New Podcast Appearance: DOOMED With Matt Binder

I appeared on Matt Binder's podcast DOOMED last night. Here's the appearance plus another hour or so of content from him. Worth subscribing and watching often. I'll be back in a week or two with this term's research paper (finally).

live now with @thamesdarwin discussing holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists. tune in: https://t.co/wVqBrTGmod

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) May 3, 2019

Mattogno on Riga, Part Four: Polishing a Turd

I’m going to finish this series on Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the murder on 30 November 1941 of thousands of Latvian Jews, plus a thousand Reich Jews who had just arrived in Riga, by making a few general observations.

Before that, however, a couple of confessions. First, I’m not an historian, although I do have an undergraduate history degree (summa cum laude) and 20 graduate credits in history (U.K. system). Also, I’ve never read a whole book by Mattogno. Readers of this blog will know that I am not a coauthor of the white paper published by most of the bloggers here several years ago, despite being one of the blog’s founders. Therefore, the extent to which I can claim any expertise on the topic at hand should be considered with those points in mind.

I spent the last week or so writing around 2,000 words on roughly ten pages of “history” written by Mattogno. While not an expert per se, I can state the following with confidence. Mattogno’s writing of history is terrible – just awful. If I submitted a paper for a grade with the kinds of errors he makes (or lies he tells), I’d get a failing grade. Were I a peer reviewer who received his work to be considered for publication in a scholarly journal (a job I have, in fact, done in a different field of the humanities), not only would I reject it outright, refusing to consider it further upon revision, but I would seriously doubt the field expertise and/or intellectual honesty of the writer.

In the ten pages on Riga alone, in a mere 2,000 words, I’ve managed to point out a number of serious methodological errors and instances of outright lying. This is not an historian – this is either an imbecile or an ideologue bent on falsifying the historical record. That Mattogno is routinely held up as the leading light of “revisionist scholarship” says a boatload about the quality of the scholarship we’re talking about. That he has managed to keep his hands relatively clean regarding overt anti-Semitism (a claim his coauthor Jurgen Graf cannot make) is a worthless distinction given the pitiful state of his “research."

“But look at all the footnotes!” Footnotes are worthless unless they’re deployed honestly. Yes, Mattogno cites a number of sources, but he doesn’t bother to present the material in those sources honestly or thoroughly.

“Thousands of pages can’t be wrong!” Yes, they can. Plus, did you ever notice how many of those pages are taken up by direct quotations? If he were a student, Mattogno would be cited for plagiarism despite acknowledging his sources because the sheer volume of quoted material is so great.

“He’s an expert in textual analysis!” Really? Who says? He doesn’t appear to have a degree in anything except (perhaps) classics and philosophy. I assume he learned some textual analysis as part of that process. That does not, however, make one an expert. Nor are the “readings” that he offers of many texts plausible or defensible.

Carlo Mattogno is a charlatan of the highest order. That he can reasonably present the veneer of respectability is beside the point. You can only polish that turd so much.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Three: Hierarchies Are Hard

Having addressed Mattogno’s butchering of the Keine Liquidierung phone note and ignorance of points like basic meteorology, geography, and arithmetic, we move in this post to discussing how Mattogno addresses the aftermath of the shooting of a thousand Reich Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941. The “orthodox” history has it that, Lange having lodged a complaint about this shooting to RSHA and thus to Himmler, Himmler issued the orders the following day regarding the ongoing disposition of Reich Jews arriving in Riga and Minsk and summoned Jeckeln on 4 December to discuss events.

Mattogno’s first point of contention here regards why Jeckeln’s shooting of Reich Jews on 30 November should warrant the attention of Heydrich and Himmler, but the shooting of Reich Jews in Kaunas on 25 and 29 November by Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando would not; he writes (p. 217), “Therefore, as Himmler did with Jeckeln, the SS should also have summoned Jäger for a reprimand.” Again, on its face, this seems like a reasonable argument. However, there are a few key differences between the cases that Mattogno does not acknowledge.

