The minds of these young graduates were fertile ground for anyone wishing to cultivate Nazi radicalism. As Ingrao demonstrates, many had lost fathers and brothers in the First World War, and had themselves been active in protest against the territorial truncations inflicted on Germany after 1918.

Ingrao concentrates on the part these men played in the invasion of the east and in particular, in the genocide of the Jews. Many agreed with Heydrich that "the fate of the world" was being decided in Russia. By creating a tabula rasa, SS men were conceiving nothing less than a new world order.

For most of them there was a chance to put their mettle to the test during their Osteinsatz, an almost obligatory period of service on the Eastern Front. A number of SS Einsatzgruppen were at work behind the lines murdering Jews, commissars and other Russian civilians. Such work required cold fortitude. As Ingrao shows, they all reacted differently, some were clearly just sadists, others, however, suppressed their more human emotions in order to provide an example for the men serving under them. In some cases the experience of killing — babies in particular — led to psychological trauma. Alcohol was a palliative. 

Some of the SD men thought they were acting in self-defence by killing Jews and commissars; that had they shown pity, these men, women and children would have done the same to them, and their wives and children. The ideologists among them saw themselves to be performing a constructive role too, in preparing the ground for Germany's new empire. The absorbing figure of Otto Ohlendorf provides an illustration here. Not only did he order the deaths of some 90,000 Jews while commanding Einsatzgruppe D, but he succoured the ethnic Germans on the Volga and constructed schools and other institutions for them. They were to be the human material with which a new Nordic east would be populated.