One of my goals as a
future historian is to be an expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. As a
result, I'm already better read than most people on the latter topic, while on
the former topic, I'm probably at the level of an interested history buff. After
having read most of the single-volume treatments of the Final Solution for a
term paper in 2015, I've limited my reading of broad histories and have tended
to focus on country-specific studies and studies on specific sub-periods and
figures. That said, every few years, I read a relatively new single-volume
study as a way of seeing what has seeped down to the "popular
history" level. I think the last one I looked at was Peter
Longerich's book. When I read a single-volume study again, it will probably
be Christian
Gerlach's or maybe David
Cesarani's.
With single-volume
studies of the Third Reich at large, like most people, I started with Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is
as good a place as any for a non-historian. It's hard to imagine anyone has
outdone Richard Evans in this regard since he finished his Third
Reich trilogy. But that's a trilogy -- three books making up 2,500+ pages.
There's a reason that Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews remains
the standard history of the Holocaust -- it's also three volumes.
It was therefore
with high hopes that I recently picked up a very new single-volume history of
the Third Reich. While I've yet to finish it, I am about two thirds of the way
through and nearly ready to render an opinion of it. That review is
forthcoming, although I should be clear that part of currently holds me back
from sharing it is the superstition to which I referred in a previous post. So
once my finger crossing is finally over (perhaps another three weeks?), I can
update on both my future educational/career plans and on this single-volume
study of the Third Reich that I'll likely finish in the next couple of days.
In the meantime,
here's the paper I refer to above, since I began this blog after I started
college courses again. Enjoy.
======
For the historian, the Holocaust poses several
thorny questions that other periods of history might not. Among the reasons for
this difficulty are two key facts. First, much of the documentation and
physical evidence for the extermination of Europe’s Jews was destroyed by the
Nazis in attempts to conceal their crimes. Second, because the full extent of
the Final Solution (FS), as the Nazi leadership itself called the genocide, was
a matter of great secrecy, much of the decision-making was never committed to
paper at all, and the vast majority of the surviving documentation on the topic
that does exist is cryptic, using oblique code words rather than speaking
plainly. As a result, our knowledge of the decision-making with regard to the
FS and its implementation has relied overwhelmingly on ambiguous documents and
on the postwar testimonies of captured war criminals, survivors of the
extermination program, and bystanders.
Among the questions that have been pursued by
historians over the seventy-year period since the war ended is one that, at
first blush, might appear strange, i.e., the extent to which the FS consisted
of a deliberate policy to exterminate Europe’s Jews. On the one hand, a school
of thought referred to as the intentionalist school posits that a genocide
of the Jews was always the intention of the Nazis generally and Hitler
specifically, and in so far as any policy seemed to contradict that intention,
it was only because the opportunity to commit genocide had yet to present
itself. On the other hand, the functionalist school asserts that the FS
was ultimately the result not of longstanding intentions but rather of a
complicated combination of military, economic, and political factors and that a
decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews was not made until the summer of 1941, at
the very earliest.[1]
As we shall see, while this debate first became public and heated in Germany
during the 1970s, it roots lay in the earliest studies of the FS.
In so far as historians in the immediate
aftermath of the FS attempted to understand what had happened to Europe’s Jews,
the FS seemed, at least at first, to have been the culmination of all forms of
Jewish persecution that preceded it. Whether that persecution began with the
Romans or with the Nazis could be debated, but few doubted that Hitler had
played the essential role in the process that ended with millions of Jews
having been killed or that this had been his intention all along. However, as
increasing amounts of documentation and testimonies from the Nuremberg trials
and trials of war criminals in formerly occupied countries unfolded, the idea
of a straight line between Mein Kampf and Auschwitz seemed increasingly
tenuous. Perhaps most importantly of all, no document bearing Hitler’s
imprimatur was found that authorized the FS. This lacuna in the evidence was
all the more puzzling, given that documents from Hitler were found authorizing
other serious war crimes and crimes against humanity. This evidence included
Hitler’s signature authorizing the T4 forced euthanasia program, which took
tens of thousands of lives of physically and mentally ill civilians, and the
origin in Hitler’s own headquarters of the infamous Kommissarbefehl,[2] which
authorized the summary execution of political commissars in the campaign
against the Soviet Union.
The first study that attempted to present, in a
single volume, a history of the FS was Léon Poliakov’s Breviaire de la Haine
(1951).[3]
Because he had worked as an assistant to the French prosecution team at the
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, which tried the major war criminals
in Europe, Poliakov had unprecedented access to primary source materials. He
addressed the matter of planning of the FS early in his book, writing, “Did
Hitler and his principal lieutenants envisage at the time [i.e., in the 1930s] wiping
the Jewish people off the face of the earth? Nothing allows us to assert this:
no document or testimony found or produced to date argues this case, and as a
matter of fact, I tend strongly toward the negative.”[4] Nevertheless, a
page later, Poliakov asserted that certain Nazis did consider extermination as
a policy quite early — in particular, Julius Streicher, publisher of the
obscenely anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, and, more importantly,
Reinhard Heydrich, who would become the head of the Reich Security Head Office
(Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), the office chiefly responsible for
carrying out the FS.
