"The Wannsee Conference was entirely responsible for the Holocaust" How valid is this assessment of the Holocaust?

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“The Wannsee Conference was entirely responsible for the Holocaust”

How valid is this assessment of the Holocaust?

The true origins of the Holocaust have been under academic debate and intense scrutiny among historians for a considerable amount of time. Dividing them into two major perspectives; Functionalists and Intentionalist.[1] The pair bring into view a key question and queries the shroud surrounding the Shoah. It questions what point in time the mass genocide of 6.6 million Jews was decided upon. Many would put forward the Holocaust was already assigned a position in the time-line using Hitler's own “Mein Kampf” as justification. Others would suggest the Holocaust was result of numerous political economic and social factors, that brought about the rise of both The Nazi Party and Thrid Reich. There is substantial evidence to support both sides of the debate. Functionalist historians such as Browning and Mommsen agree that the power struggle between Hitler's subordinates and war played a much greater role in deciding the demise of the Jewish people compared with Hitler himself while Intentionalists like Fleming and Dawidowicz say Hitler was following a gradualist policy. Taking these perspectives into account while researching my own sources it seems implausible the Wannsee Conference headed by Reinhard Heydrich on 20th January 1942, conceived the Holocaust and it was most definitely not fully responsible for the Shoah, however it did play its part, comprised of fifteen highly educated leading Nazi officials, civil servants and SS members, brought together under a grand villa in Berlin on shores of Lake Wannsee to discuss a programme of mass murder.

Anti-Semitism was by no means birthed from Nazi imagination, although it was the Nazi party who took advantage of this hidden resentment and unleashed it with mass exaggeration. Undoubtedly without the Nazi party it would not have manifested itself in such the way it did.

Rhode's perspective is from the very early stages of the Nazi party they had clear enemy. Hitler had convinced himself that Bolshevism was birthed from Jewish ideology and like a disease, would slowly infect it's way around the globe until every country was a Bolshevic state and his National Socialist state was the last line of defence against Bolshevism. Having also convinced himself that the Jews who were a very easy target, were responsible for Germany's humiliating defeat of the First World War and blamed them for accepting the crippling terms of the Treaty of Versailles.[2] Historian Yehuda Bauer adds “No genocide to date had been completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, non-pragmatic ideology”[3] Once he had internalised these “myths” and “hallucinations” he then required the German people to join in his beliefs; which wouldn't require much prompting.[4] The phase “two opposing political systems” which Yehuda Bauer also refers to as “parallel quests” means that National Socialism and Bolshevism or the Nazi Party and the Jews were on a collision course which could only endure one outcome, essentially one destroying the other in terms of how the Nazi's perceived it to be. Seeing as the Jews were seen as an inferior race to the Aryans (Nazis) through the ideologies of eugenics and Charles Darwin's “Survival of the fittest” theory, the Nazi's believed they had the right to destroy the Jews. The term “quest” and “conspiracy” invokes the feelings that eventually they would reach the end and they would be willing to travel a great length to reach that end, and the Jews conspiracy would be the main obstacle upon the quest, therefore in the Nazi's eyes eradication of that obstacle would bring glory upon the German Nation. It was this ideological racial war[5] so to speak between the two political systems that was the most powerful driving factor of the Holocaust and the Nazi war machine. Hitler then had to pass his ideological war onto the people, of course he knew the outcome, but would have to encourage step by step resentment and programme by rational means in order to reach this outcome.

By using the intentionalist theme, this allows us to see the invasion of the Soviet Union as a way of disguising the horrors of the Einsatzgruppen and justify the killings of Jews as acts of war. The invasion of the Soviet Union was the first step in Hitler's racial war against non-Aryans and the first step towards the elimination of Bolshevism.

This source is neither for or against the functionalist or intentionalist approach, however if we continue with the idea that the Holocaust and mass genocide of all inferior races, Jews in particular had already been decided upon long before the meeting at the Wannsee conference, Wannsee being in January 1942 and this taking place in September 1941[6] shows that the method of killing compared to that of 1942/1943 was extremely different, what remains completely the same between the two dates is the logistical removal of unwanted races of people through murder proves that it was well entrenched in Operation Barbarossa's blueprints. As Himmler ordered his men to act harshly against “a racially and humanly inferior population” To have such an unwavering tenacious view toward a race of people and view them as ideologically under them just highlights how much the Nazi ideology of race and purity was bombarded into the people of Germany, and also means that genocide had been amongst the Nazi Party's designs for a long time.

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With these answers comes another question, what was the purpose of the Wannsee Conference. To view the source from a functionalist's perspective, one could argue that with the newly acquired territory of Soviet Union due to occupation, the Nazi Party now found themselves under the control of another 2.5 million Jews who all had to be accounted for, and that would mean the next problem the Nazi's came under was what to do with such a high amount of people. The quickest and simplest answer was to liquidate them at the source, so while conquering the land; they disposed ...

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