First, there was no conflict of interest or “turf war” in Kaunas as there was in Riga. After all, Lange did not raise the issue of Reich Jews in Riga being shot because he was particularly concerned with their lives. Rather, he seems to have been motivated by the need to apportion some Jews to work detail and, perhaps as importantly, the fear that his prerogative to manage the arrival and treatment of Reich Jews in Riga, which he had been assigned as a member of the SD, would be taken over by Jeckeln. Also, it’s worth noting that it was Lange who had routed the Reich Jews shot in Kaunas to that city in the first place; therefore, if anyone would have raised an alarm, it would have been he.

Second, there is again the matter of geography – Riga is not Kaunas, and more importantly, the people stationed in each city were different. Jäger’s immediate superior, Stahlecker, was stationed in Riga; in contrast, Jeckeln, as an HSSPF, had Himmler as his immediate superior. Therefore, while Stahlecker, like Lange, could have taken issue with Jäger’s shooting of Reich Jews five days and one day earlier and some reprimand given, that they were in different cities made such a scenario less likely to have yet emerged, particularly while occurring in the context of the Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto being shot at the same time. Complicating matters is that, as I pointed out in my article on the Keine Liquidierung note, it seems fairly clear that Stahlecker wasn’t even in Riga on the dates in question. Otherwise, as Finnberg pointed out in his testimony, Lange would have brought his complaint directly to Stahlecker.

Mattogno pulls something similar in discussing the dispute that arose between Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for Ostland, and the SS regarding the need to keep Jews alive for labor. Noting that Jeckeln claimed to have been ordered by Himmler to exterminate the Jews in the Riga Ghetto on 10 or 11 November, Mattogno points to a document dated 20 November from the Generalkommissar for Latvia, Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, commenting on labor assignments for ghetto Jews. Clearly, if the Jews of the ghetto were to be exterminated, Drechsler’s document makes no sense. Mattogno writes (p. 225), “Can one seriously believe that the Generalkommisar in Riga, who issued these orders, had never heard of Himmler’s alleged extermination order?”

Well, frankly, yes. Drechsler’s immediate superior was Lohse, who in turn reported directly to Alfred Rosenberg as Minister for the Eastern Territories – the civilian occupation regime. Jeckeln, as noted, reported directly to Himmler. Since the dispute between Lohse and the SS was ongoing, there is no reason to think Drechsler would not have begun planning to deploy the Riga Ghetto Jews for labor, particularly since, when he wrote the document in question, the Jews in the ghetto were still alive.    

A key thing to point out here is that there are two possibilities for what Mattogno has done in these cases. Either Mattogno doesn’t know or understand the differences in hierarchies between the SD, on the one hand, and the SS and Police Leaders, on the other, or between the SS hierarchy in the east and that of the civilian administration, or he’s deliberately obfuscating. The man has written several books on the topic of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity, so the odds favor the latter, although I suppose the former is possible.

The next and last part of this series will offer some final observations on how Mattogno has treated this topic. Spoiler alert: He has done so badly.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Two: Phone Calls in Riga, Prague, and Berlin

Picking up where I left off in my last post, Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the mass shooting of Latvian Jews, as well as a thousand newly arrived Reich Jews, on 30 November 1941 is riddled with errors and lapses in logic. After briefly remarking on the discrepancy between the actual date of the shooting and the date as reported in Stahlecker’s famous report of the following year (“in early December”), Mattogno writes (p. 216), “The exact date is important because the shooting of the Jewish transport early in the morning depended precisely on the large number of persons who were to be killed during the day. This has its logic, but if 45 minutes (from 8:15 to 9:00 AM) was time enough to kill 1,000 persons (according to the verdict in the Riga Trial), then why did it require more than seven hours to kill 4,000 people? At Riga, in fact, the sun only came up at 8:34 AM on 30 November, and it set at 3:50 PM.”

