I am a graduate student in history and my research focuses on human rights in Southeast Asia. Born into a refugee camp during the aftermath of the Vietnam War, my life experiences as an immigrant and a war refugee has led me to sympathize with the plight of those who have experienced government oppression and persecution. In my own research and in my piece, ” Understanding the Holocaust: Was Hitler to Blame?” I find that the best way to raise awareness and help prevent systematic marginalization and oppression is not to blame the one in power, but to examine the intrinsic prejudices present in the culture of that society. My hope is that by examining the history of human evil, we can realize its destruction on human life and find solutions that show more compassion, understanding, and tolerance for our fellow human beings.
http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/jew-registration-leaflets-open-holocaust-wounds/
UNDERSTANDING THE HOLOCAUST: WAS HITLER TO BLAME?
Abstract
The limited historical evidence on the Holocaust has caused many early scholars to assume that it was a pre-determined plan by Hitler to annihilate all Jews off the face of the earth. But in the recent years, revisionist scholars have collected German, as well as international sources to paint a more complete picture of how the Holocaust occurred. This paper argues that the Holocaust was both a result of Hitler’s anti-Semitic doctrine and unforeseen historical circumstances that forced Nazi Germany to change their plan from one in which Jews would be expelled from the country to a plan in which Jews had to be annihilated in concentration camps. By observing the interplay between rhetoric and actions, we come to the conclusion that the Holocaust was not the evil plan of one man, but the immoral behavior of many who participated and many more who looked away.
In 1945, when nearly all of Europe was blanketed in the gloom and ashes of war, the world stood in shock, wondering how the Holocaust was possible; how could one man spell doom to the lives of millions of those whom he had never known? The theories on how the Holocaust happened are polarized and analyzed by two schools of thought: intentionalism and functionalism. Those who subscribe to intentionalism believe that Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews was determined in his ideology and that Hitler was the sole architect of the “final solution”(the total annihilation of all Jewry).Functionalists, on the other hand, argue that the Holocaust was the result of a series of interconnected circumstances and bureaucratic decisions. This occurred only when expulsion of Jews from German territory seemed no longer possible. Both interpretations attempt to make something as unbelievable as the Nazi’s violence towards Jews into something that can be logically comprehensible. But our understanding of the Holocaust is not bettered by reducing something as complicated as the Nazi ideology into a summarized school of thought, and neither does it benefit our understanding to view the Holocaust as either intentionalism or functionalism. It is only by observing both schools of thought that we can come close to understanding the whole truth about how the Holocaust happened. The manner by which the Holocaust was carried out, therefore, is a conglomeration of historical circumstances and Hitler’s anti-Semitic ideology.
Steven Katz, author of The Holocaust in Historical Context, wrote extensively about intentionalism as an effort to prove its uniqueness. Katz described the Nazi dogma as a “determinative ideology” and argues that the use of state funds to build concentration camps, the scientific research to define race, and the death sentences executed were willed events—not actions that can arbitrarily occur.[1] Other supporters of intentionalism cite Hitler’s letters, speeches, and diaries to prove that the obliteration of Jews was detailed and premeditated by Hitler even before his rise to power in 1933. It is hard to argue that anti-Semitism did not pervade Hitler’s thoughts; in fact, Hitler had an unusual obsession with the Jews, referring to them countless of times in all of his works. One of the first appearances of Hitler’s anti-Semitism appears in a letter that he wrote to Adolf Gemlich in 1919. In the letter, the young Hitler writes, “its final objective…must be the total removal of all Jews from our midst.”[2] Around the same year, Hitler also remarked that he had discovered the “Jewish virus” and that ‘we shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.’[3] Intentionalists latch onto the key words “final objective,” “total removal,” and “eliminating” to conclude that Hitler, indeed, had a determined goal to exterminate all Jews and it was with this goal in mind that the Nazi regime advanced towards the “final solution.” However, one cannot assume that these words referred to the act of killing. A closer historical interpretation reasonably suggests that what Hitler probably meant by “total removal” was the removal of all Jews from Germany through means of emigration. It is also important to note the year in which Hitler wrote or spoke these words. In 1919, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party and renamed it a few months later the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. In 1928, almost a decade later, the Nazi party was only able to scrape 2.8 percent of votes in the Reichstag elections.[4] Hitler held no real power and the Nazi party’s chances of gaining mainstream popularity were extremely bleak. Hence, it is farfetched to assume that Hitler intended to launch murder programs before he even knew he could be Führer, much less plan the mass genocide of millions of Jews in countries he did not know he would even conquer.
