Functionalism v. intentionalism is a historiographical debate about the
origins of the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as
foreign policy. The debate on the origins of the Holocaust centers on
essentially two questions: Was there a master plan on the part of
Adolf Hitler to launch the Holocaust? Intentionalists argue there was such a
plan, while functionalists argue there was not.
Did the initiative for the Holocaust come from above with orders from Adolf
Hitler or from below within the ranks of the German bureaucracy? Although neither
side disputes the reality of the Holocaust, nor is there serious dispute
over the premise that Hitler was personally responsible for encouraging
the anti-Semitism that allowed the Holocaust to take place, intentionalists
argue the initiative came from above, while functionalists contend it came
from lower ranks within the bureaucracy. The terms were coined in a 1981 essay by
the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason. Notable functionalists have
included Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat,
and Zygmunt Bauman. Notable intentionalists have included Andreas
Hillgruber, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Klaus Hildebrand, Eberhard Jäckel, Richard
Breitman, and Lucy Dawidowicz. Origins of the debate
The search for the origins of the Holocaust began almost as soon as World
War II ended. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of 1945–6, the "Final
Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe" was represented by the
prosecution as part of long-term plan on the part of the Nazi leadership going
back to the foundations of the Nazi Party in 1919. Subsequently, most
historians subscribed to what would be today considered to be the extreme
intentionalist interpretation. Starting in the late 1960s with the publication
of such work as Martin Broszat's The Hitler State in 1969 and Karl Schleunes'
The Twisted Road to Auschwitz in 1970, a number of historians challenged the
prevailing interpretation and suggested there was no master plan for the
Holocaust. In the 1970s, advocates of the intentionalist school of thought
were known as "the straight road to Auschwitz" camp or as the
"programmeists", because they insisted that Hitler was fulfilling a programme.
Advocates of the functionalist school were known as "the twisted road to
Auschwitz" camp or as the "structuralists", because of their
insistence that it was the internal power structures of the Third Reich that
led to the Holocaust. In 1981, the British historian Timothy
Mason published an essay entitled "Intention and Explanation" that was in
part an attack on the scholarship of Karl Dietrich Bracher and Klaus
Hildebrand, both of whom Mason accused of focusing too much on Adolf Hitler as
an explanation of the Holocaust. In this essay, Mason called the followers of
"the twisted road to Auschwitz"/structuralist school
"functionalists" because of their belief that the Holocaust arose as part of the
functioning of the Nazi state, while the followers of "the straight road to
Auschwitz"/programmeist school were called "intentionalists" because of
their belief that it was Hitler's intentions alone that explained the
Holocaust. The terms "intentionalist" and "functionalist" have largely
replaced the previous terms used to signify the conflicting schools of
thought. Debate
Those historians who take an intentionalist line, like Andreas
Hillgruber, argue that everything that happened after Operation Barbarossa was
part of a masterplan he credited Hitler with developing in the 1920s. Hillgruber
wrote in his 1967 book Germany and the Two World Wars that for Hitler:
The conquest of European Russia, the cornerstone of the continental European
phase of his program, was thus for Hitler inextricably linked with the
extermination of these "bacilli", the Jews. In his conception they had gained
dominance over Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia thereby became the
center from which a global danger radiated, particularly threatening to
the Aryan race and its German core. To Hitler, Bolshevism meant the consummate
rule of Jewry, while democracy – as it had developed in Western Europe and
Weimar Germany – represented a preliminary stage of Bolshevism, since
the Jews there won a leading, if not yet a dominant, influence. This racist
component of Hitler's thought was so closely interwoven with the central
political element of his program, the conquest of European Russia, that
Russia's defeat and the extermination of the Jews were – in theory as later in
practice – inseparable for him. To the aim of expansion per se, however, Hitler
gave not racial, but political, strategic, economic and demographic
underpinnings". The German historian Helmut Krausnick
