An understanding of how and why the Holocaust took place, or was able to take place, can be realised by looking at the intention that initiated it. The main debate surrounding the question of intentionality is based upon the timing of the decision to implement the final solution. The division on this question lies between those who view the final solution as having developed from Hitler's pathological anti‑Semitism, as a meticulously planned project of extermination, even before he came to power. Those who maintain the above are often referred to as intentionalists, while the functionalists argue that the final solution arose step by step during the reign of the Nazi party, without any premeditated goal, culminating in 1941.
One of the key problems in addressing this question arises because Hitler used incredibly vague language, employing many euphemisms. He was also very reluctant to commit his orders onto paper. Thus, while Hitler's intense hatred of the Jews is well documented, his orders regarding their fate are not. Consequently, there is no evidence before 1939 that Hitler and the Nazis planned the annihilation of European Jewry.20 However, Dawidowicz maintains that Hitler had considered the destruction of European Jewry as early 1919. She elucidates on this claim by quoting the following from Mein Kampf,
If at the beginning of the (first world) war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of multitudes at the front would not have been in vain.21
Paul Johnson also demonstrates Hitler's murderous hatred towards the Jews by quoting from a private conversation between Hitler and Major Josef Hell in 1922. According to this conversation, Hitler claimed that if he won power,
the annihilation of the Jews will be my first and foremost task.... Once the hatred and the battle against the Jews are really stirred up, their resistance will inevitably break down in short order. They cannot protect themselves and no one will stand forth as their defenders.... I shall have gallows erected, in Munich for example in the Marienplatz, as many as traffic permits. Then the Jews will be hanged, one after another, and they will stay hanging until they stink.... As soon as one is untied, the next will take his place, and that will go on until the last Jew in Munich is obliterated. Exactly the same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of its last Jew.22
Such documentation is a very disturbing testimony to Hitler's intense hatred for Jews and also of his desire to instigate their murder in a most degrading and cruel fashion. However what such documentation does not show is that Hitler had a lucid plan to destroy European Jewry. Nevertheless, scholars such as Rubenstein maintain that Hitler decided upon a "final solution" for the "Jewish problem" in 1923, while he was in Landsberg prison, rather than at the Wannsee Conference of 1941.23
Dawidowicz cites Hitler's first public speech on 13 November 1919 to reiterate her earlier point that Hitler planned the annihilation of the Jews from the very beginning.
We will carry on the struggle until the last Jew is removed from the German Reich." One year later Hitler advocates "the removal of the Jews from our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence ‑ we congratulate the rest of the world on their company ‑ but because the existence of our nation is a thousand times more important to us than that of an alien race.24
As mentioned above functionalists do not believe than the final solution was implemented by Hitler making the crucial decision. Instead it arose "bit by bit". Local Nazi initiatives, according to Broszat 25, were fundamental in the deportations and Einsatzgruppen murders. Hitler made his hatred for the Jews clearly known, and set the objective of Nazism, "to get rid of the Jews, and above all to make the Reich judenfrei", although, according to Broszat, Hitler did not specify how this end may be reached, he left such initiatives to the enthusiastic Nazis below him. Such initiatives were implemented when the ghettoes in the east could no longer cope with the increasing influx of transported Jews. Thus killing "began not solely as the result of an ostensible will for extermination but also as a "way out" of a blind alley into which the Nazis had manoeuvred themselves."26
Intentionalists, however, maintain that Hitler controlled all major party institutions and facets of government. It was due to such governmental control that his anti‑Semitic fantasies were able to be perpetrated to such a great extent, with little, if any, great opposition. Jackel maintains that the Nazi leaders around Hitler did not in fact know from the beginning that they were going to murder millions of Jews. Such lack of knowledge on their behalf resulted in the "planlessness" of Nazi Jewish policy before 1941. However, one aspect Jackel is clear of, is that Hitler himself knew that his ultimate goal was the systematic mass murder of European Jewry.27
However a question arises when we look at the expulsion of Jews from German territory. Hitler may have sought the destruction of European Jewry as early as 1923, but up until 1938 the principal action taken against the German Jews was expulsion and deportation. Intentionalists argue that expulsions were merely stop gap measures issued during the early stages of Hitler's operations. These measures were implemented because Hitler was waiting "for an opportune moment to carry out his fixed objectives", the extermination of German and then European Jewry, and ultimately world Jewry.28
In four years, from 1933 to the end of 1937, only one hundred and twenty‑nine thousand, (or twenty‑six per cent) of the half million Jews in Germany fled. This enables the functionalist to argue that if Hitler's intentions were so apparent, why did so few Jews leave. However, such statistics do not entail that only a small portion of German Jewry sought to emigrate, firstly there was the problem of where to emigrate to, for example, America was unwilling to accept Jewish immigrants. Many Jews did not seek to emigrate as their families had been living in Germany as long as the "Aryans", and we must also take into consideration the difficulty in leaving older members of ones family behind.29
With 1938 came an intensification of persecution against the Jews including greater violence and expulsion, although, according to Bauer, a memorandum sent by Himmler in May 1940, rejected mass murder in preference to enslavement and cultural deprivation. Hitler, however had already issued a statement on 30 January 1939, threatening the destruction of European Jewry if they unleashed another world war.
