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.

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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).

What I've Been Reading

In my last post, I noted how I'd set about to reading Eric Cline's 1177 B.C. Ah, but the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. I stopped a couple of chapters in to pick up Hans-Ulrich Wehler's The German Empire: 1871-1918. Wehler takes a very straight line approach from Bismarck to Hitler, and his treatment of the period specifically under discussion is pretty relentlessly Marxist. That said, with the exception of some purely economic sections on GDP, defense spending, etc., that are pretty dry, The German Empire is a pretty swift read (approx. 300 pages) and a fairly thorough discussion of how and why Bismarck forged together the empire, where the loci of power lay over the empire's 47-year history, and how World War I and the subsequent revolution that ushered in the Weimar Republic were the logical culmination of the attempts by entrenched military and agricultural interests in the north and east of the country to hold onto authoritarian power in the face of rising democratic and socialist thinking.

The other book I've been reading as part of brushing up on German history pre- and post-Third Reich is Michael Frayn's play Democracy, which covers pretty much the whole tenure of Willy Brandt as Chancellor of Germany (1969 to 1974), from his election at the head of the first leftist government in postwar West Germany to his resignation in the face of the discovery that one of his top aides, Günter Guillaume, was a spy for East Germany. This was a story with which I was wholly unfamiliar until a few weeks ago, and in seeking sources on the topic, I came across Frayn's play relatively early and thought it would be a quick way to get myself familiar with the story before diving into something more substantive on the Brandt period generally. I've got a lengthier Brandt bio on deck, as well as some other stuff on the 1953 workers uprising in East Germany.

Still waiting on a decision letter to decide my future course on graduate studies. More on that eventually, I assume...

Gramsci, Riley, and Fascism

I'm on a bit of a hiatus from my coursework, having finished my first class with the University of Edinburgh about a month ago, the term paper for which is here. Now, I'm waiting to hear about admission to a different Master's program, which would save me a significant amount of money on tuition. I'm superstitious enough not to mention which school that is.

In the meantime, I'm reading a few things that are relevant to my research line and a couple that aren't. In the former category is Dylan Riley's The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe. Riley, who teaches political sociology at UC Berkeley, deploys an argument to counter the convention wisdom that a major contributor to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe was the lack of strong civil societies and related institutions. Actually, he maintains, the countries in which fascism emerged were characterized by strong civil societies with fairly lengthy histories. The cases he cites are Italy, Spain, and Romania; he then considers the cases of Hungary (which Riley identifies as authoritarian but not fascist) and Nazi Germany, showing that Germany shared aspects of his model, whereas Hungary did not.

At the core of Riley's work is a theory of societal conflict based on the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theoretician and political prisoner. Riley deploys Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explain the rise of fascism and its relationship to the existence and strength of civil society. The hegemonic project, particularly as regards social reform, requires that hegemony begin with the hegemonic group establishing intraclass hegemony with other groups within the same social class. E.g., the military might be the initial locus of power, and in the process of intra-class hegemony, it extends its power toward the church. The second stage involves the transfer of hegemony to other classes. Here, for instance, an example would be a national political party attracting voters from a workers' union. Finally, there is counterhegemony, where the class or social group that will arise to lead revolutionary change emerges in conflict against the hegemonic class or group.

Riley does a reasonably good job of making his case. He's well versed in most of the history of the countries he analyzes. I think where I part ways with him is in his characterization of fascism (or the lack thereof) in Spain and Romania. First, it's an open question regarding whether fascism was actually established to any significant extent in Spain. Certainly there were fascist strains within the Falange, and Riley is careful to note this point, but he seems overly eager to politicize Franco, who with the exceptions of being anti-democracy and anti-socialism, seems to have been relatively apolitical. The case of Romania is more complex and less well studied. He makes the argument that Codreanu's Iron Guard moved away from anti-Semitism and it acquired political power, which is a theory I'd not seen floated before.

Finally, I'm also not sure of how Riley uses the term "democracy." As part of his central thesis, he sees fascism as the result of failed hegemony in combination with a strong civil society presence. As a democratizing force, without strong political institutions, Riley theorizes, a society with failed hegemonic institutions will realize the democratic aspirations of civil society not through political democracy with elections (liberal democracy) but rather through the political expression of a more organic (ethnic?) sort of democracy. Where I think Riley might have been more accurate would have been to say that democratization with a lack of hegemonic political institutions gives rise to populism rather than to fascism. Whether populism is a core aspect of fascism is itself an open question, but I don't see a strong enough definition of fascism in Riley's book to bear out his model a hundred percent.