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

With my blogmates already having responded to parts of Carlo Mattogno’s magnum opus on the Einsatzgruppen, I decided to have a look at the ten pages Mattogno dedicates to the killings in the fall of 1941 in Riga – a topic I’ve had occasion to look at very closely over the last couple of years. I put together some of the theories about the famous Keine Liquidierung note a few years back; for his part, Mattogno seems to have stuck with some of the less compelling explanations.

Constructing Utopia? The Third Reich

How important was anti-Semitism to the Nazi regime before 1939? Had the regime started on the 'twisted road to Auschwitz' before 1939?

Anti-Semitism was always vitally important to the Nazi regime, although that importance could be muted in public at times. Certainly it was a core philosophical underpinning of the Nazi movement, and while the Nazis would occasionally mute their presentation of the issue while attempting to campaign for votes, they did not hesitate to implement anti-Semitic legislation once in power. That said, it is also true that the state-sponsored anti-Semitism of 1939 was both qualitatively and quantitatively different from that in 1933.

For instance, while the regime implemented such measures as the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, and the systematic removal of Jews from the white-collar professions began almost immediately, the actual extraction process by which Jews would be removed from German life was quite slow. Several authors make it clear that the Nazis' primary objective during their first year in power was the establishment of single-party rule and Gleichschaltung; for instance, Jeremy Noakes details the suppression of the Bavarian People's Party, writing, "Although the BVP leaders were treated gently by comparison with Socialists and Communists and released after only a few days, this kind of cat-and-mouse tactic was clearly calculated to exercise the maximum psychological pressure on respectable middle-class people, for whom imprisonment would have a particularly traumatic effect."[1] Therefore, the anti-Semitic legislation of the first two years notwithstanding, the power of the state was principally against political enemies: the KPD and SPD, then other parties, and subsequently Nazi party rivals in the Knight of the Long Knives.

The period between the passage of the Nuremberg Law, which altered the citizenship status of German Jews, and Reichskristallnacht, which marked the first instance in which the full fury of Nazi Party functionaries was unleashed at large against the German-Jewish population, marked a section stage during which increased legal pressure was exerted upon the Jewish population while, perhaps counterintuitively, the Jewish population of the state increased by virtue of the annexations of Austria (particularly Vienna) and the Sudetenland (and Prague in March 1939). As hinted at in the prompt for this post, Karl Schleunes nevertheless points out in The Twisted Road to Auschwitz that, even as the noose tightened around the necks of German Jews and many sought to emigrate, the retail sector, which was heavily populated by Jewish family businesses, was exempted from much of the legislation because of the precarious state of the German economy, primarily the lack of foreign reserve currency. Remarking on the 1933 boycott, Schleunes writes, "economic considerations had forced the Nazis to protect several Jewish department stores"; this protection was followed by a government bailout for one of these stores.[2] Thus, despite Kristallnacht, the reason for Hermann Göring's anger with Joseph Goebbels at having unleashed the pogrom was that Germany was not yet prepared to lose this vital section of the economy, not to mention its physical capital.

Ultimately, as became the case even into the war with the implementation of the Final Solution, Nazi Jewish policy was clearly enunciated in philosophy but tended to limp along until a major event caused it to ratchet up significantly. The Nuremberg Laws were the first major elevation, Kristallnacht was the second, and with the war, the elevations became both greater in magnitude and more radical and deadly. This is the "twisted road" of which Schleunes's title speaks, and because the extermination camp at Birkenau was certainly not envisioned in 1933, the road that led there was necessarily contingent and thus "crooked."

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[1] Jeremy Noakes, "The Nazi Revolution," in Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Moira Donald and Tim Rees (London: Palgrave, 2001), 107.
[2] Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39 (Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 93.

Book Review: Mayer's "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?"

I'm starting a new job next week, so I don't know when I'll have time to blog again soon. With hope, I'll be in a new course in September and will blog regularly then; in the meantime, I'm offering the below.