When, five chapters into his account, Poliakov
dedicated an entire chapter to the decision on extermination, he wrote of “[t]he
leaders — or more exactly the Leader: because it was Adolf Hitler himself who
undoubtedly signed the death warrant of the Jews of Europe.”[5] Nevertheless, he
did attribute the decision in part to the influence of “extremists” on Hitler,
particularly Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and
Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery.[6] Moreover, Poliakov asserted that
Hitler gave the order in the fall of 1940 to Reichsführer-SS[7] Heinrich Himmler.
For this information, Poliakov relied on the testimony of Felix Kersten, a
Finnish national who was the physical therapist to Himmler. Poliakov noted, “We
have seen, moreover, that the extermination of the Jews was in no way a part of
the totality of Nazi goals”[8];
nevertheless, he asserted that the Einsatzgruppen[9] were formed for
the specific goal of systematic extermination of the Soviet Jewish population.
He wrote that “a special order of the Führer (the text of which has not been
found) covered this decision.”[10]
Although the absence of a Hitler order – a Führerbefehl – for the FS was
noted, Poliakov assumed that such an order would eventually emerge.
Thus, Poliakov established some key arguments
that would play a role in the intentionalist-functionalist dispute. First,
although he did not specifically use the term “functionalist,” he nevertheless
set out a functionalist line of argumentation in noting that the FS was not among
the Nazis’ original goals. However, Poliakov asserted positively that Hitler
gave an order to begin the FS and that he gave this order in late 1940 at the
earliest. Finally, Poliakov noted that the deployment of the Einsatzgruppen
against Soviet Jewry marked the formal beginning of the FS.
Gerard Reitlinger’s The Final Solution
(1953)[11]
followed Poliakov’s book by two years and was the first complete study written
in English. It suffered from many of the same limitations in terms of its
sources, focusing primarily on Nuremberg documents and testimonies. Like that
of Poliakov, Reitlinger’s argument bore many aspects of what would later be
called functionalism; for instance, like Poliakov, Reitlinger established early
in The Final Solution that the decision toward the FS came in stages. He
also asserted that much of the actual implementation of the FS did not involve
Hitler beyond the initial approval, writing, “having started the machine
working, Hitler was generally content to assume that it continued to do so.”[12] In
Reitlinger’s treatment, independent initiative on the parts of the SS and RSHA
played key roles, as did Hans Frank, General Governor of occupied Poland.[13]
When Reitlinger considered the matter of a Führerbefehl,
again like Poliakov, he dedicated a section of his book to the topic. He also
considered this order to have come down in the run-up to the invasion of the
USSR. He conceded the absence of any written order — “The part of the Fuehrer
Order concerning the execution of Jews was at any rate never put on paper”[14] —
and thus he allowed that an oral order might not have reached some of the Einsatzgruppen
commando units until several weeks into the invasion. Finally, Reitlinger’s
treatment of the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, received greater
emphasis than Poliakov allowed, with the latter dedicating a single footnote to
the conference.[15]
Reitlinger, however, did not ascribe to the conference the importance that
later historians would.
The publication of Raul Hilberg’s The
Destruction of the European Jews (1961)[16] represented a watershed moment in
the historical approach to the FS. Like the earlier works, it was not called
functionalist at the time, and although Hilberg often approximated an
intentionalist style in his discussion of the period, one of his two central
theses – that the FS occurred primarily as the result of struggles for power
among the staffs of the complicated bureaucracy of the Third Reich – stated a
cornerstone concept of functionalism: “The destruction of the Jews did not
proceed from a basic plan. No bureaucrat in 1933 could predict what kind of
measures would be taken in 1935, nor was it possible in 1935 to foretell
decisions made in 1938. The destruction process was a step-by-step operation,
and the administrator could seldom see more than one step ahead.”[17] This
statement stands in sharp contrast to an earlier statement in the same book:
“Yet, in reviewing the documentary record of the destruction of the Jews, one
is almost immediately impressed with the fact that the German administration
knew what it was doing. With an unfailing sense of direction and with an
uncanny path-finding ability, the German bureaucracy found the shortest road to
the final goal.”[18]
Perhaps the best way to reconcile what seem to be contradictory positions is to
see the end result of FS as greater than the sum of its parts, bearing in mind
Hilberg’s assertion that bureaucratic competition eventually took on a life of
its own.