Anyway, I nevertheless enjoyed the book and found its ideas interesting. Whether it will play a significant role in my thinking about fascism as an historical movement remains to be seen. Next up, I'm reading Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which while not on the topic of 20th century history nevertheless engages another interest of mine -- textual criticism of ancient cultures and history of the Near East.

Jewish Refugees in the Kresy: Soviet Loyalty Testing

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, a large number of Jews fled east. When the Red Army invaded Poland from the east sixteen days later, these Jewish refugees found themselves under Soviet rule. By the time the border was formalized between the Soviet and German zones of occupation, thousands of Jewish refugees were in the Soviet zone. Over the course of the coming months, these refugees were offered Soviet passports, which many rejected; in addition, when Nazi-Soviet cooperation over population transfers culminated in German committees appearing in eastern Poland to vet returnees to the Generalgouvernement, a large number of Jews applied to return to the German zone of occupation. An examination of these events makes it clear that the Jewish refugees were subjected to a series of loyalty tests by the Soviet occupation forces, culminating in the forced deportation of a large number to the Soviet interior.

            According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 300,000 Jewish refugees from the Generalgouvernement and the regions of Poland annexed to the Reich were in the Kresy – the Polish term for the eastern third of the Second Polish Republic, consisting of territory annexed from Lithuania and the Soviet Union – when the Soviets annexed the territory on November 15, 1939.[1] These refugees, like the Jewish population remaining under the Nazi occupation, came from a variety of walks of life. Beyond the professions of the refugees, which included white collar professionals, small business owners, tradespeople, and industrial laborers, the political persuasions of the refugees ran the gamut from members of mainstream Polish political parties to Jewish-specific parties, including those for the religious community (Agudas Yisroel), for Zionists (themselves running the gamut from left to right), and for socialists (the General Jewish Workers' Association, called the Bund in Yiddish).

            All of these factors contributed to the Soviets' suspicions of these refugees. As a state that was officially and militantly atheist, the Soviet Union viewed Judaism as an equivalent threat to any other faith, and as a nationalist movement, Zionism was seen by the Soviets as bourgeois and reactionary; as a result, the use of Hebrew for either religious or political reasons had been severely circumscribed by Soviet authorities in the early 1920s.[2] Regarding the Bund, its relationship with Soviet authorities was more complicated. Founded in 1897 in Vilnius, the party had split in 1920 into a left faction that was absorbed by the Bolsheviks the following year and a right faction that persisted underground for a few years before disappearing. Outside the USSR, however, the Bund had gained political power in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and especially Poland. Members of the Bund in these countries had been labeled "social fascists" by Stalin with the rest of the non-Bolshevik left during the 1930s. Now Polish Bundists were arriving in the Soviet zone of occupation. Although a large percentage of Bundists from western Poland and the Generalgouvernement went to Vilnius, which would not be occupied by the Soviets until June 1940, significant numbers nevertheless gathered in Lviv, Bialystok, and other large cities and towns in the Soviet occupation zone.

            While the period of the Great Purges had ended by the time the Soviets occupied the Kresy, it is important to note that, as with former members of other non-Bolshevik political parties, such as Trotskyists or Mensheviks, former Bundists were purged in the 1930s. Noting the tendency of the accused during the purges to be former members of other socialist or left-wing parties, rather than actual "reactionaries," Robert Conquest notes that the Bund "was a particularly fatal association."[3] Therefore, it is unsurprising that the Bundist leadership in the Kresy was arrested in massive sweeps a few weeks after the Soviet invasion. Most famously, Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter, two prominent Bundist leaders from Warsaw, were arrested in Brest and Kovel, respectively.

            However, while Erlich and Alter's prominence in the Polish Bund had marked them for early detention, the majority of Jewish refugees in the Kresy when the border between the Soviet and Nazis zones was established were of unknown political affiliation. Therefore, to determine the loyalties of these new residents, it was necessary for the Soviet authorities to institute a series of tests. Calls for volunteers for labor battalions for details in the Soviet interior afforded the earliest opportunity. According to Grzegorz Hryciuk's highly detailed analysis of the period, nearly 60,000 refugees from the other parts of Poland – including not only Jews but also Ukrainians and Poles – relocated to eastern districts of Ukraine, including the Donbas mines, between October 1939 and August 1940.[4]

            However, even if every refugee sent on a work detail during this period were Jewish, it would still leave four-fifths of the refugees in the Kresy, with the loyalties of these refugees unknown to Soviet authorities. Another approach would be necessary. According to N.S. Lebedeva, based on her examination of Russian archival documents, NKVD head L.P. Beria, N.A. Bulganin, N.M. Shvernik, and L.P. Korniets, a high-ranking official in the government of the Ukrainian SSR, formed a commission on refugees in November.[5] In addition to addressing the continued allocation of volunteers to labor, the commission sought to investigate the possibility of repatriating the refugees to their former homes.

