Holocaust - Historical Interpretations
Historical interpretations
As with any historical event, scholars continue to argue over what
exactly happened and why.
Who was directly involved in the killings?
Who authorized the killings?
Hitler authorized the mass killing of those labelled by the Nazis as "undesireables"
in the T-4 Euthanasia Program. A mass of evidence suggests that sometime
in the fall of 1941, Himmler and Hitler agreed in principle on mass
murder by gassing. To make for smoother intra-governmental cooperation
in the implementation of this "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question",
the Wannsee conference was held near Berlin on January 20, 1942, with
the participation of fifteen senior officials, led by Reinhard Heydrich
and Adolf Eichmann, the records of which provide the best evidence of
the central planning of the Holocaust. Just five weeks later on February
22, Hitler was recorded saying "We shall regain our health only by
eliminating the Jews" to his closest associates.
Hitler approved of the work of the Einsatzgruppen, where Jews throughout
Russia were shot naked in front of ditches. Most historians believe he
not only knew of the Holocaust and the gas chambers, but ordered Himmler
to carry it out — certainly it was entirely consistent with his lifelong
beliefs.
Arguments that no documentation links Hitler to "the Holocaust" rely on
artificially limiting the Holocaust to exclude what we do have
documentation on, such as the T-4 Euthanasia Program and the
Kristallnacht pogrom.
Who knew about the killings?
The full extent of what was happening in German-controlled areas was not
known until after the war. However, numerous rumors and eyewitness
accounts from escapees and others did give some indication that Jews
were being killed in large numbers. Since the early years of the war the
Polish government-in-exile published documents and organised meetings to
spread word of the fate of the Jews. Some protests were also held, for
example, on October 29/30, 1942, in the United Kingdom, leading
clergymen and political figures held a public meeting to register
outrage over Germany's persecution of Jews. It has also been suggested
that the Reichbahn (German Rail Company used for deportations and
transit to the various concentration camps), who had over one million
employees, was far more aware of the Holocaust than previously known,
and that Germans working on the rails must have known of the reality of
life in the camps.
In 1943, 43% of Americans polled believed that Hitler was systematically
murdering the Jews.
Why did people participate in, authorize, or tacitly accept the killing?
Obedience
Though possibly irrelevant--when considering the egregiousness of the
acts, in Stanley Milgram's Experiment which sought the answer to the
above question, reasonable people, when instructed by, preferably a
respectably suited, person in the United States, obeyed commands
entailing what they believed to be death.
Functionalism versus intentionalism
A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of
functionalism versus intentionalism. The terms were coined in a 1981
article by the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason to describe two
schools of thought about the origins of the Holocaust. Intentionalists
hold that the Holocaust was the result of a long-term masterplan on the
part of Hitler's and that Hitler was the driving force behind the
Holocaust. Functionalists hold that Hitler was anti-Semitic, but that he
did not have a masterplan for genocide. Functionalists see the Holocaust
as coming from below in the ranks of the German bureaucracy with little
or no involvement on the part of Hitler. Functionalists stress that the
Nazi anti-Semitic policy was constantly evolving in ever more radical
directions and the end product was the Holocaust.
Intentionalists like Lucy Davidowicz argue that the Holocaust was
planned by Hitler from the very beginning, at very least from 1919 on,
if not earlier. Other Intentionalists like Andreas Hillgruber and Klaus
Hildebrand suggested that Hitler had decided upon the Holocaust sometime
in the early 1920s. More moderate recent intentionalist historians like
Eberhard Jäckel continue to emphasize the relative earliness of the
decision to murder the Jews, although they are not willing to claim that
Hitler planned the Holocaust from the beginning. Yet another group of
intentionalist historians such as the American Arno J. Mayer claimed
Hitler only ordered the Holocaust in December 1941.
Functionalists like Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat and Christopher
Browning hold that the Holocaust was started in 1941-1942 as a result of
the failure of the Nazi deportation policy and the impending military
losses in Russia. They claim that what some see as extermination
fantasies outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature were
mere propaganda and did not constitute concrete plans. In Mein Kampf
Hitler repeatly states his inexorable hatred of the Jewish people, but
no-where does he proclaim his intention to exterminate the Jewish
people.