Like his predecessors, Hilberg saw a distinct
separation between the years leading up to Operation Barbarossa[19] and the ensuing
years, referring to the former as embodying a policy of emigration and the latter
a policy of annihilation.[20]
Also like his predecessors, although unable to bring specific documents to
bear, Hilberg posited the existence of a Führerbefehl:
Basically, we are dealing with
two of Hitler’s decisions. One order was given in the spring of 1941, during
the planning of the invasion of the USSR; it provided that small units of the
SS and Police be dispatched to Soviet territory, where they were to move from
town to town to kill all Jewish inhabitants on the spot. This method may be
called the “mobile killing operations.” Shortly after the mobile operations had
begun in the occupied Soviet territories, Hitler handed down his second order.
That decision doomed the rest of European Jewry. Unlike the Russian [sic]
Jews, who were overtaken by mobile units, the Jewish population of central,
western, and southeastern Europe was transported to killing centers.[21]
Hilberg
also attributed great significance to a communication of July 31, 1941, from
Reichsmarschall[22]
Hermann Göring to RSHA chief Heydrich, authorizing the latter to make “all
necessary preparation with regard to the organization and financial matters for
bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere
of influence in Europe.”[23]
Hilberg wrote that this order constituted “a turning point in anti-Jewish
history,”[24]
identifying it as the moment at which European Jewry was doomed. As a result,
Hilberg attributed little significance to the Wannsee Conference and gave it
short shrift in his work.
Despite his academic credentials (he earned a
Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied political science under Franz
Neumann – one of the most famous political refugees from German academia) and
the rigor of Destruction, Hilberg’s work was met with some hostility. Other
historians saw his study as overly concerned with the inner workings of Nazi
Germany and, as a result, coldly dismissive of Jewish suffering. In addition, beyond
the aforementioned bureaucratic thesis stated by Hilberg, his other central
thesis, i.e., that Jewish complacency and failure to understand the nature of
the threat that the Nazis posed played a key role in the FS, upset many
readers. As a result of these issues, Hilberg had a difficult time finding a
publisher and was attacked in the academic press. However, the hostility experienced
by Hilberg would seem mild in comparison to that experienced by the
functionalists when they began to publish their work.
If there is an ur-functionalist work, it
is Martin Broszat’s The Hitler State (Der Staat Hitlers; 1969).[25] The
book offered a theory of government for Nazi Germany in which, rather than a
standard authoritarian framework, Nazi Germany is better understood as a
polycracy. In this framework, Hitler acted as a “weak dictator,”[26]
suggesting but rarely introducing policy and allowing competition among offices
achieve the momentum necessary for action. In this way, Broszat approximated
Hilberg’s view of Germany under Hitler. However, Broszat’s book discussed far
more than the FS, with the war years covering only part of a single chapter. In
his clearest statement on the subject of the FS, Broszat wrote, “This criminal
mass destruction of the Jews must not be seen simply as the continuation of the
legal discrimination against Jews after 1933. Procedurally this was in fact a
break with former practice and in that respect had a different quality.”[27] In
this sense, Broszat expressed the FS as being distinct from the discrimination
and persecution of the years leading up to extermination, although he conceded,
“The progressive undermining of the principle of law through measures cast in
legal form finally resulted in an utterly crude, lawless, criminal action.”[28]
The first truly overt expression of the
functionalist viewpoint in English came in Karl A. Schleunes’s The Twisted
Road to Auschwitz (1970).[29]
While Hilberg and Broszat had established and documented the highly
bureaucratic environment in which the FS could emerge without a coherent,
prearranged central plan, Schleunes stated plainly that the FS emerged only
after years of pursuit of other policies. If these policies had been successful,
Schleunes implied, they would have superseded the FS – at least for the Jews of
Germany. Economic matters, in particular, complicated earlier attempts at
marginalization of the Jewish population, Schleunes argued, as well as the
Nazis’ own inability to understand their Jewish “enemy” in terms other than
their own paranoid caricature thereof.
Schleunes alleged, for instance, that the Nazis
“did not envisage a massive anti-Jewish campaign immediately following a
seizure of power.”[30]
The boycott of April 1933, he wrote, was mostly unsuccessful because the
repercussions thereof would have been too great for the strapped German economy
to bear. Schleunes further alleged that, until Kristallnacht, “one
cannot speak of a single Jewish policy” and that “[w]hat appeared to outside observers
as steady Nazi pressure against Jews on nearly all fronts, was actually the
product of strain and disagreement within the Nazi movement.”[31] Schleunes even
saw the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which racially defined Jews and formally rescinded
their citizenship, as haphazard in construction.
Where Schleunes saw the FS under development, he
identified it with the coldly analytic anti-Semitism of the SS and RSHA, which
slowly but surely came to occupy the primary position on Jewish policy between
1934 and 1939. However, because Schleunes’s study ended before the beginning of
World War II, it is difficult to say what his position would be on Nazi policy
toward Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. It is reasonable to
hypothesize, however, that had a coherent emigration policy been implemented
before WWII, such a policy might have been extended toward Jewish populations
outside Germany.