The first course I took when I went back to school in 2015 was a hisoriography course, for which the below was one of my assignments, i.e., a review of one of the books I would be including in my term paper for the course, which I posted earlier. Figured I'd post this now, since my academic studies have taken a bit of a pause.

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Mayer, Arno J. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History. New

York: Pantheon, 1988.

This book[1] makes a curious, albeit mostly baffling, contribution to the intentionalist-functionalist debate. Mayer, who is currently professor emeritus of history at Princeton and holder of an endowed chair, began his academic career specializing in World War I and its aftermath, writing his dissertation at Yale on the relationship between the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. He went on to publish a book on the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles and volumes on European revolution and counter-revolution before trying his hand at the Final Solution. The result commits the dual errors of advancing a thesis even too radical for most functionalists and of failing to substantiate his argument with sufficient primary and secondary sources and documentation. The result is a text that ultimately has greater worth as a curiosity than as an addition to either the history or the historiographical debate.

The problems with Heavens begin with Mayer’s nomenclature and compound from there. First, Mayer elects to eschew the two most common terms to refer to the extermination of Europe’s Jews during World War II, Holocaust and Final Solution, in favor of “Judeocide,” a term unused by historians before Mayer and largely ignored since. While his complaint about the term “Holocaust,” i.e., that it has religious connotations and that its emphasis on survivor memory incurs fundamental problems with critical analysis,[2] is well-worn ground, but his rejection of the term “Final Solution,” particularly given the predominant use of the term among functionalists emphasizing the Nazi government’s agency over the victims’ perspectives, seems poorly founded. In addition, Mayer proposes and applies a three-fold paradigm of anti-Semitism, with “Judeophobia” connoting personal prejudice, “anti-Semitism” connoting institutionalized prejudice against Jews, and “anti-Judaism” connoting hostility toward the Jewish faith.[3] That he relegates his explanation to a footnote rather than offering a more incorporated explanation of his terminology for his reader seems frankly hostile.

Moreover, on a macro scale, Mayer chooses to present the “Judeocide” within the broad context of what he calls the “Second Thirty Years War,” covering both world wars and the interwar period. In a lengthy prologue that strays far from the central subject matter, Mayer draws broad analogies between the period from 1914 to 1945 and that from 1618 to 1648, the “First Thirty Years War.” Sharing in common the explosion of widespread violence in central Europe in the context of a general social and economic crisis, Mayer clearly sees strong similarities between the periods, but his discussion of the Thirty Years War – not to mention his discussion in the same prologue of the first Crusades – seems more like a justification for an historian specializing outside the Nazi period to write about the Final Solution than an ideological framework, which it ultimately is not. That the three periods – the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the first half of the twentieth century – involved the commission of grave acts of violence by German-speaking people against civilian Jewish populations is not in dispute; rather, the relevance of the similarities feels strained, particularly when this framework is not sustained throughout the work, except for in the repetition of particular contrived terms.

The result of this decision to use non-standard terminology adds a level of density to an already challenging read. Mayer frequently uses German terms without translating them, and although his vocabulary in English (which is not his first or second language, it bears noting) is extraordinary, both of these points communicate a certain hostility toward the non-specialist. These choices by the author are particularly stunning given Mayer’s highly controversial choice to eschew the use of footnotes entirely, even in cases of direct quotations. According to historian Richard Breitman, when challenged during a symposium on his non-use of standard citation methods, Mayer defended himself by claiming that he had no need to “prove his manhood.”[4] With three words, Mayer somehow managed to offend women, conscientious historians, and, it must be pondered, tenured professors, given Mayer’s presence at Princeton for 27 years by the time this book appeared.

