They were only thirty years old when Adolf Hitler came to power: they were jurists, economists, philologists, philosophers and historians. Why did they decide to be part of the organs of repression of the Third Reich? After accessing the archives of the SD and the SS, the author investigated the trajectory of a good number of these academics. Believe and destroy is a pioneering study that shows that the extermination in the concentration camps, far from obeying only the insane mentality of the Führer, was anchored in a belief system shared by many of the members of the generation that grew up in Germany. defeated and submitted to the Treaty of Versailles. And to a large extent, the history of Nazism is based on the personal experiences-of fervor and resentment-of these men, so eager to believe in their nation as to destroy what seemed to threaten it: they theorized and planned the elimination of twenty million of individuals of "inferior" race and organized and intervened in the extermination of a million people.