To what extent was Hitler solely responsible for the Holocaust

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To what extent was Hitler Solely responsible for the Holocaust?

While undeniable the holocaust will forever remain as one of the darkest passages in history, an argument has emerged amongst historians concerning its origins and over who instigated it. Many historians view the path to Auschwitz and the massacre of the Jewry as a ‘straight road’, seeing Adolf Hitler (military and political leader of Germany 1933-1945) as the sole instigator of the event, while others claim that the responsibility of the Holocaust lies with numerous other perpetrators, such as the bureaucracy, architect of genocide Heinrich Himmler and the ordinary German citizens. This essay attempts to analyze who in bears the ultimate responsibility for one of the biggest crimes against humanity. Is Hitler the soul individual behind the genocide of the Jewry or can the responsibility be divided up with numerous other agencies involved.

In order to answer whether Hitler was central to the Holocaust and its occurrence, one needs to be able to understand why Hitler expressed such a vehement hatred towards the Jews.  Although Historians have long debated where Hitler acquired his anti-Semitic views from, Hitler himself has stated that they were first developed in Vienna between 1908-1913. During this period, Vienna was ripe with traditional racial prejudice, and many historians have claimed that Hitler may’ve been influenced by the writings of ideologist anti-Semite Lanz von Libenfels and politicians such as Karl Lueger. In addition the anti-Semite music of operatic composer Richard Wagner was said to have particularly profound effect on the youthful Hitler. Hitler’s own friend from that period of his life Augest Kubizek claimed that the ‘charged emotionality of this music’ provided Hitler a means for ‘self hypnosis’ and the ingredients to escape into a fantasy. Historian Gerald Flemming has also claimed that the very essence of Wagner’s anti-Semite music found its way through Hitler into the National Socialist Radical Doctrine (Weltanschauung).  Hitler seemingly blamed Jews for every negative aspect in his life, even blaming them for his failure to get into the Vienna art academy, thus showing that Hitler was ‘gripped by a pathological hatred for Jews’.

Hitler also began to associate the Jews with certain forms of Bolshevism and Socialism, where he merged his hatred of the Jews with his own anti-Marxism. He even went as far to blame the Jews for Germany’s military defeat in World War I, claiming that the Jews were the culprits of Imperial Germany’s downfall. Scholars such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that ‘plans for destroying the Jews were always part of Hitler’s thinking’.  She insists Hitler had always been fixated on the total annihilation of the Jewish race. Her argument is supported by a number of passages in Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf, and his warning to the Reichstag:  ‘if the Jewish financiers outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of the Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” This piece of evidence suggests that Hitler had always insisted on a definitive solution to the Jewish question.  .

While Hitler’s hatred for the Jews was demonstrated through his speeches and of course their removal was core to his creed, how were his strong anti-Semitic views able to translate into policies which saw their ultimate extermination? Functionalist historians such as Hans Mommsen have stressed the view that there was no formal order given to carry out the final solution, with Martin Broszat also sharing a similar view claiming that there was no ‘comprehensive general extermination order at all’. Mommsen sees Hitler as thinking about the Jews in propagandistic terms, without charting a course of action for their extermination. Instead, Mommsen believes that the implementation of the Final solution cannot solely be attributed to Hitler alone, and that the explanation lied in the ‘fragmented decision making process in the Third Reich, which made for improvised bureaucratic initiatives with their own inbuilt momentum’.

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So to what extent were these bureaucrats responsible for the holocaust? Historians such as Raul Hilberg have argued that the genocide of the Jews was an administrative process, taken at the initiative of ‘countless decision makers in a far flung bureaucratic machine’. Hilberg believes that these perpetrators worked together in such a mechanized fashion that at a certain point, there was no master plan or blue print. Hilberg argues that a consensus for mass murder emerged amongst these bureaucrats and they developed a ‘shared comprehension of consonance and synchronization’, which meant they all had an unfailing sense of direction and were ...

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