One thing I should like to say on this day which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and I have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time for my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it the whole of the nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.30
This speech clearly reiterates Hitler's fervent hatred for the Jewish people, and gives an inkling of what fate he has in store for them. Thus by this time the mass murder of German Jewry at least, had become a real possibility for Hitler, rather than just a sick anti‑Semitic fantasy. However, despite making the above declaration, Hitler continued to support the Madagascar plan. In fact, Hitler was the key decision maker in authorising both the Lublin and Madagascar plans.31 Due to such evidence Bauer concludes that no mass murder plan could have existed at this time. Bauer proceeds to explain how the final solution began to take shape in 1941, as the Einsatzgruppen were trained to murder both Jews and Communists in the Russian campaigns that were to follow. It is assumed that Hitler ordered the annihilation of the Jews in mid‑March 1941.32 However, neither the actual date of the oral order nor its contents are known. Jackel on the other hand refutes the belief that there was a single killing order, instead the annihilation of the Jews existed in several phases covering several different methods as well as victims.33
There is also a debate amongst the functionalists with regard to when the decision for the final solution was initiated. Many functionalists maintain that the annihilation of European Jewry was decided upon at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. While others believe that such a decision was made ten months earlier during the Russian campaign.34 Throughout the complex debate, one thing is certain, the intention to annihilate European Jewry was a logical conclusion of Nazi ideology. And it is perhaps the fanatical hatred of the Jews by the Nazis that precipitated their attempted extermination. It is the ideology behind the intention to annihilate which marks out the Holocaust from other examples of genocide. It is therefore necessary to discuss the ideology of the Nazis in an attempt to understand why they felt compelled to attempt to destroy European Jewry.
According to the fervently racist and anti‑Semitic make up of the Nazi party, there existed two divisions in society. Unlike the ideology of many political parties this division did not run along economic lines, but biological ones. For the Nazis, society was divided into Aryan and non‑Aryan elements. The Jew was the most hated of the "non‑Aryans", in fact it appears that Aryan meant nothing more than non‑Jewish. The Japanese, for example were regarded as honorary "Aryans". While the "Semitic" Mufti of Jerusalem was a welcome guest in Nazi Berlin.35
Ideology is "the link between theory and action... combines action... with a consciousness of purpose and of the general thrust of history. It gives its adherents a sense of consistency and certainty that is too often absent among those brought up in the tradition of short‑range pragmatism."36 All those at the top of the Nazi Party swore allegiance to the Führer. They were also all nationalists and racialists believing in "the dominant racial community of the German people", and the most terrible consensus being that they were all fervently anti‑Semitic.37
The Nazis often spoke of a Jewish world conspiracy, which was apparently their most efficient piece of propaganda. 38 Throughout the propaganda produced by the Nazis, the Jew was portrayed as the incarnation of the devil, being irredeemably evil. The Jews were often referred to as vermin and were consequently associated with lice, disease and insects. Dietrich Eckart argued in 1919, that Jews did not believe in immortality and therefore lacked souls. Thus if they did not have souls they could not have been human, it was therefore easier to kill a soulless creature, than a living, thinking, feeling human being similar to oneself. Eckart also placed the blame for political disorder and the disintegration of the German nation on the shoulders' of the Jewish people.39
