"Another type of perpetrator": the SS racial experts and forced population movements in the occupied regions.

The "racial experts" of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS (RuSHA) were an important, yet not well studied, group of perpetrators. By setting up a procedure for "racial examination" that was applied not only to the members of the SS but also to millions of civilians in the Occupied Territories, they provided the ideological background and logistics of persecution. Following the outbreak of war, the racial experts' qualification of persons as "desirable" or "undesirable" guided National Socialist population policy and the planned ethnic reconstruction of Europe.