming effective murderers.
The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
“It must be kept in mind,” declared Hilberg, “that most of the participants of genocide did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers … Most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on the telephone, and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desks.”
German historian Michael Wildt found that leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which played a central role in the mass murder of European Jewry, was composed of highly educated men in their 30s who were staunch supporters of National Socialism. The RSHA’s main office in Berlin housed 3,000 employees. Approximately 400 men and one woman held key positions in the organization. SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich served as chief of the RSHA. The years these men, who would later assume leadership positions at the RSHA, spent at the university “would prove to be one of the decisive periods in their lives,” Wildt concludes.
Of the 221 individuals of the RSHA Wildt surveyed, 77% were born after 1900. Most came from lower-middle-class homes and were the first in their families to have attended a university. Two-thirds graduated with degrees, with one-third having completed a doctoral degree. The most important positions in the RSHA were held by lawyers, historians, philologists (historical linguists) or journalists. Approximately 22% majored in German literature, history, theology, journalism or philology. They were part of the bourgeois educated elite. For those aspiring to climb the social ladder, the RSHA provided the venue.
Their goal, Wildt asserts, not only to re-create Germany with a new “racial order for all of Europe, not merely to design a braver new world, but to turn it into a horrific reality—led droves of intellectuals, academics and scientists to become ready supporters of the Nazi regime. At last philosophers could believe they were in power; physicians could see themselves in the role of uncontrolled designers of human life; historians saw themselves in a position to shape world history…. These men had never been little wheels in a huge machine of destruction, never functionaries who only looked at their narrow task, never bureaucrats obeying only the orders that cam from above; these men had designed the concepts, constructed and operated the apparatus that led to mass murder and genocide.”
The Trauma of Defeat
The Germans involved in the destruction of European Jewry were not from the same generation, Evans said. Some lived during the 1890s and 1900s. Others were children when the Nazis seized power. Attempting to study them as a group of people sharing a common characteristic will not be productive.
Far more useful, Evans opines, is what historian Alex J. Kay has observed: “They were certainly united by a shared national trauma that cut across age groups and social backgrounds. Defeat in the First World War, the obliteration of German great-power ambitions (loss of colonies and substantial swathes of Reich territory; military and economic subjugation) and the tumultuous fallout of 1918-19 caused an individual and collective trauma in German society. This affected not merely those who consciously experienced these events but also—by means of intergenerational transmission—their progeny, who suffered a secondary traumatization. In this situation, ethnic-nationalistic sentiments already present in the belated nation-states were radicalized further.”
Part II – From Conventional Antisemitism To Pathological Antisemitism
The First World War had a profound influence in the development of Hitler’s views toward Jews. His “existing more or less conventional antisemitism became pathological, proto-genocidal,” historian Ian Kershaw asserts. Hatred of Jews continued to increase significantly during the war, which “gripped Hitler, too, as never before,” not even in the years he lived in Vienna (1907-1913).
He now understood the reasons for the war and Germany’s humiliating defeat. Jews were clearly responsible for the fighting and for what he believed to be Germany’s disgraceful surrender in 1918. Even before the stab-in-the-back myth became popular, which claimed Germany did not lose WWI on the field of battle, but was betrayed instead at home by the communists, socialists and Jews, Hitler subscribed to this fiction. Jews had undermined Germany from inside the country, he believed.
A Chilling Early Document
In a letter of Sept. 16, 1919, considered to be the first written document of his political career, Hitler concluded an extensive discussion with: “Antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will always find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms (sic!). A rational antisemitism, however, must lead to the systematic legal fight against and the elimination of the prerogatives of the Jew which he alone possesses in contradiction to all aliens living among us (legislation concerning aliens. Its ultimate goal, however, must unalterably be the elimination of the Jews altogether).” The context of this letter, German historian Eberhard Jäckel says, demonstrates that Hitler was regarded as an antisemite even within his own group at the Reichswehr-Gruppenkommando (command of the Reichswehr-Reich Defense) in Munich.
The Utopian Nightmare: Race Replaces Morality
Evans observed that the leaders of the RSHA were convinced that only “absolutely radical measures” would reverse the shame of Germany’s devastating defeat of 1918. The goal of the Nazis, historians Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann explain, was to construct “a utopian society organized in accordance with the principles of race.” A fundamental concern was the “purification of the body of the nation from ‘alien,’ ‘hereditary ill,’ or ‘asocial’ ‘elements.’” Racial purification was an essential part of comprehensive “social policies designed to produce a “healthy” focused on achievement, ‘Aryan’ ‘national community.’”
Race would replace class as the foremost unifying principle of the German nation. This would reduce prevailing social classifications and increase the divisions between the “healthy,” “Aryan national comrades” and those “elements” that were described as being racially inferior, “unfit” or “alien.” They would therefore be “destined for exclusion and eventual extermination.” The millions of Jews who were annihilated prove the length to which the Germans were driven to establish a “functioning racial state.”
The notion that the Jewish people should be completely annihilated “was not a tactically motivated threat,” German historian Peter Longerich said, “but the logical consequence” of the belief that “dominated” the entire National Socialist agenda, “that the German people were locked in a life-and-death struggle with their mortal enemy—international Jewry—in which their very existence as a nation was in peril.”
Hitler’s Final Testament
This fixation with destroying the Jewish people can be seen in Hitler’s Political Testament. In his last communication with the German people, written on April 29, 1945, at 4 a.m., just before he and his mistress Eva Braun committed suicide, Hitler declared, “Above all I charge the leadership of the nation and their followers with the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples, international Jewry.”
Historian Yehuda Bauer adds that the Jews were not merely victims. They are a people, a community and a nation, “which was in some significant ways, central to the self-understanding of European and not just German society.” This is why the Jews became the focus of an unprecedented assault that has transformed the Western, and progressively also the non-Western word’s “perception” of itself. The essence of National Socialism is not its bureaucratic culture or “modernistic structures”—which clearly contributed—but an ideological commitment to abolish not just a government or a political system, “but the basic order of the world.”
Did They Really Mean What They Said?
In the 1940s there was much “sophisticated opinion” that the Germans were “master propagandists” who could not possibly believe or act on the irrational antisemitism they espoused, historian Jeffrey Herf notes. Today, we know that is not true. It expressed their Weltanschauung (worldview) and their analysis of current events. Their interpretation of the events of World War II as viewed “through the distorted and paranoid prism of radical anti-Semitism pushed German anti-Semitism beyond its past eras of persecution to one of genocide.” We have learned, Herf concludes, that when political leaders make extreme threats to murder or annihilate a people or a nation, we need to recognize that “such fanatics mean what they say and say what they mean.”
Herf found that in the thousands of wartime documents and in private memos, such as found in Joseph Goebbels’ diaries, one does not find any proof that Hitler, Goebbels, Jacob Otto Dietrich, who served as the press chief of the Nazi regime, or any of their staff, had the slightest doubts about what they wrote, or considered their antisemitic declarations as a cynical strategy to dupe the naïve and easily deceived public. However bright or astute these men were, they were so obsessed with their racial ideology that it deeply distorted their perception of reality.
*Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
** This article was first published on The Jewish Link on June 18 & 25, 2026.