            Beyond the commission, however, was a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of November 29, 1939, granting citizenship to inhabitants of the Kresy. The decree was in three sections, the first of which defined two categories of people immediately receiving Soviet citizenship:

a) former Polish citizens who were on the territory of the western regions of the Ukraine and Belorussia when these became part of the USSR;

b) persons who arrived in the USSR on the basis of the agreement of November 16, 1939, between the Government of the USSR and the German Government, as well as those who arrived in consequence of the cession by the USSR to Lithuania of the city of Vilnius and Vilnius Region in accordance with the agreement of October 10, 1939.[6]

 

            Thus, any Polish citizen residing in the Kresy as of November 1-2 was a Soviet citizen, as was any person emigrating to the Soviet Union from Nazi Germany. The former category undoubtedly included many Jews, while the latter category specifically did not. Regarding the Vilnius region, many Jews fled to, rather than from, that area, believing Lithuanian independence might be permanent. Regarding the cited agreement between the Reich and Soviet Union of November 16, the agreement specifically stipulated the transfer of only ethnic Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. The agreement of November formalized one of the secret annexes to the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact in which the agreement of the Soviets to allow Volksdeutsche in the USSR to emigrate to the Reich is reciprocated: "A corresponding obligation is assumed by the Government of the German Reich in respect to the persons of Ukrainian or Belorussian descent residing in the territories under its jurisdiction."[7]

            The next step in the process of bestowing citizenship on previous Polish nationals was to issue them Soviet passports to replace their Polish passports. The so-called passportization operation appears in virtually all of the literature on the period. For instance, Sara Bender, in her book on the city of Bialystok during the war, notes that, while Polish citizens were forced to surrender their passports for Soviet ones, the refugees were allowed to choose, and if they elected not to accept Soviet citizenship, they could request return to the Generalgouvernement.[8] In contrast, Lebedeva and Yosef Litvak specifically interpret the choice as illusory and designed to prepare for these refugees' ultimate deportation; Litvak further states that the SS authorized the Soviet authorities to post public announcements that refugees could apply for return to the German zone of occupation, but he does not cite specific sources for this claim.[9]

            We do not know what percentages of Jewish refugees opted for a Soviet passport versus return to the Generalgouvernement. However, we can assume that many Jews who already had left-wing or communist sympathies and many who rightly feared returning to Nazi occupation accepted the Soviet passport. However, many also registered to go west. Christoph Mick, for instance, alleges that 75% of registrants in Lviv requesting to go west were Jewish.[10] Bender attributes some of these choices to a desire for family unity and reports that, at least at the end of 1939, conditions in Warsaw, e.g., were tolerable.[11] She also notes that Bundists broadly refused the passport, both fearing Stalinist political repression and having heard of Bundist underground activity getting under way in the German occupation zone. Bogdan Musial, citing NKVD documents on the topic, notes that the Soviet secret police viewed Bundist calls from Poland to support the Soviet regime "as a tactical manoeuvre to ensure the survival of the Bund’s own leadership corps."[12] Zionists generally refused the passport, fearing that they were be forbidden by Soviet authorities from eventually emigrating to Palestine; like many Bundists, they concentrated in Vilnius and continued to organize from there.

            It was with the arrival in the Kresy of committees of staff members of the German Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi) to process applications for transfer to the Generalgouvernement, including of Volksdeutsche, that the magnitude of the number of Jews who had refused passportization was determined. In what in hindsight can only be considered a fatal miscalculation, thousands of Jews appeared before committees in Lviv, Bialystok, and other cities to request return to the German occupation zone. The incidents are attested in numerous primary sources from former Nazi and Soviet authorities and from Jewish émigrés. For instance, the Yiddish writer Moishe Grossman reported being told by another émigré about Jews crossing from the Generalgouvernement into the Kresy seeing Jews coming in the other direction and urging them to go back.[13]