With
the writings of Broszat and Schleunes, the gauntlet had been thrown. Among
German scholars, it was picked up by Andreas Hillgruber, among others, whose
responses came mainly in the German academic literature. For instance,
Hillgruber’s 1972 essay “The ‘Final Solution’ and the German Empire in the East
as the Core of National Socialism's Race-based Ideological Program”[32] (not
translated into English and thus not reviewed here) was among the first essays
to defend an intentionalist viewpoint with specific regard to the FS in defense
against the functionalist thesis. Among American scholars, the chief respondent
at first was Lucy Dawidowicz, in her book The War Against the Jews
(1975).[33]
Dawidowicz argued what might be called an extreme
intentionalist line of thinking, stating early in her book that, to eliminate
the Jews, “the German dictatorship involved and engaged the entire bureaucratic
and functional apparatus of the German state and the National Socialist
movement and employed the best available technological means.”[34] Establishing a
model typical of later intentionalist works, Dawidowicz began her study with a
consideration of historical anti-Semitism and a biography of Hitler, stating,
“A line of anti-Semitic descent from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler is easy to
draw”[35]
and calling the FS the “terminus ad quem of Mein Kampf.”[36]
Finally, she asserted that the transition from persecution to extermination
dated not from the invasion of the USSR but from the beginning of war with
Poland: “Once war began, ‘evacuation’ became a euphemism for ‘deportation,’
which, in turn, signified transportation to a place of death.”[37]
Importantly,
Dawidowicz sought actively to refute the functionalist viewpoint. She argued,
for example, in response to extermination coming as an alternative to less
radical, failed policies, “Yet everything we know about National Socialist
ideology precludes our accepting the idea of [deportation to the East] as the
last stage of the Final Solution.”[38]
She dated the “practical implementation” of Hitler’s decision on extermination
to between December 18, 1940, and March 1, 1941,[39] standing in
contraposition to even Poliakov, Reitlinger, and Hilberg. Most importantly, she
attacked Schleunes’s work directly, albeit in a footnote: “Originally a
doctoral dissertation, this study attempts to trace the evolution of Nazi
Germany’s anti-Jewish policies up to 1938. Schleunes found much interesting
archival material, but failed to place it in any intelligible framework. His
only reference to Mein Kampf is to dismiss it as an inadequate
‘reflection’ of German-Jewish relations.”[40]
Broszat
published his rejoinder to the intentionalists in Vierteljahreshefte für
Zeitgeschichte (VfZ)[41]
in 1977.[42]
Primarily a response to the British historian David Irving’s book Hitler’s
War (1977),[43]
which attempted to prove that Hitler was entirely unaware of the FS, Broszat
used the opportunity provided by demonstrating the holes in Irving’s thesis to
define the functionalist position on the FS relative to the intentionalists.
For instance, dismissing the notion of a Führerbefehl, he wrote, “the
physical liquidation of the Jews was set in motion not through a one-time
decision but rather bit by bit.”[44]
He offered some sympathy with the intentionalist viewpoint but ultimately
ascribed it to an incomplete view of the evidence. Conceding that anti-Semitism
was a core aspect of Hitler’s personality and governance, Broszat wrote that,
based on this point alone, the historian “necessarily concludes that there had
been neither evolution nor radicalization. The final solution of the Jewish
question appears as a realization of a long-established programme [sic] methodically
and ‘logically’ carried out step by step.”[45] However, he used the interval of
almost three years between the lawlessness of Kristallnacht and the
beginning of the extermination of the Jewish population in the USSR to suggest
that a complete view of the FS in practice bore out that Jewish policy unfolded
in “an improvised and jerky fashion.”[46]
By
1981, the intentionalist-functionalist debate had generated sufficient light
and heat to warrant a box score of sorts. Fulfilling this need was British
historian Tim Mason, whose essay “Intention and Explanation” (1981)[47]
formally defined the debate, its terms, each side’s proponents, and their
strengths and weaknesses. Noting that the intentionalists had accused the
functionalists of “offer[ing] an unwitting apologia for National Socialism,”[48]
which Mason, as both something of a functionalist and a Marxist, rejected, he
lodged a range of criticisms against the intentionalists. These criticisms
included, but were not limited to, the failure to acknowledge the ambiguity of
primary sources, which Mason charged were read only literally by the
intentionalists.[49]
He did criticize functionalism as well, albeit less harshly, principally citing
the lack of a complete functionalist study of Nazi Germany at the time of the
essay and the dearth of economic studies by functionalists.