Beyond the problems of nomenclature and shoddy scholarship, Heavens has the additional problem of some statements that Mayer makes that simply cannot be justified in the context of the available scholarship. In perhaps the best-known of these statements, Mayer writes about the Nazi concentration/extermination camp Auschwitz in southwestern Poland, where one million people were murdered, the majority of them Jews, “[F]rom 1942 to 1945, certainly from Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than ‘un-natural’ ones.”[5] Given the established fact that the majority of Jews killed by the Final Solution were dead by the end of 1942, this statement seems particularly ludicrous. Similarly inane is Mayer’s contention that the Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads deployed against political operatives and civilians in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “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.”[6] In fact, the Jewish casualties in the areas abutting the 1939 border were enormous, particularly in Latvia and Lithuania, where the Nazis faced virtually no resistance from the Soviet Red Army, which had fled in the face of the invasion.

All of these significant shortcomings of Heavens relate in some fashion to Mayer’s highly controversial thesis, which is that the “Judeocide” of World War II was not ultimately so much an expression of anti-Semitism (or “Judeophobia”) as the result of the conflation by Hitler and the Nazis of Jewish identity with Bolshevism, i.e., Judeobolschewismus. In short, had the Nazis’ not primarily targeted the Soviet Union among their war aims and had they not primarily done so because of their intractable hatred of Soviet communism, then Jewish casualties would have been significantly fewer. It should be stipulated that the latter part of this proposition – that the Nazis turning toward extermination as a policy toward Europe’s Jews was intimately linked to the fortunes of the military campaign against the USSR – is a fundamental assumption of functionalism. That the Nazis’ anticommunism outweighed their hatred of Jews is not.

While it is not unusual, particularly in the functionalist camp, for a thesis greatly at odds with the prevailing scholarship to be introduced, for it to be introduced in the absence of justification among the pre-existing literature is unheard of. In this sense, the errors of Mayer’s technique and the outlandishness of his central thesis are fundamentally connected. For example, less than twenty pages after making his statement about natural vs unnatural causes of Jewish deaths, Mayer writes, “Seemingly discontinuous with the intrinsic social amalgam and tactical ambiguity of the Nazi project, as well as uninformed by precedent, the extermination sites [the Aktion Reinhard camps and Chelmno] defy explanation.”[7] Yitzhak Arad’s seminal study of the Aktion Reinhard camps – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka – was published in English in 1987,[8] and it was incumbent upon Mayer as a responsible historian to be aware of the major scholarship in the field and to revise his own writing accordingly. That Mayer failed to acknowledge the very explanation of the Reinhard camps that Arad provided is almost criminally negligent.

These very large negative aspects of Heavens notwithstanding, Mayer, as a self-described Marxist, is an able historian of European anticommunism and anti-Sovietism, and while these passages of the book are similarly unsourced, they are nevertheless not at odds with the established scholarship. Moreover, the framing device of the Second Thirty Years War is potentially enlightening, but as noted above, Mayer does not sustain this framework sufficiently to qualify his book as an essential reading on those particular grounds. Readers in search of a radically functionalist point of view have a rich literature to consult that can both communicate the functionalist thesis and serve as bases for further research. Heavens sadly does neither.

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[1] Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

[2] Ibid, 16.

[3] Ibid, 5, footnote.

[4] Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 26.

[5] Mayer, 365.

[6] Ibid, 270.

[7] Ibid, 377, emphasis mine.

[8] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

Stefan Molyneux Is Holocaust Denier-Adjacent

Simul-blogged at Holocaust Controversies

You probably missed, but there was a bit of a dust-up a couple of days ago on Twitter. What happened was that, about a month ago, New Atheist Sam Harris hosted Christian Picciolini on his podcast. Picciolini is a former leader of the Hammerskins skinhead group who reformed several years ago and now does the lecture circuit talking about how to prevent/undo the damage done by such groups. During the Q&A section of podcast, Picciolini stated his belief that Stefan Molyneux, the very popular Irish-Canadian YouTube (on who much more here). Now, weeks later, Harris announced that he had expunged all mention of Molyneux from his podcast, apparently because Molyneux lodged a complaint with Harris. For his own part, Picciolini took to Twitter to complain and offered some evidence.

So what's the deal here? Is Stefan Molyneux a Holocaust denier?

No, but he is Holocaust denier-adjacent.