            More reliably, one of the defendants in the Nuremberg Military Tribunal trial against the SS Race and Settlement Office, Otto Heinz Brückner, who worked for VoMi, testified about the resettlement actions. Asked whether he was able to process non-Volksdeutsche applications for resettlement, he said, "In a fairly large number of individual cases, we were. I did this whenever it was definite that these people were facing extinction in the Soviet Union, and if I could find a way to carry through this resettlement. I remember that at the time I re­settled Swiss, Swedes, Lithuanians, Russians and people of Jewish descent too. This meant a definite danger for me at that time."[14] Although Brückner's testimony must be approached with caution given its exculpatory nature, his account is corroborated in part by an entry in the diary of Hans Frank, the German Governor General of Poland in Krakow. In this entry, dated May 3, 1940, Frank recounts a meeting with Otto Wächter, who chaired the VoMi committee in Lviv and was later the district governor there, at which Wächter told Frank, “Of approximately 18,000 refugees, 16,500 were Jews, who in any case awaited admission to the Generalgouvernement.”[15]

            Finally, no less a figure than N.S. Khrushchev reported the spectacle in his memoirs. In Lviv at the time as head of the CPSU in Ukraine to oversee the city's incorporation into the USSR, Khrushchev reports being told by I.A. Serov, NKVD head in Ukraine, that the lines registering to go west were quite long. Serov reportedly said, "When I approached the place I found it very painful, because most of the waiting line consisted of people from the Jewish population. What’s going to happen to them? And yet, this is how devoted people are to all kinds of petty everyday things—an apartment, material objects. They give the Gestapo agents bribes to help them leave here sooner and return to their hearths and homes."[16]

            As noted by these sources, there were a number of Jews who returned to the Generalgouvernement under the auspices of VoMi. We can assume that most of these Jews perished over the course of the coming years. Conversely, we know that many Jews without Soviet passports remained in the Kresy following the appearance there of the resettlement committees. Because one of the four subsequent deportations specifically targeted the Jewish refugees who had not accepted the Soviet passport, some scholars have assumed that there was a coordinated effort between VoMi and the NKVD to identify Jewish applicants. In his book on the period, for instance, Dov Levin writes that VoMi's lists were "presumably forwarded" to the NKVD but he does not cite any sources.[17] As noted above, Litvak saw the whole process as a ruse, calling it a "malicious act of deceit"; however, his proof is the mere existence of the VoMi committees, which we know now were charged with much larger processes of population transfer.[18]

            There is one piece of information that perhaps supports the assertions of Levin and Litvak on this point, however. Specifically, in a message to V.M. Molotov asking for direction, Ye.I. Chekmenev, who headed the resettlement program for the Council of People's Soviet of the USSR (Sovnarkom), wrote the following:

The [Sovnarkom] Resettlement Administration has received two letters from the Berlin and Vienna resettlement bureaus concerning the resettlement of Jews from Germany to the USSR - specifically to Birobidzhan and the Western Ukraine.

Under the evacuation agreement between the USSR Government and Germany, only ethnic Ukrainians, Belarusians, Rusins [sic], and Russians are subject to evacuation to Soviet territory.

We believe that the proposals by the aforementioned resettlement bureaus cannot be accepted.

Awaiting further instructions.[19]

 

The message is notable not only because of its inclusion of Rusyns along with Ukrainians and Belarusians but also because it is clear that Chekmenev's recommendation was adopted by Molotov. It is uncertain whether Chekmenev was motivated by adhering to the letter of the agreements signed by Germany and the USSR, personal anti-Semitism, a desire to avoid further complication of what was already becoming a logistical nightmare, or some other factor.

            The aforementioned mass deportations from the Kresy began in February 1940, but the first two actions did not target the refugees. Rather, these deportations targeted, respectively, veterans of the Polish-Soviet war that ended in 1921 and their families. While these deportations were being carried out, however, decisions to target the now undocumented Jewish refugees were being made. Hryciuk identifies two high-level decisions: first, a decision of the Politburo of Central Committee of the CPSU on March 2, 1940; and second, a resolution of Sovnarkom on April 10.[20] The deportation targeting refugees in the Kresy was subsequently carried out on June 28-29, with more than 64,000 Jewish refugees deported and another 13,600 arrested and detained.[21]

            One irony of the fate of the Jewish refugees in the Kresy is that this mass deportation of refugees in June 1940 is that, while it undoubtedly netted many rank and file Jewish political party members, it largely missed the parties' leaders, most of whom, as noted above, had relocated to Vilnius. When Lithuania was subjected to direct Soviet rule in the same month, plans were made to target these leaders. For instance, Arcadius Kahan, who after the war would become an economic historian associated with the University of Chicago, was arrested almost immediately upon Soviet occupation of Vilnius, on the basis of his Bundist and Menshevik associations. In perhaps the most famous case, future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin, who led the Revisionist Zionist Betar youth group in Vilnius, was arrested on September 20, 1940. In the fourth and final deportations, carried out across all of the territory the USSR occupied since September 1939 – including the Kresy, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Bukovina – the remaining known politically oriented Jewish refugees were seized and deported.