argued that: What is certain is that the nearer
Hitler's plan to overthrow Russia as the last possible enemy on the continent of
Europe approached maturity, the more he become obsessed with an idea—with which
he had been toying as a "final solution" for a long time—of wiping out the Jews
in the territories under his control. It cannot have been later than March 1941,
when he openly declared his intention of having the political commissars of the
Red Army shot, that he issued his secret decree—which never appeared in writing
though it was mentioned verbally on several occasions—that the Jews should
be eliminated. Streim wrote in response that Krausnick
had been taken in by the line invented after the war to reduce the
responsibility of the Einsatzgruppen leaders brought to trial. Klaus
Hildebrand wrote that: In qualitative terms, the executions by
shooting were no different from the technically more efficient
accomplishment of the 'physical final solution' by gassing, of which they were
a prelude. Against the intentionalist
interpretation, functionalist historians like Martin Broszat argued that the
lower officials of the Nazi state had started exterminating people on their
own initiative. Broszat argued that the Holocaust began “bit by bit” as German
officials stumbled into genocide. Broszat argued that in the fall of 1941
German officials had begun "improvised" killing schemes as the "simplest"
solution to the "Jewish Question". In Broszat's opinion, Hitler subsequently
approved of the measures initiated by the lower officials and allowed the
expansion of the Holocaust from Eastern Europe to all of Europe. In this way,
Broszat argued that the Shoah was not begun in response to an order, written
or unwritten, from Hitler but was rather “a way out of the blind alley into which
the Nazis had manoeuvred themselves”. The American historian Christopher
Browning has argued that: Before the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen
were not given explicit orders for the total extermination of Jews on Soviet
territory. Along with the general incitement to an ideological and racial
war, however, they were given the general task of liquidating "potential"
enemies. Heydrich's much-debated directive of 2 July 1941 was a minimal
list of those who had to be liquidated immediately, including all Jews in state
and party positions. It is very likely, moreover, that the Einsatzgruppen
leaders were told of the future goal of a Judenfrei [Jew-free] Russia through
systematic mass murder. By contrast, the Swiss historian
Philippe Burrin argues that such a decision was not made before August 1941
at the earliest, pointing to orders given by Himmler on 30 July 1941 to the
2nd SS Cavalry Regiment and the SS Cavalry Brigade operating in the Pripet
Marshes in the Pripyat operation calling for the murder of male Jews only while
the Jewish women and children were to be driven into the Marshes. Browning argues
that sometime in mid-July 1941 Hitler made the decision to begin general
genocide owing to his exhilaration over his victories over the Red Army, whereas
Burrin contends that the decision was made in late August 1941 owing to
Hitler's frustration over the slowing down of the Wehrmacht. Kershaw argues
that the dramatic expansion in both the range of victims and the intensity of
the killings after mid-August 1941 indicates that Hitler issued an order to
that effect, most probably a verbal order conveyed to the Einsatzgruppen
commanders through either Himmler or Heydrich. It remains unclear whether
that was a decision made on Hitler's own initiative motivated only by his own
anti-Semitic prejudices, or ordered that the other three Einsatzgruppen emulate
Einsatzgruppe A's bloody example. The Canadian historian Erich Haberer has
contended that the “Baltic flashpoint of genocide”, as the killings committed by
Einsatzgruppe A between July–October 1941 are known to historians, were the
key development in the evolution of Nazi anti-Semitic policy that resulted in the
Holocaust. The Baltic area witnessed both the most extensive and intense
killings of all the Einsatzgruppen with 90,000–100,000 Jews killed between July
and October 1941, which led to the almost total destruction of the Jewish
communities in that area. Haberer maintains that the “Baltic flashpoint of
genocide” occurred at time when the other Nazi plans for a “territorial
final solution” such as the Madagascar Plan were unlikely to occur, and thus
suggested to the Nazi leadership that genocide was indeed “feasible” as a
“final solution to the Jewish Question”. Positions
= Extreme intentionalist interpretation Extreme intentionalists believe that
Hitler definitely had plans for the Holocaust by 1924, if not earlier.