This is a blog about Holocaust denial, so I won't bore you here by providing you with some definition of denial and showing you that Molyneux doesn’t exactly fit the bill. But what is this adjacency of which I speak? It boils down to a few key points.

1) Molyneux frequently engages in anti-Semitic rhetoric that, at the very least, seeks to "explain" anti-Semitism by identifying Jews behaving badly. For instance, while I certainly have issues with some of the content from its editor, this video provides some good examples. Among other topics, Molyneux details how communism generally and Bolshevism specifically were really Jewish movements. To be clear, it's true that the number of Jews among the Bolsheviks was larger than their proportion in the general population. It's also true that, by WWII, most of them were gone -- Kaganovich and Livtnov* being the notable exceptions. It's moreover true that other political parties in revolutionary Russia and had far higher proportions of Jewish members: specifically the Mensheviks, the General Jewish Workers' Association (the Bund), and the Zionist parties. The latter two were, in fact, entirely Jewish. Why so many Jews in left-wing parties? The answer is a pretty simple one. Left-wing politics seek to disturb pre-existing hierarchies. Jews were near the bottom of the Tsarist hierarchy. Do the math.

2) Molyneux has hosted Holocaust deniers on his show. In particular, Molyneux has hosted Chuck Johnson (discussed by our own Sergey Romanov here) and "Styxhexenhammer666," on whom see this RationalWiki article. Maybe Molyneux hosted these guys before they became deniers? One of Sergey's archived links is from January 2017; Molyneux last hosted Johnson one month earlier. But Molyneux also tweeted out a statement supportive of Johnson six months after that. With Styxhexenhammer, Molyneux has hosted him more than once since his denial statements.

3) He seems to buy every other Jewish conspiracy theory. OK, not the really dumb ones like blood libels, but he's constantly bleating about "cultural Marxism," and there's a good case to be made that this is really just an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Is it possible that Molyneux doesn't realize that it is? Sure, it's possible -- it's just not likely.

All of that makes him denier-adjacent, in my opinion. Others might call aspects of Molyneux's shtick "soft denial." That works too.

But is he a racist? Oh, you betcha.

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* Litvinov gets an asterisk in this case due to his removal from office by Stalin, purportedly because he was Jewish and therefore an inappropriate representative of the Soviet foreign ministry and signing a non-aggression pact with the Nazis. He eventually returned to the foreign ministry. Yes, Lenin was apparently one-quarter Jewish by ancestry; no, he did not identify as Jewish, nor was he raised Jewish. No, Stalin was not Jewish. Nor was Beria.

Paul Craig Roberts Crosses the Line

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

If you've never heard of Paul Craig Roberts, don't feel bad. As a public figure, he seems to have hit his high water mark during the Reagan Adminstration as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, where he stridently defended supply-side economic policy. Since 2001, he has been a rather loud voice among the 9/11 truth movement, which dovetails nicely with his Buchanan-esque paleoconservative views of Israel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his writings over the last decade or so have walked a very fine line between perhaps overly vehement but otherwise justifiable attacks on Israel's role in American foreign policy to overtly anti-Semitic rhetoric. I want to be clear before continuing that I don't know whether Roberts is an anti-Semite and am not saying that he is. But with his latest column, he has crossed over a divide -- whether he knows it or not -- into plain Holocaust denial. And for this, he needs to answer.

Roberts's column posted on May 3, entitled "Morality, Truth, Facts Have Exited From The Dying West," begins by addressing remarks made Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a speech to the Palestinian National Council on April 30 -- or more correctly addressing the response by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who called Abbas's remarks Holocaust denial. To be clear, I don’t know what Abbas actually said, but if the reporting is correct, then his remarks were at the very least insensitive and overly general regarding the causes of European anti-Semitism and its relationship with Zionism. That Abbas has a history of overt Holocaust denial (having written a doctoral dissertation several decades ago that minimized the death toll) didn't help Abbas's case here. For what it's worth, he has since apologized.