The intentionalists are also in danger of seeming superficial because they incorrectly assume that the Holocaust was Hitler’s main goal, rather than a later by-product of Hitler’s chief goal, which was to create a racially pure state. The central idea of the Nazi Party was the nationalistic idea of a German state for German people. It stressed the need for ethnically German or Volkish (folk) people to return to historically German lands.[5] Thus, the Nazi goal was not to destroy, but to create anew a utopia for Germans. The intentionalists do not take into consideration that eliminating Jews was a means to an end (the end being a racially pure state) rather than the other way around. The boycott of April 1, 1933 and the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” are two examples of the racially-driven Nazi ideology to purify Germany. Both legal measures were put into place to unemploy Jews, denying them a means of living in hopes that Jews would move out of Germany and search for livelihoods elsewhere. The April 1 boycott, for example, was a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses and the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” established that all civil servants who were not of Aryan race must retired from their positions. In Sebastian Haffner’s memoir, Defying Hitler, he describes how his friend announces the day after the April 1 boycott that he had gotten engaged and was moving to Zurich in order to find a job. “There’s nothing left for me here, so I’m leaving,”[6] said the friend. This was the result that Hitler and the Nazis hoped for. However, to the disappointment of the Nazis, not all Jews emigrated. There were about 500,000 Germans Jews in 1932 and only 37,000 were able to flee. The fact that Hitler’s efforts to create a pure German state failed allows the functionalism theory to make its case.
Functionalism argues that the road to Auschwitz was not paved prior to Hitler coming to power, but was a culminating result of circumstance and bureaucratic needs. The failure of the boycott and the law that forced Jews from professional fields was one of those circumstances. It signaled to the Nazis that these measures were too soft and that in order to efficiently raise a pure German state, harsher measures would be required to oust the Jews. The years that followed saw many more laws designed to make life for Jews exceedingly unbearable. One of these was the “Law Regarding the Legal Status of Jewish Communities” in 1938, which called for the emigration of all Jews who were not naturalized. Many of these non-naturalized Jews had lived in Germany for many generations, but did not acquire citizenship. “Foreign Jews” who did not emigrate were rounded up and sent to concentration camps and were only released when they had visas. [7] In observing this aspect of history,intentionalism is proved false. With thousands of Jews rounded up in concentration camps, Hitler could have executed his plan to “eliminate” the Jew. But no order was given to kill. Instead, the order was to provide visas.
Around 120,000 people left Germany between 1938 and 1939, but many were rejected by countries suffering from economic depression. [8] Perhaps the clearest example that prove theintentionalist theory wrong, was the negotiations that took place between Berlin and Warsaw on October 31 after Poland had forbade the return of the newly destitute Jews to Poland. If Hitler had in fact premeditated the mass murder of Jews, then certainly there would be no better time to commence this plan than at this moment when the very Jews whom Hitler tried to dispose of would not leave his sight. But instead, he negotiated with Poland to let the immigrant Jews into their country, showing once again that Hitler did not intend to wipe Jews off the face of the earth; he simply wanted them out of German territory. A key event that occurred in the aftermath of these negotiations was Kristallnact, otherwise known as the night of broken glass when Jewish shops and houses were ransacked and Jewish men were thrown into prison. Many historians refer to this night of November 9, 1938 as being the turning point of Nazi policy from oppressive to outright violence. The event occurred due to an assassination of a German diplomat by a Polish Jew. Intentionalists believe Kristallnacht to be the beginning of the “final solution,” but can we safely assume that this was part of Hitler’s initial plan? Certainly, Hitler could not have predicted the assisination. There is no evidence that the slippery slope towards genocide was part of Hitler’s grand scheme and, in fact, it is more convincing to conclude that a number of unpredicted events snowballed into the violence that occurred that night. Intentionalists also assert that Hitler was the sole architect of the “final solution,” however, Kristallnact was planned and executed by propaganda minster, Joseph Goebbels, who initiated the attack and rounded up Jews without Hitler’s approval