            One week later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The final irony of the Jewish refugees in the Kresy is that deportation to the Soviet interior likely saved their lives, as the vast majority of Jews in those areas, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia and Bukovina were killed in the coming weeks and months by Einsatzgruppen deployed the Nazi for that purpose. Some of the Jews who had been deported earlier were freed to fight the Nazis. Erlich and Alter, for instance, who months earlier had been tried for anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to death, were freed to help form the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. However, they were arrested again later in 1941 and executed. Begin, who had been held near Saint Petersburg, was allowed to leave and join the Anders Army, with which he deployed in 1942 to Palestine. Bundist and Zionist activists under the Nazi occupation organized resistance movements. Most died, but some, including Marek Edelman, a Bundist from Warsaw, returned to Poland after the war and continued their resistance to Soviet domination.

            In conclusion, the influx of thousands of Jewish refugees into the Kresy upon the Nazi invasion of Poland posed a significant challenge for Soviet authorities upon their own occupation of these territories a couple of weeks later, particularly because many of these refugees had political affiliations identified as problematic by the Soviets. Although citizenship was granted to these refugees, a series of loyalty tests were nevertheless imposed on them, with opportunities to volunteer for labor followed by passportization. Finally, Jews rejecting Soviet passports were given the opportunity to apply with the German authorities to return to their homes. Since few were admitted, they were largely arrested in the waves of deportation that followed. While these refugees were subsequently subjected to great hardship, their chance of survival was far greater if deported. In the end, the refugees’ own hostility to Soviet rule might have saved their own lives.

 

---

[1] Holocaust Encyclopedia, s.v. "German Invasion of Poland: Jewish Refugees, 1939," accessed November 30, 2017, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005593

[2] Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001), 77.

[3] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 272.

[4] Grzegorz Hryciuk, “Victims 1939-1941: The Soviet Repressions in Eastern Poland,” in Shared History – Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939-1941, edited by Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve, Leipziger Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 5 (Leipzig, Germany: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 198.

[5] N.S. Lebedeva, “The Deportation of the Polish Population to the USSR, 1939–41,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 16, nos. 1-2 (2000): 31

[6] "On the Acquisition of Citizenship of the USSR by Inhabitants of the Western Districts of the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs," Soviet Statutes and Decisions, 7, no. 3 (1971): 260

[7] German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, Germany-Soviet Union, September 28, 1939, in “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: The Documents,” Litanus, 35, no. 1 (1989): 1-5, accessed November 30, 2017, http://www.lituanus.org/1989/89_1_03.htm

[8] Sara Bender, The Jews of Bialystok During World War II and the Holocaust, translated by Yaffa Murciano (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis UP, 2008), 86.

[9] Lebedeva, ibid, 31; Yosef Litvak, “The Plight of Refugees From the German-occupied Territories,” in The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939-41, edited by Keith Sword (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 67

[10] Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939–44,” Journal of Contemporary History, 46, no. 2 (2011): 352.

[11] Bender, ibid, 55.

[12] Bogdan Musial, “Jewish Resistance in Poland's Eastern Borderlands During the Second World War, 1939–41,” Patterns of Prejudice, 38, no. 4 (2004): 379.

[13] Quoted in Ben-Cion Pinchuk, “Jewish Refugees in Soviet Poland,” Jewish Social Studies, 40, no. 2 (1978): 158, note 82.

[14] Testimony of Otto Heinz Brückner, United States v. Ulrich Greifelt et al., December 19, 1947, in Trials of the Major War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, vol. IV (Washington, D.C.: US GPO, 1949): 843.

[15] Hans Frank, entry of May 3, 1940, Diensttagebuch Hans Frank, 2233-PS, International Military Tribunal XXIX, Nuremberg, Germany, 358.

[16] Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 1, edited by Sergei Khrushchev (College Park, Pa.: Penn State UP, 2005), 242.