The
subsequent years saw important intentionalist contributions to the debate. For
instance, like the functionalist Broszat, the intentionalist Gerard Fleming was
inspired to write Hitler and the Final Solution (1984)[50] partly in
response to David Irving, as well as what he considered to be the conservative
historian Ernst Nolte’s relativizing of Nazi crimes. Using documentation
previously unknown and interviews he conducted himself, Fleming advanced the
thesis that the line between Hitler’s youthful anti-Semitism and the FS was “a
direct one.”[51]
To achieve this goal, he presented a no-nonsense narrative based on a series of
events chosen to draw that direct line most clearly. In addition, he maintained
ongoing involvement of Hitler in the FS once it began in practice in the
“leading and literally commanding role,”[52] superseding even in the
involvement of Himmler or Heydrich and “issu[ing] orders covering all aspects
of the gassing.”[53]
Meanwhile,
among the German intentionalists, Andreas Hillgruber published his essay “War
in the East and the Extermination of the Jews” (first published in German in 1984),[54]
offering a concise intentionalist overview of the FS in the context of the
Barbarossa campaign. While perhaps less vehement than Fleming, Hillgruber was
no less insistent on the interrelationship between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and
the FS. “The sole ‘explanation’ of these mass crimes ordered by Hitler
and Himmler,” he wrote with regard to the massacres committed by the Einsatzgruppen,
“can be found in the racist-ideological frame of reference.”[55] Hillgruber saw
Barbarossa as the beginning of the FS in practice, and he hypothesized a Führerbefehl
given in June or July 1940, although he acknowledged the controversy already
surrounding this point in a footnote.[56]
In short, for Hillgruber specifically and the more moderate intentionalists
generally, the decision for the FS preceded the invasion of the USSR.
Beginning
in 1986, the intentional-functionalist dispute was largely displaced among
German historians by the far more controversial Historikerstreit¸[57] in
which the aforementioned Ernst Nolte faced off in the German press against
left-wing historians led by Jürgen Habermas. At issue was whether the crimes of
Nazi Germany – the Holocaust foremost among them – were a reaction to
Bolshevik/Stalinist oppression and aggression or whether National Socialism was
truly unique. Nolte argued the former position and Habermas the latter.
Hillgruber and sided with Nolte, while Broszat and Hans Mommsen sided with
Habermas, although it ought not be assumed that the intentionalists generally sided
with Nolte, since the prominent intentionalist Eberhard Jäckel took Habermas’s
side.
While
the Historikerstreit raged in Germany, Princeton’s Arno Mayer published Why
Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988),[58] offering his own unique take on
functionalism. In contrast to the conception of Barbarossa inherent to the
intentionalism of Hillgruber or Fleming, Mayer stated that a decision for the
FS came only well into the invasion and only when it became clear to Hitler
that the Nazis might not win. Where Mayer diverged most from even the most
radical functionalists, however, was in his central thesis that it was not
anti-Semitism but anticommunism that most motivated the extermination of the
Jews; because the Nazis conflated all Jews with the Bolsheviks, the Jews could
ultimately have met no other fate. Mayer wrote, for instance, that “Hitler was
obsessed with two imagined threats: the Marxist-cum-Bolshevik ‘octopus’ and the
Jewish world conspiracy. He did not put one ahead of the other.”[59] Most
glaringly, in plain ignorance of much of the available scholarship, he wrote
about the invasion that the Einsatzgruppen “killed few Jews in the
buffer zone, and even once they penetrated Russia’s [sic] pre-1939
borders, they initiated their infamous butchery only upon reaching towns and
cities captured after heavy fighting.”[60] The historical record clearly
shows that neither assertion is accurate.
Ultimately, Mayer’s book had little influence on
the debate because of serious questions about his scholarship, but the book did
set an important boundary of sorts for how far functionalists could push their
agenda and still be taken seriously. Arguing that anti-Semitism per se
was not a core issue in the FS or, like Irving, that Hitler was not aware of
the FS were positions that would be scoffed at. Conversely, it was becoming
increasingly difficult, particularly in light of increasingly available
evidence, for extreme intentionalists to maintain that there was extensive
planning before 1939 for the FS.
