ABSTRACT
Careerists are perpetrators who rise to high levels of power within an oppressive or genocidal regime. They are very ambitious and power-hungry people who strive to gain power, status, prestige, money or welfare. They operate very strategically and ruthlessly and mostly act out of opportunism and do not necessarily adhere to the extremist ideology of the Criminal Masterminds they support. They want to earn their own spot in history but are much less interested in how they achieve this. In the first case study the focus is on Nazi Germany and the many ambitious men who formed Hitler's inner circle, and zooms in on Herman Göring and Albert Speer, two prototypical Careerists. The second case study is on former Yugoslavia where many power-hungry political entrepreneurs like Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Biljana Plavsic used radical and extremist ideologies to gain power after Tito died and left behind the country with a power vacuum to fill. Many of them will not have been aiming for war or genocide at the start of their political careers but they nevertheless ruthlessly accepted that wass exactly where they were heading, for no other reason than that it brought them in a position of power.