As mentioned before, intentionalism neglects to recognize that the central ideology of the Nazi party was German nationalism. Hence, when Hitler set out to reclaim historically German lands that were taken away after World War I, Hitler was working towards the idea of a unified Germany. When Germany invaded Poland and other countries to the east, the Nazi Regime ironically added 11 million Jews to their population, compared to the half a million that was present in Germany when Hitler rose to power. Hitler did not go to war to hunt down Jews and he most certainly did not plan for the invasion of any country before he took power. Functionalism helps us better understand the Holocaust through the circumstances of these invasions. If the Nazi goal was to expel Jews to lands outside of Germany, then Hitler ran into a problem when previously expelled Jews were reintegrated into the German territory by his conquests of eastern countries. Because Germany now had control of most of Europe, there were not many places left where Jews could be expelled to. The Madagascar plan and the Wannsee Conference give insight into the Nazi’s desperate plans to get rid of Jews. In 1940, Governor General Hans Frank ordered ‘to abandon all ghetto construction plans in view of the Führer’s plan to send the Jews to Madagascar after the war. SS General Reinhard Heydrich formulated the Madagascar plan which planned for the wholesale deportation of European Jewry to the island of Madagascar.[9] Hitler did not formulate the plan, nor was he the one to deal with the intricacies of completing it; the Nazi bureaucracy was responsible. Hitler could not predict in 1919 that most of the European Jewish population would be in German hands. He could not foresee the need to expel Jews to a faraway island, and he most certainly could not predict that Madagascar would be denied to Germany and that murder was the only solution left. The invasion of Russia soon thereafter also contributed to this final solution. It added more territory to Germany, making Madagascar unnecessary. It was after this invasion that Hitler saw the concentration camps in the east as the one and only destination for the Jews.
The desperate plan to exterminate Jews materialized with the conference in Wannsee. Hitler had signed a euthanasia decree known as Action T4 in the months proceeding; however, Hitler did not detail the plans for the annihilation of Jews. The Wannsee Conference allows functionalists to prove its theory that the Holocaust was a result of circumstances. Heinrich Himmler, a top Nazi official, wanted to take full control in 1942 in regards to the final solution. However, Himmler knew that Hitler would not grant him power so he got his power through Goring, who gave him a letter authorizing him to “carry out all necessary preparations with regard to the…Jewish Question.”[10] As a result, Heydrich called for a convention at Wannsee and invited top officials (excluding Hitler’s powerful inner circle). It is clear that intentionalism cannot properly explain the Holocaust because its theory that Hitler is the sole architect is proven wrong numerous times and here again at the Wannsee Conference.
Therefore, the long series of events that occurred over the decades created conditions for genocide. Genocide was never the initial goal. The rise and fall of Hitler was just as unpredictable for him as it was for anyone else. But although functionalism may have succeeded in explaining the Holocaust through the “domino effect” of particular events, intentionalism also helped in understanding the man that pushed the first domino. The gun that is loaded will always go off in the end, and Hitler loaded his plans and ideology with such strong hatred for the Jews that even if he did not plan to kill them, his abhorrent attitude allowed him to. The story of these series of unfortunate events sadly ended with the Holocaust, a solution that no one, not even Hitler himself could predict.
[1] Katz, Steven, “The Holocaust: A Preliminary Description for Purposes of Comparison, The Holocaust in Historical Context, p. 3
[2] Hitler’s 1919 Letter to Adolf Gemlich
[3] Katz, Steven, “The Holocaust: A Preliminary Description for Purposes of Comparison, The Holocaust in Historical Context, p. 8
[4] Dwork & Van Pelt, Holocaust: A History, p. 53
[5] Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State, 28-73
[6] Haffner, Sebastian, Defying Hitler, p. 164
[7] Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State, p. 120
[8] Dwork & Van Pelt, Holocaust: A History, p. 129
[9] Dwork & Van Pelt, Holocaust: A History, p. 208-209
[10] Dwork & Van Pelt, Holocaust: A History, p. 280-281