In this environment, Richard Breitman published The
Architect of Genocide (1991)[61],
which traced the role of Himmler in the FS. In his introduction, Breitman
addressed both the Historikerstreit and the intentionalist-functionalist
dispute, noting specifically the diminished role played by Hitler in the
functionalist version. In Breitman’s words:
If the Final Solution was
improvised during the midst of the war, there is reason for scholars studying
it to stress the conditions and atmosphere engendered by the war itself, the
role of bureaucrats … and initiatives in the field as essential causes of
genocide. On the other hand, the earlier the existence of a high-level plan
for mass murder, or actions that could only stem from such plans, the greater
the importance of Nazi ideology and the less the importance of mid-war
imperatives and improvisation from below. Determining the chronology of
planning becomes essential in the debate.[62]
Architect sought,
therefore, to establish an earlier chronology. However, faced with a still
absent Führerbefehl and little else in the way of hard evidence for
Hitler’s direct role in the FS, Breitman opted to bring Himmler to the
forefront to show that “[t]he evolution of planning had more to do with
geography, scope, and methods of killing than with any changes from a moderate
to a radical goal.”[63]
To
establish this point, Breitman argued, among other points, that Himmler might
have conceived of the death camp killing center with gas chambers as early as
December 1939.[64]
If wholesale extermination only became a fait accompli with Barbarossa,
then it was only because “[g]eography and demography made it impossible to wipe
out the huge population of enemy groups – five million Jews alone – in one fell
swoop”[65];
this, for Breitman explained why only military-age men were targeted in the
earliest phase of the Einsatzgruppen massacres. Although Breitman closed
with a reminder that the FS had its roots in the “ideological obsessions that
Hitler, Himmler, and numerous other leading Nazis shared,”[66] he nevertheless
had to concede much of the functionalist case, and he dated the decision-making
by Hitler to no earlier than March 1941.[67]
As
the 1990s proceeded, the prevailing functionalist argument as it stands today
took its form, based largely on the work of Christopher Browning and Ian
Kershaw. In 1992, Browning took the initiative in updating the academic
community on the state of the intentionalist-functionalist debate and offering
a way forward. In a groundbreaking essay,[68] Browning argued, starting from a
functionalist position, that Barbarossa began with the Einsatzgruppen
given “only the general task of liquidating ‘potential’ enemies.”[69] The
executions of the first several weeks, he wrote, “could in no way constitute a
program of total extermination.”[70]
However, he continued, the Einsatzgruppen commanders underwent what Hans
Mommsen had called “cumulative radicalization” in implementing the policy.
Responding to Mayer and others, Browning wrote that only with the “premature
euphoria of victory, not growing frustration” did Hitler – whom Browning
insisted remained a key figure in the decision-making if not the planning – approve
a program of total extermination.[71]
This approach, called by Browning “moderate functionalism,” allowed for a
continuing central role for Hitler in the FS without insisting on a long-term
plan before Barbarossa for its implementation.
Ian Kershaw, who was mentored by Broszat,
introduced a second important innovation to the functionalist interpretation –
the concept of “working towards the Führer.”[72] Kershaw’s essay on this topic
began with a comparison of the leadership styles of Hitler vs Stalin. Kershaw
rejected the “weak dictatorship” theory about Hitler but nevertheless confirmed
the functionalist theory that Hitler took primarily a hands-off approach to
policy. Using a speech by Arthur Greiser, who was Gauleiter of Wartheland,[73] in
which Greiser referred to the concept that Hitler stated a vision and allowed
his lieutenants to achieve the goal, Kershaw wrote that “‘working towards the
Führer’ offered endless scope for barbarous initiative, and with them
institutional expansion, power, prestige and enrichment. The career of Adolf
Eichmann, rising from a menial role in a key policy area to the manager of the
‘Final Solution’, offers a classic example.”[74] The result of the relationship
established between Hitler and his underlings, Kershaw argued, was essential to
the “ceaseless … momentum of radicalisation [sic].”[75]
Against
this background of a burgeoning moderate functionalist hypothesis, Daniel
Goldhagen published Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996),[76] as a
kind of last gasp for extreme intentionalism. Goldhagen took specific aim at
Browning, specifically Browning’s book Ordinary Men (1992)[77] and
its central thesis, based on Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,”
that a significant proportion of Nazi mass murderers among the Einsatzgruppen
and police battalions were absolutely average and not even violently
anti-Semitic, at least the outset of the extermination process. According to
Goldhagen, the Holocaust was the logical culmination of German anti-Semitism.
This anti-Semitism, he maintained, was unique among hatreds in its
eliminationist quality, whereby the only solution to “the Jewish problem”[78] imaginable was the
elimination of the Jewish people, through either expulsion or extermination:
During the Nazi period, all of
the Germans’ policy initiatives and virtually all of their important measures
towards Jews, as different in nature and degree as they manifestly appear to
be, were in the practical service of, and indeed were symbolically equivalent
expressions of, the Germans’ desire, the Germans’ perceived need, to succeed
in the eliminationist enterprise.[79]
Therefore,
any notion of Nazi aggression against Jews being anything but an attempt at
extermination would be ludicrous.
Although Goldhagen’s book is important to the
historiography of the Holocaust because of the controversy it generated upon
its release, and it remains an excellent example of a radically intentionalist
point of view, it ultimately contributed little to the intentionalist-functionalist
debate. The books failed to contribute significantly at least in part because
Goldhagen, while acknowledging the importance of the debate to advancing
general knowledge about the FS, felt that the debate itself detracted from a
better understanding of the perpetrators. The sheer number of perpetrators,
according to Goldhagen, indicated something distinct about the German national
character, at least before 1945.[80]
At nearly the same time, the final piece of the
moderate functionalist puzzle was put into place by Christian Gerlach, who, in his
landmark 1997 essay on the Wannsee Conference and its role in the FS,[81]
became the first major historian to posit an exact date for Hitler’s decision
to implement total extermination. In making this case, Gerlach made a critical
distinction in Hitler’s decision-making between a decision to exterminate
Soviet Jewry (presumably in the fall of 1941) and one to eliminate German
Jewry, as well as central and western European Jews, on December 12, 1941. The
latter decision, Gerlach wrote, came as a result of the U.S. entry into the
war. If correct, Gerlach would have driven a final nail into the coffin of extreme
intentionalism and of much moderate intentionalism to boot; that said, it is
unlikely that his theory will ever be conclusively proved. Nevertheless, with
Gerlach’s work came the culmination of the moderate functionalist viewpoint in
full light of the Soviet documentation that became available beginning in 1991.