[17] Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry Under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 194.

[18] Litvak, ibid, 67.

[19] Ye.I. Chekmenev to V.M. Molotov, February 9, 1940, in Pavel Polyan, “Two Million Unsaved Jews,” Moscow News, April 27, 2005, accessed November 30, 2017, http://archive.is/43HZX

[20] Hryciuk, ibid, 189.

[21] Ibid, 190.

Russia v. Ukraine: Causes and Consequences

What are the causes and consequences of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

It seems pretty clear the causes of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine consist of a combination of ethnolinguistic divisions and security concerns, with some small historical factors thrown into the mix. I'm a big fan of maps as a means of understanding issues. Below is a map that I feel represents the ethnolinguistic situation fairly well:

Unsurprisingly, the areas annexed by Russia -- particularly Crimea -- are those areas with a Russian ethnic majority or significant minority and that are Russian-speaking. I wrote last week about the extent to which Putin's foreign policy has been irrendentist at least with regard to the protection, if not annexation, of Russians living outside Russia's borders.

Another map lays out why security concerns caused the conflict:

  

This map of the Rada election results in 2014 shows People's Front (pro-EU) voters in the Ukrainian ethnolinguistic areas and the opposition in the Russian areas. Therefore, for Russia, concerns about accession to the EU and further separation of Ukraine from Russia at the very least provided a pretense for intervention. Finally, it bears noting that the USSR had bestowed Crimea on Ukraine only in the 1950s, so an historical argument could be made that, in the case of the peninsula, a legitimate claim cwas being made by Russia.

In terms of the consequences, the most important one, I think, is the extent to which it has brought Putin and Russia into further conflict with the EU and United States. Hawks in the U.S. had already been gunning for Putin over his intervention in Georgia, but the Obama administration had sought a "Russian reset," at least during Obama's first term. However, the Ukrainian conflict turned the relationship overwhelmingly negative, giving rise to Russian-U.S. conflict the full extent of which we have yet to see.

The Medvedev Interregnum

6.1. What was the significance of the Medvedev interregnum?

I think the greatest significance of the Medvedev interregnum was that the period signaled to the world and the country itself that Russia would at least continue to give the outward appearance of democracy, even while ultimate political power continued to be wielded by Putin. For all of the ink (apparently) spilled in considering the extent to which consigning Putin to a term as prime minister as Medvedev ascended to the presidency would change the power dynamic, I don't think that the period was all that significant in terms of genuine changes implemented by Medvedev. Perhaps in making this assessment I am relying too much on knowing the outcome in the five years since Putin has returned to the presidency.

Here, Alexander Baturo and Slava Mikhaylov seem to have made a strong case for Medvedev at least believing for some of the period that he might be an independent actor from Putin in establishing his own policy initiatives. They emphasize his liberalization and modernization schemes, for example, although they note that he mainly enunciated these goals in speeches and writing rather than in concrete proposals. Thus, they conclude, Medvedev "could be regarded as neither a figurehead nor a fully-fledged successor."[1] Simultaneously, they note, Russian regional governors drifted more into Putin's orbit during Medvedev's presidency. Thus, in the end, Medvedev was more of a placeholder than perhaps he himself realized at the time.

What I'm left wondering is why Medvedev stayed on with Putin after the latter returned to the presidency. Ola Cichowlas wrote in March of this year that Medvedev had made himself a millionaire several times over via corruption as part of Putin's team, but he was increasingly being seen as a scapegoat for the government as economic misfortune has led to dissatisfaction among the population. "While Putin’s approval ratings have soared as a result of his efforts to play tough with the West and secure military victories abroad," Cichowlas writes, "Medvedev has taken the blame for falling living standards at home. For the past few years, the Russian public, and even some within Putin’s hard-line inner circle, have considered Medvedev both weak and dispensable."[2] Nevertheless, at this writing, Medvedev remains the prime minister. Perhaps he poses more of a danger to Putin's hold on power as a potentially popular figure than as the unpopular man he is today.

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[1] Alexander Baturo and Slava Mikhaylov, "Reading the Tea Leaves: Medvedev's Presidency Through Political Rhetoric of Federal and Sub-National Actors," Europe-Asia Studies, 66, no. 6 (2014): 974.
[2] Ola Cichowlas, "The Most Hated Man in Russia," Foreign Affairs, March 28, 2017,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/28/the-most-hated-man-in-russia-dmitry-medvedev-protests-putin/, accessed November 27, 2017