Dawidowicz argued that Hitler already decided upon the Holocaust no later than
by 1919. To support her interpretation, Dawidowicz pointed to numerous extreme
anti-Semitic statements made by Hitler. Criticism has centered on the fact that
none of these statements refer to killing the entire Jewish people;
indeed, very few refer to killing Jews at all. Only once in Mein Kampf does
Hitler ever refer to killing Jews when he states that if only 12,000 to 15,000
Jews had been gassed instead of German soldiers in World War I, then "the
sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain." Given that Mein
Kampf is 694 pages long, Dawidowicz's critics contend, she makes too much of
one sentence. Daniel Goldhagen went further, suggesting that popular opinion
in Germany was already sympathetic to a policy of Jewish extermination before
the Nazi party came to power. He asserts in his book Hitler's Willing
Executioners that Germany enthusiastically welcomed the
persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime in the period 1933–39.
= Moderate intentionalist interpretation Moderate intentionalists such as Richard
Breitman believe that Hitler had decided upon the Holocaust sometime in the late
1930s and certainly no later than 1939 or 1941. This school makes much of
Hitler's "Prophecy Speech" of January 30, 1939 before the Reichstag where
Hitler stated if "Jewish financiers" started another world war, then "...the
result would be the annihilation of the entire Jewish race in Europe." The major
problem with this thesis, as Yehuda Bauer points out, is that though this
statement clearly commits Hitler to genocide, he made no effort after
delivering this speech to have it carried out. Furthermore, Ian Kershaw
has pointed out that there are several diary entries by Joseph Goebbels in late
1941, in which Goebbels writes that "the Führer's prophecy is coming true in a
most terrible way." The general impression one gets is that Goebbels is
quite surprised that Hitler was serious about carrying out the threat in the
"Prophecy Speech." = Extreme functionalist interpretation =
Extreme functionalists such as Götz Aly believe that the Nazi leadership had
nothing to do with initiating the Holocaust and that the entire initiative
came from the lower ranks of the German bureaucracy. This philosophy is what is
known as the bottom-up approach of the Holocaust. Aly has made much of
documents from the bureaucracy of the German Government-General of Poland
arguing that the population of Poland would have to decrease by 25% to allow
the Polish economy to grow. Criticism centers on the idea that this
explanation does not really show why the Nazis would deport Jews from France and
the Netherlands to death camps in Poland if it was Poland the Nazis were
concerned with, and why the Jews of Poland were targeted instead of the
random sample of 25% of the Polish population. Additional criticism of
functionalism points out that Hitler and other Nazi leaders delayed railcars
providing supplies to front line troops in the Soviet Union so that Jews could
be deported by rail from the USSR to death camps thus demonstrating the
pursuit of genocidal policies over pragmatic wartime actions.
= Moderate functionalist interpretation Moderate functionalists, such as Karl
Schleunes and Christopher Browning, believe that the rivalry within the
unstable Nazi power structure provided the major driving force behind the
Holocaust. Moderate functionalists believe that the Nazis aimed to expel
all of the Jews from Europe, but only after the failure of these schemes did
they resort to genocide. This is sometimes referred to as the "crooked
path" to genocide. = Synthesis =
A number of scholars such as Arno J. Mayer, Yehuda Bauer, Ian Kershaw and
Michael Marrus have developed a synthesis of the functionalist and
intentionalist schools. They have suggested the Holocaust was a result of
pressures that came from both above and below and that Hitler lacked a master
plan, but was the decisive force behind the Holocaust. The phrase 'cumulative
radicalisation' is used in this context to sum up the way extreme rhetoric and
competition among different Nazi agencies produced increasingly extreme
policies, as fanatical bureaucratic underlings put into practice what they
believed Hitler would have approved based on his widely disseminated
speeches and propaganda. This phenomenon is referred to more generally in social
psychology as groupshift. Given the fact that scholars have
written so much in relation to Nazi Germany, Richard Bessel asserts that,
"The result is a much better informed, much more detailed and more nuanced
picture of the Nazi regime, and most serious historians of the Nazi regime
now are to some extent both ‘intentionalists’ and ‘functionalists’-
insofar as those terms still can be used at all." While some historians may
remain entrenched on this subject, there is no unified causal theory to explain
one of the greatest crimes in history. See also
Historikerstreit Holocaust Denial
Nazi foreign policy debate Sonderweg
References Sources