When Richard Bessel, following Mason and Browning
before him, sought to update historians on the state of the
intentionalist-functionalist debate in 2003, he essentially declared it over,
while noting that the sides still existed.[82] On the one hand, Bessel wrote,
“the battle lines have become rather blurred”[83]; on the other hand, he argued, it
might be useful to consider “how little the battle lines may have changed since
1979.”[84]
That is, ideologically, functionalism, with its methodological roots, and
intentionalism, with its focus on morality, have remained entrenched on their
respective sides. However, as noted here, more moderate approaches from each
side that acknowledge the important points made by the other side have become
more widely accepted. As a result, we know much more now about the FS in its
planning and execution than we did in the late 1960s, when the debate began in
earnest.
The full breadth of what we know about the FS and
how far the moderate functionalist viewpoint, in particular, has evolved are
perhaps best expressed in Browning’s Origins of the Final Solution
(2003).[85]
Among Browning’s conclusions are that Hitler made the key decision for the FS
in the fall of 1941[86];
thus, Barbarossa itself was not the beginning of the FS, as earlier
functionalists had maintained. However, the intentionalist school continues to
produce significant scholarship, among it Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany
and the Jews, the second volume of which, entitled The Years of
Extermination,[87]
covers the period between 1941 and 1945. The very dating of the second volume could
be seen as a sort of concession to the functionalists. Finally, while the
moderate functionalist viewpoint has largely triumphed, more radical
functionalist endeavors, notably Donald Bloxham’s The Final Solution,[88] continue to
challenge the boundaries of what we think we understand about the Nazis
generally and the FS specifically. Most importantly, as both Bessel and
Goldhagen noted, as a result of the intentionalist-functionalist debate, we
know more today than we might have known about the Holocaust.
[1] It should be noted that virtually no
historians assert that the policies pursued by the Nazi leadership before the
summer of 1941 would not have resulted in a significant loss of human life.
Rather, the issues here involve whether this loss of human life would be more
active (through the use of firing squads and eventually of gas chambers) or
more passive (expelling populations of Jews into a new territory with no
concern for their well-being on the journey or their continued survival once
they had arrived) and whether the FS would encompass only Eastern European Jews
or Jews in other occupied areas of Europe (e.g., France, Greece, Bulgaria,
etc.). In short, no one believes that the Nazis did not intend to do grave harm
to Europe’s Jews; rather, what is disputed is the extent of the harm and extent
of Nazi agency in committing it.
[2] Literally the “commissar order”; all
units of the Soviet Union’s Red Army had political commissars attached to them.
[3] Léon Poliakov, Bréviaire de la Haine:
Le IIIo Reich et les Juifs (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1951), Ebook
edition. All quotations represent my own translations from the French.
[4] Ibid, 3.
[5] Ibid, 67.
[6] In addition to the Reich Chancellery (Reichkanzlei),
which was the traditional office of the Chancellor (equivalent to Prime
Minister) of Germany, Hitler also instituted a chancellery from his office
operated by the Nazi Party (the Parteikanzlei) and a personal
chancellery (the Führerkanzlei). These offices operated as buffers
through which information came to and from Hitler.
[7] The SS, short for Schutzstaffel,
i.e., the protection squad, began as a paramilitary organization of the Nazi
Party. Ultimately, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, it came to
encompass not only the role of security but also those of intelligence and
policing. Reichsführer was a title held only by the head of the SS.
[8] Poliakov, 68.
[9] Literally “action groups,” the Einsatzgruppen
were paramilitary units attached to the Wehrmacht (Germany Army) that
operated behind the front in a quasi-intelligence capacity. Among their chief
responsibilities was the physical elimination of political opposition. They
were first deployed in the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi
Germany in March 1938.
[10] Poliakov, 73.
[11] Gerard Reitlinger, The Final Solution:
The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (New York: A.S.
Barnes and Company, 1961).
[12] Ibid, 4.
[13] After invasion by Nazi Germany and by the
Soviet Union 16 days later, Poland was divided into three zones. The
westernmost and easternmost portions were annexed by Germany and the USSR,
respectively, while the middle zone, called the General Government, was
occupied by Germany and placed under civilian administration but not annexed.
[14] Reitlinger, 81.
[15] Poliakov, 171, note ej.
[16] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the
European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961).
