Were the reasons for the Holocaust functionalist or intentionalist?

Answer 1

In the context of the Holocaust:A. Intentionalism refers to the view that:

(1) the extermination of the Jews was Hitler's main political aim since the mid 1920s (or even earlier). (Explanations taking personal experience and ideology as the driving force behind the Holocaust are generally regarded as 'intentionalist'); or

(2) the motivation was almost entirely ideological (even if the policy was formulated later than the 1920s).

B. Functionalism (often also called 'structuralism') means that exterminating the Jews emerged as an aim much later, possibly not till 1941 and was largely driven by pressures from below and/or practical considerations. (Explanations that see the Holocaust as largely driven by bureaucratic and/or economic motives and/or wartime pressures are classed as 'functionalist').

- The view, taken by Arno Mayer, Andreas Hillgruber and Helga Grebing (three very different historians, writing from very different standpoints) that the genocide of the Jews was part of a wider, ideologically driven plan to rid the world of 'Judeo-Bolshevism' tends towards as a (sophisticated) Intentionalist theory as it treats ideology as more significant than pressures from Nazi administrators in Poland and elsewhere.

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There's an ongoing debate among historians about this. There are also various intermediate views. Almost no historians now accept the traditional intentionalist notion that there was a 'master plan' in place already in the 1920s or early 1930s is unlikely. (However, from 1945 till about 1960 a simple intentionalist view - that there was an early 'master plan' - was just taken for granted went unquestioned). There is singificant counter-evidence: for example, until August 1941 German Jews and those of some Nazi occupied countries were encouraged to emigrate.

It seems probable that the early Nazi 'plans' for the Jews involved a 'territorial solution', but no effort was made to plan it realistically or efficiently. (In this context, 'territorial solution' meant resettlement, in Eastern Europe or, as was briefly suggested in 1940, Madagascar).

There is a whole spectrum ranging from extreme intentionalism (for example, that Hitler was determined from about 1919 on to exterminate the Jews) to extreme functionalism, which believes that many of the pressures started with middle ranking German officials in occupied Poland and that these pressures then 'worked their way upwards' to the top. Certainly, the Nazi administration in occupied and annexed Poland was particularly extreme and pressed for early and drastic measures.

The most radical functionalist views imply (but rarely spell out) the notion that to some extent the Nazis 'stumbled' into the decision to carry out the Holocaust - that by invading Poland and later the western areas of the Soviet Union they exacerbated their own self-inflicted 'Jewish problem' by adding large numbers of Jews to the populations under their control; they isolated them, herded them into ghettos, made them economically useless, and then in an almost literal sense did not know what to do with them. Obviously, this needs qualifying, as it was the Nazi leadership that had created this 'problem' for itself.

Some historians, like Ian Kershaw, combine the two perspectives but lean towards functionalism. Hitler's rabid and obsessive antisemitism encouraged pressures for the Holocaust.

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