The Holocaust- No Hitler, No Holocaust?

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The Holocaust- No Hitler, No Holocaust?

During the 1980, scholars who studied the Nazis' attempt to destroy all of the Jews of Europe fell into two camps. "Internationalists" placed Hitler and his maniacal hatred of Jews at the root of the genocide, arguing that the intention to murder all of the Jews of Europe had festered in his brain at least since 1920. The actual timing of the "Final Solution" was merely a matter of waiting for the most appropriate circumstances rather than the result of any evolution of Hitler's thinking or any changes in the nature of his regime. A second school, the "functionalists," argued that while the Nazis pursued an obviously anti-Semitic policy, they reached the decision to commit mass murder only at the end of a long period of indecision and after having failed in their plans for expulsion or ghettoization of Jewish populations. A process of "cumulative radicalisation" was characteristic of the regime. Competing bureaucratic agencies vying for the attention of the Fuhrer offered ever more extreme proposals.

Surely the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Nazis did change their policies as the war unfolded. The mass shootings that followed in the wake of Operation Barbarossa did demoralize the killers and turn the Nazis' attention towards a bureaucratic and industrial "solution" to the "Jewish problem." But it was always Hitler at the centre of the web. It was his obsession, his determination, that ruthlessness that placed mass murders high at the top of the Nazi regime's agenda.

2. THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST Another debate, more recent, concerns the extent of "eliminationist " anti-Semitism in Germany. One scholar, Daniel Gold Hagen, has argued that this murderous variety of anti-Semitism was widespread in Nazi Germany. But other studies suggest that levels of anti-Semitism in Germany in this period were in many respects comparable to those in other European countries. Indeed, the intensity of anti-Jewish feeling was arguably higher in Poland, Hungary, and Romania. What was distinctive about Germany was its murderous and ideologically driven regime. There was in fact a distinction between the fanatical anti-Semitism of the party's "true believers" and the conventional anti-Semitic attitudes of the population at large. Hitler's biographer, Ian Kershaw, finds that "the 'Jewish question' was of no more than minimal interest to the vast majority of Germans during the war years.... Popular opinion, largely indifferent and infused with latent anti-Semitic feeling... provided the climate within which spiralling Nazi aggression towards the Jews could take place unchallenged. But it did not provoke the radicalisation in the first place.... The road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference."

There have been other genocides, other cases of mass murder, in this century. But the Nazi project was distinctive: "the systematic dehumanisation of the victims, the assembly-line process of mass murder, and the bureaucratic organization on a continental scale that brought people from every corner of Europe to be killed" (Michael Marrus). "The tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, though each probably caused more deaths than the Third Reich, did not aim at the total physical extermination of entire populations. The attempted annihilation of the Jews of Europe was a state-sponsored project with the aim of killing every man, woman, and child in pursuit of an ideological fantasy. For the killers, it was necessary to believe not only that individual Jews were inferior or wicked, but that Jews collectively constituted a mortal danger to Germany in particular and the world in general" (Peter Pulzer).

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The totality of this project is one of its most striking and appalling features. "Unlike the case with any other group, and unlike the massacres before or since, every single one of the millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total. In principle, no Jew was to escape. In this important respect, the Nazis' assault upon Jewry differed from the campaigns against other peoples and groups Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Poles, Ukrainians, and so on. Assaults on these people could indeed be murderous; their victim’s number in the millions, and their ashes mingle with those ...

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