[17] Ibid, 31.
[18] Ibid, 4.
[19] “Barbarossa” was the name given by Hitler
to the invasion of the Soviet Union.
[20] Ibid, 32.
[21] Ibid, 177.
[22] The highest rank in the German armed
forces, it was held only by Göring, who served as chief of the air force (Luftwaffe)
and vice chancellor of Germany and who unofficially managed the German economy.
[23] Quoted in Hilberg, 262.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The
Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich,
trans. John W. Hiden (London: Longman, 1981).
[26] The term “weak dictator” (schwachen
Diktator) appears to have been coined by German historian Hans Mommsen,
another important early contributor to the functionalist thesis, in his 1966
book Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (The Civil Service in the Third
Reich).
[27] Broszat, 323.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to
Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39 (Urbana-Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1990).
[30] Ibid, 70.
[31] Ibid, 92.
[32] Andreas Hillgruber, Die ‘Endlösung’ und
das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologische Programms des
Nationsozialismus, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20 (1972), 133-53.
[33] Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against
the Jews (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2010), Kindle.
[34] Ibid, location 419.
[35] Ibid, 23, location 917.
[36] Literally, “the point at which something
ends”; Dawidowicz, 151, location 3577.
[37] Ibid 106, location 2648.
[38] Ibid 118, location 2868.
[39] Ibid 121, location 2929.
[40] Ibid, 406, location 8691, note 12.
[41] Literally, Quarterly Journal of
Contemporary History, Vfz is the journal of the Institut für
Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich, among the
premier centers of study of the Third Reich. Martin Broszat was its director
for nearly two decades.
[42] Martin Broszat, “Hitler and the Genesis
of the ‘Final Solution’: An Assessment of David Irving’s Theses,” in Aspects
of the Third Reich, edited by H.W. Koch (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985),
390-429.
[43] David Irving, Hitler’s War (New
York: Viking, 1977).
[44] Broszat, “Hitler and the Genesis,” 398.
[45] Ibid, 423.
[46] Ibid, 423-424.
[47] Timothy W. Mason, “Intention and
Explanation: A Current Controversy About the Interpretation of National
Socialism,” in Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason,
edited by Jane Caplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 212-30.
[48] Ibid, 213.
[49] Ibid, 220-221.
[50] Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final
Solution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
[51] Ibid, 2.
[52] Ibid, 42.
[53] Ibid, 110.
[54] Andreas Hillgruber, “War in the East and
the Extermination of the Jews,” Yad Vashem Studies XVII (1987): 103-33.
[55] Ibid, 122, emphasis mine.
[56] Ibid, 112, note 44.
[57] Literally, the “historians’ argument”; a
good English-language introduction to the issues at hand is Richard Evans’s In
Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past
(New York: Pantheon, 1989).
[58] Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not
Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
[59] Ibid, 107-108.
[60] Ibid, 270.
[61] Richard Breitman, The Architect of
Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991).
[62] Ibid, 24.
[63] Ibid, 32.
[64] Ibid, 88.
[65] Ibid, 169.
[66] Ibid, 246.
[67] Ibid, 206.
[68] Christopher R. Browning, “Beyond
‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism’: The Decision for the Final Solution
Reconsidered,” in The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final
Solution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86-124.
[69] Ibid, 101.
[70] Ibid, 102.
[71] Ibid, 111.
[72] Ian Kershaw, “‘Working Towards the
Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary
European History 2 (July 1993): 103-18.
[73] Gauleiter was a Nazi party term
used for a regional party leader; in some respects, the Gauleiters acted in the
capacity of regional governors. Wartheland was an area of Poland occupied by
Germany in 1939 that was annexed to the Reich.
[74] Ibid, 117; Eichmann, perhaps the best
known war criminal tried since Nuremberg, was the person in charge of deporting
Jewish populations to their deaths, particularly after the assassination of
Heydrich in June 1942.
[75] Ibid, 109.
[76] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s
Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf,
1996).
[77] Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men:
Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York:
HarperCollins, 1992).
[78]
Notably, while most scholars have
historically translated the German term Judenfrage as “Jewish question,”
Goldhagen translated it as “Jewish problem” – thus more clearly requiring a Lösung,
i.e., a solution.
[79] Goldhagen, 48.
[80] Ibid, 10-11.
[81] Christian Gerlach, “The Wannsee
Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in Principle to
Exterminate All European Jews,” Journal of Modern History 70 (December
1998): 759-812.
[82] Richard Bessel, “Functionalists vs.
Intentionalists: The Debate Twenty Years on or Whatever Happened to
Intentionalism and Functionalism?” German Studies Review 26 (February
2003): 15-20.
[83] Ibid, 15.
[84] Ibid, 18.
[85] Christopher R. Browning, The Origins
of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March
1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
[86] Notably, the search for a written Führerbefehl
has been almost entirely abandoned.
[87] Saul Friedländer, The Years of
Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
[88] Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A
Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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