In Holocaust studies, the functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical controversy about the origins of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe in World War II. The debate focuses on the transition, 1941–1942, from state-sanctioned discrimination, forced displacement, and sporadic violence against Jews towards genocidal mass extermination. Key themes include the personal role of Adolf Hitler, Nazi ideology, and the role of lower-level party officials and civil servants.
"Intentionalist" historians argue that Hitler consciously planned and ordered the extermination of Jews. They stress the exterminatory antisemitism within Nazi ideology and the Holocaust's relationship to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. "Functionalists", by contrast, argue that the transition occurred incrementally as a result of decisions made at lower levels of the Nazi Party and bureaucracy in German-occupied Eastern Europe, especially associated with the General Government administration. They tend to emphasise the decentralized nature of Nazi rule and argue that extermination was only adopted in response to the "failure" of earlier discriminatory policies like forced displacement. Individual "intentionalist" and "functionalist" historians have taken different approaches and some historians have attempted to synthesize both approaches.
The terms were coined in a 1981 essay by the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason.: "The terms 'intentionalist' and 'functionalist' were coined by Tim Mason, 'Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism,' Der Führerstaat: Mythos und Realität, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart, 1981), 21–40. Prime examples of the two interpretive approaches can be seen in the articles by Klaus Hildebrand and Hans Mommsen in the same volume." Notable functionalists have included Timothy Mason, Raul Hilberg, Karl Schleunes, Christopher Browning, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Götz Aly, Christian Gerlach, Zygmunt Bauman, Timothy Snyder and David Cesarani. Notable intentionalists have included William Shirer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Karl Bracher, Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, Eberhard Jäckel, Leni Yahil, Israel Gutman, Gerhard Weinberg, Walter Laqueur, Saul Friedländer, Richard Breitman, Lucy Dawidowicz and Daniel Goldhagen.
Origin The search for the causes of the Holocaust began almost as soon as World War II ended. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of 1945–46, the "Final Solution" was represented by the prosecution as part of the 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 nowadays considered to be the extreme intentionalist interpretation. Books such as Karl Schleunes' The Twisted Road to Auschwitz which was published in 1970 influenced a number of historians to challenge 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 "programmists", 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 Hitler as an explanation of the Holocaust. In this essay, Mason called the followers of "the twisted road to Auschwitz" (or 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" (or programmist 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.
Arguments Historians who take an intentionalist line, like Andreas Hillgruber, argue that everything that happened after Operation Barbarossa was part of a master plan he credited Hitler with developing in the 1920s. Hillgruber wrote in his 1967 book Germany and the Two World Wars that
The German historian Helmut Krausnick argued:
Alfred 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:
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 autumn 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 argued:
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 Marshes massacres 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 antisemitic prejudices, or (impressed with the willingness and ability of Einsatzgruppe A to murder Jewish women and children) 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 antisemitic 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 a 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".
Functionalism Extreme Extreme functionalists such as Martin Broszat believe that the Nazi leadership did not consciously initiate the Holocaust and that initiative instead came from the lower ranks of the German bureaucracy. This philosophy is what is known as the bottom-up approach of the Holocaust. Götz 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. 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. Hans Mommsen was a leading expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.Menke, Martin, "Mommsen, Hans", pp. 826–827 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, edited by Kelly Boyd, Volume 2, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing, 1999, p. 826 He argued that Hitler was a "weak dictator" who rather than acting decisively, reacted to various social pressures. Mommsen believed that Nazi Germany was not a totalitarian state and criticized totalitarianism as a concept in general. Together with his friend Broszat, Mommsen developed a structuralist interpretation of the Third Reich, that saw the Nazi state as a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies engaged in endless power struggles, and the Final Solution as a result of the "cumulative radicalization" of the German state as opposed to a long-term plan on the part of Hitler.
Moderate 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 "twisted road" to extermination, after a book by Schleunes called The Twisted Road to Auschwitz.
Intentionalism
Extreme