The program of the NSDAP (Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party/Nazi), or the "twenty‑five points" encompasses the goals that the Party wishes to attain. Lane and Rupp that the program was drawn up and printed in early 1920. No single writer of the program is identified, it does however reflect the anti‑Semitic thinking of both Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg. 40 The Program's first point calls for the unification of all Germans in a "Greater Germany", while the fourth point makes clear the place of the Jews in German society by denying them German citizenship, "Only he who is a folk comrade can be a citizen. Only he who is of German blood, regardless of his church, can be a folk comrade. No Jew, therefore can be a folk comrade." The sixth point of the program proceeds to deny all people, apart from "German citizens", the right to hold public office at any level. The program also maintains that the state cannot support non‑citizens, who should in fact be expelled so that they do not drain any resources that may be used by the "German citizen". The eighteenth point calls for the death of those people who are regarded as harming the common good, such as traitors, usurers and profiteers. The Jews were ultimately regarded as harming the common good, through creating "political disorder and causing the disintegration of the German nation", as mentioned above. As such, their just punishment was death.
The program of the NSDAP shows clearly the Nazi preoccupation with conserving the German race and nation. Hitler reiterated many times that, "the state is only the means to an end. The end is: Conservation of race."41 The Nazis took the idea of conserving the German race to the utmost extreme by denying citizenship to many people whose families had lived as Germans for generations. But of course, the greatest extremity, and the most devastating, was condemning European Jewry to death in the most inhumane manner, before which, such inhumanity would never have been conceivable.
I do not believe that Jews were merely used as scapegoats for all the conceivable problems of Nazi society, the fervent hatred felt for the Jew appears to transgress such a suggestion. Anti‑Semitism had been prevalent in Europe for centuries before the Nazi Party came to power, and Rubenstein sees the deep rooted hatred felt for the Jews by the Nazis as stemming from the transformation of a theological conflict into a biological one. For Rubenstein, "the Christian conception of the Jew as deicide is a significant component of the religious origins of the death camps." The Nazis were "satanic anti-Christians, who were able to utilise all the religious myths surrounding the Jews, with an "explosive force". 42
One of the most surprising aspects of Germany when the Nazis came to power is that it was no more anti-Semitic many other European countries at the time, France, for example, was considered to be far more anti-Semitic. The Nazi regime was unique in advocating such abhorrent measures as a solution to the perceived threat of the Jews. Hitler came to power with a visible hatred of the Jewish people, although the anti-Semitic aspect of the Nazi party was not used in all parts of Germany as an issue to mobilise votes. During the period of the Nazi dictatorship the measures taken against the Jews grew progressively worse, culminating with the horrors of the final solution. Whether one takes either an intentionalist or functionalist perspective, the desire to make the Reich Judenrein existed, and whether the final solution had been meticulously planned, or arose on a step by step basis, we cannot deny that ultimately, the final intention was in fact the final solution. The evil involved in condemning a whole race of people to death is immense, whether such a decision was decided upon in the early days of the Nazi Party reign, or towards the end, becomes largely irrelevant, the important point to remember, is that such a decision was actually made at all. The importance of the intentionalist-functionalist debate rests upon those who actually made the decision to annihilate European Jewry. However, to place the onus solely upon Hitler neglects the fact that many Nazi leaders must also have played key roles. Whereas by holding Nazi leaders alone responsible, we are relinquishing Hitler of responsibility. It is obviously necessary to be aware of how many people allowed the Holocaust to occur, and their reasons for deeming it desirable. An ideology that requires the death of any people should never be allowed to become the ruling ideology, ever again.
20 Yehuda Bauer, "Genocide: Was it the Nazis' Original Plan?", ANNALS, AAPSS, 450, July, 1980.
21 Cited in Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1990, p3.
22 Paul Johnson, The Holocaust, UK: Phoenix, 1996, pp1-2.
23 Rubenstein, Religion and the Origins of the Death Camps, p33.
24 Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, p18.