Roberts first expresses agreement with Abbas's remark that European anti-Semitism was not Christian in origin but rather an outgrowth of Jewish control over money lending (again, a bit of an overgeneralization), but in the fourth paragraph, he really hits his stride:

What was the Holocaust? According to zionists, the Holocaust was National Socialist Germany’s elimination of 6 million Jews by first gassing them and then cremating the bodies. It is unclear how Germany managed this feat when all of its limited and dwindling resources were employed, unsuccessfully as it turns out, on the Russian front.

The first problem, obviously, is that the definition he provides is not one limited to only "zionists" [sic]. More importantly, as noted in numerous blog posts here, no responsible historian claims that the Nazis gassed six million Jews. Fewer than three million deaths of Jews during the war can be attributed conclusively to gassing; at least an equal number were shot by Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, were starved or died from disease in ghettos or non-death camps, or were murdered by Axis allies.

His third point is also a bit of a groaner, although if we could extend the benefit of the doubt to him regarding good faith, we might say it's a decent question. Enough ink has been spilled on the topic of the changing nature of Nazi Jewish policy during the Barbarossa campaign, so I won't reinvent that wheel here except to note that Roberts seems woefully under-read on this topic. Anyone with more than a miniseries-level knowledge of the Holocaust would consider the whole paragraph an exercise in either total ignorance of historical facts or evidence of bad faith.

Roberts continues:

Photos demonstrating the Holocaust include dead skeletal-like bodies. But these are not people gassed and cremated. These are deaths from typhus and starvation. The disintegrating German state had no food or medicines for Germans and often not for its own soldiers. Concentration camp inmates were on the bottom of the totem pole.

True enough, the bodies in German camps found by American and British liberators were of Jews who died of disease and starvation. To his credit, Roberts does not try to claim that these dead Jews are not the responsibility of the German state. But that's a less interesting point than feeling the need to point this fact out at all. Where have I seen this before? Oh yes! That Roberts deploys an opening gambit of virtually every Holocaust denier I've encountered over the last 20 years is probably not a vote in his favor here

The next few paragraphs is really where the rubber meets the road, so I want to drill down on these a bit. He begins, "We know very little about the Holocaust, because no one is allowed to study it."

Actually, we know a tremendous amount about the Holocaust and what we know about it we know because people have routinely been able to study it. This might seem axiomatic, but apparently it isn't, since it's another commonly used opening gambit used by deniers. More on this below.

Roberts continues, "Anyone in Europe who studies it and makes the slightest correction to the zionist narrative is arrested and imprisoned as a Holocaust denier."

Putting aside the point addressed above about a "zionist narrative," Roberts is simply wrong. Assuming by "zionist narrative," he means that European Jews were deliberately murdered in numbers of approximately six million by the Nazis, using methods including poison gas, then perhaps he isn't aware that this account is routinely modified on the basis of newly available evidence. Interestingly, one of the things that has happened is that the death toll estimated by historians has tended to go up, not down. Gerald Reitlinger (a European) estimated the number of deaths as falling in range of 4.3 million to 4.7 million in 1953; Raul Hilberg (another European, albeit eventually a naturalized American) estimated the number at 5.1 million in 1961. These numbers, by the way, were already at odds with numbers estimated by, e.g., the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry tasked with estimating this number. Reitlinger wasn't prosecuted for estimating a number fully 1.5 million smaller than the "official" estimate.

Roberts again: "There is no doubt that many Jews were killed, but there are different views about the various means employed and the extent to which the process was organized or haphazard. Before differences could be resolved and sorted out, the subject was put off limits."

Compare Mark Weber's writing from "The Holocaust: Let's Hear Both Sides": "They ["revisionists"] do not dispute the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during the Second World War."

Regarding the means employed, to be clear, there are not different views, at least among anyone who has taken the time to explore the issue. Regarding whether the process was organized or haphazard, thereby hangs a tale -- one told here and elsewhere repeatedly, despite Roberts's assurance that such a discussion is "off limits."

Two points bear mention here. The first is the intentionalist-functionalist debate, which I wrote about here. If it interests you, you can read about it further, but suffice it to say that it was perhaps the major point of dispute among historians for a couple of decades, and nobody went to prison.

The second point is the Historikerstreit, or "historians' fight" of the 1980s and 1990s, during which conservative German scholars openly questioned the extent to which the Holocaust might have been a natural reaction on the part of the Nazis to Bolshevist terror, which was believed by many people, not just Nazis, to be specifically Jewish in origin (owing to the Jewish backgrounds of many early Bolsheviks). None of these historians were punished either. Many of them wrote canonical works in the historiography of the Third Reich (e.g., Ernst Nolte) that remain important.

Not to put too fine a point on this issue, but I've spent the last two years researching fairly intensively the Holocaust in the Baltic States and eastern Poland. Trust me when I tell you that no small amount of the work in this area has examined the extent to which Jews living in these regions might have provoked the anger of the populations by embracing the Soviets when the Red Army occupied these regions between September 1939 and June 1941. This point is examined because it's an important one -- if one of the goals of history is to assure that, by understanding history, we can avoid it being repeated in its worst aspects, then understanding the motivations of the murderers of Europe's Jews is an important part of the process.

None of the historians who have examined this question -- difficult as it is to examine -- have been prosecuted, much less imprisoned. Where "historians" have been imprisoned is when they have publicly stated their conviction that the Holocaust was essentially a hoax -- that the number of victims have been irresponsibly inflated and especially that no gassings were committed. As wrongheaded and counterproductive as I might think these laws are, it's worth noting that these are the people who have been prosecuted -- not radical functionalists like Götz Aly, not conservative revisionists seeking to draw an equivalence between the Holocaust and Stalinist mass killing like Nolte, and not nationalist historians like Mark Paul, whose work seeks to contextualize the mass killing of Jews within the behavior of certain sectors of the Jewish population. Also worth noting is that the people who are prosecuted are often not prosecuted for denying the Holocaust per se but for inciting racial hatred -- which is a crime in more countries than it is not. Given that the Venn diagram for Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites is pretty much a perfect circle, this fact ought not surprise us.

Roberts writes the following next:

For example, suppose a scholar in Germany discovers a previously unknown document that proves that National Socialist Germany exterminated 3 million Jews. This discovery of proof of the Holocaust would be rewarded with the arrest and imprisonment of the scholar for reporting the document, because it conflicts with the official zionist declaration of 6 million. The document would be branded a falsification and discarded. The scholar’s career would be ruined.

I hope the examples of Reitlinger and Hilberg above have disproved this point. But I do believe that, were a document found smeared with Hitler's DNA and reading, "Kill the Jews, use gas chambers, and stop when you hit six million," some people would find issue with its veracity. It's fair to question the motives of people willing to seize on the smallest bit of exculpatory evidence and ignore the mountain of evidence proving the Holocaust.

The last paragraph from Roberts worth addressing is this:

The Holocaust is not a subject that can be studied or investigated. It is an occurrence handed down by zionists that cannot be examined or modified and certainly not questioned. We must take it on faith alone. If a scholar does not, he is a Holocaust denier and, if European or captured in Europe, he is imprisoned.

Well, by now, he's basically repeating himself, but a final point does emerge here in referring to "scholars" as the people being imprisoned for denying the Holocaust. With the exception of David Irving, whose early work on World War II could be considered genuinely valuable, if biased, none of the people prosecuted for doing so have been scholars -- not even close. The number of Holocaust deniers with advanced history degrees numbers zero -- the ones who did have them are either dead (Harry Elmer Barnes) or no longer deniers (Mark Weber), and they were always the minority. There's a reason for that fact.

The rest of Roberts's essay is par for his particular course, and I won't address it here. In the interest of fairness, I intend to draw Roberts's attention to this piece; should he respond, I'll note it here.

Intentionalism and Functionalism

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.

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[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 III^o 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).