Furthermore, Functionalists point to the fact that in the 1930s, Nazi
policy aimed at trying to make life so unpleasant for German Jews that
they would leave Germany. Not until October 1941 were German Jews
forbidden to leave. Adolf Eichmann was in charge of faciliating Jewish
emigration by whatever means possible. Functionalists point to the SS's
support for a time in the late 1930s for Zionist groups as the preferred
solution to the "Jewish Question" as another sign that there was no
masterplan for genocide. The SS only ceased their support for German
Zionist groups when Joachim von Ribbentrop informed Hitler of this, and
Hitler ordered Himmler to cease and desist as the creation of Israel was
not a goal Hitler thought worthy of German foreign policy.
In particular, Functionalists have noted that in German documents from
1939 to 1941, the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was
clearly meant to be a "territorial solution", that is the entire Jewish
population was to be expelled somewhere far from Germany and not allowed
to come back. At first, the SS planned to create a giantic "Jewish
Reservation" in the Lublin, Poland area, but that plan was vetoed by
Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland who refused to allow the SS
to ship any more Jews to the Lublin area after November, 1939. In 1940,
the SS had the so-called "Madagascar Plan" to deport the entire Jewish
population of Europe to "reservation" on Madagascar. The "Madagascar
Plan" was cancelled because Germany could not defeat Britain and until
the British blockade was broken, the "Madagascar Plan" could not be put
into effect. Finally, Functionalist historians have made much of a
memorandum written by Himmler in May, 1940 explicitly rejecting
extermination of the entire Jewish people as "un-German" and going on to
recommend to Hitler the "Madagascar Plan" as the preferred "territorial
solution" to the "Jewish Question". Not until July 1941 did the term
"Final Solution to the Jewish Question" come to mean extermination.
Recently, a synthesis of the two schools has emerged that has been
championed by such diverse historians such as the Canadian historian
Michael Marrus, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer and the British
historian Ian Kershaw that contends that Hitler was the driving force
behind the Holocaust, but that he did not have a long-term plan and that
much of the initiative for the Holocaust came from below in a effort to
meet Hitler's perceived wishes.
Another controversy was started by the historian Daniel Goldhagen, who
argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in
the Holocaust, which he claims had its roots in a deep eliminationist
German anti-Semitism. Most other historians have disagreed with
Goldhagen's thesis, arguing that while anti-Semitism undeniably existed
in Germany, Goldhagen's idea of a uniquely German "eliminationist"
anti-Semitism is untenable, and that the extermination was unknown to
many and had to be enforced by the dictatorial Nazi apparatus.
Revisionists and deniers
Holocaust denial, also called Holocaust revisionism, is the belief that
far fewer than the 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis (numbers
below 1 million, most often around 300,000 are typically cited).
Adherents of this position claim that there never was a Nazi attempt to
exterminate the Jews, and that many other minorities were persecuted as
severely or worse than the Jews, particularly Ukrainians under Stalin
(the latter persecutions are often attributed to Jews). Many people who
hold this position further claim that Jews and/or Zionists know that the
Holocaust never occurred, yet that they nonetheless disingenuously use
the Holocaust to further their political agenda. These views are not
accepted as credible by mainstream historians.
Holocaust deniers almost always prefer to be called Holocaust
revisionists. However, many people contend that the latter term is
misleading. Historical revisionism is a well-accepted and mainstream
part of the study of history; it is the reexamination of accepted
history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more
accurate, and/or less biased information, or viewing known information
from a new perspective.
Holocaust deniers maintain that they apply proper revisionist principles
to Holocaust history, and therefore the term Holocaust revisionism is
appropriate for their point of view. However, mainstream historians
strongly disagree. Gordon McFee writes in his essay "Why Revisionism
isn't" that
"'Revisionists' depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not
occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that
preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper
methodology [...], thus turning the proper historical method of
investigation and analysis on its head."[8]
New historical studies of the Holocaust may in theory be referred to as
Holocaust revisionism. However, because the latter term has become
associated with Holocaust deniers, mainstream historians today now avoid
using it to describe such work.
Holocaust denial, aka Holocaust revisionism, is most commonly associated
with neo-Nazis or anti-Semites, and has become popular among the
Palestinian national movement and many Islamic fundamentalists. Mahmoud
Abbas, the President of the Palestinian national authority, asserted in
his doctoral thesis (i) that no more than a million Jews were actually
killed—the rest is Jewish exaggeration and (ii) that the Holocaust
itself was the result of a conspiracy between the Nazis and the
Zionists. However, Abbas' supporters claim out that "in order to earn a
PhD from a Soviet university, [Abbas] had to write what the Communists
wanted."[9]
The public advocacy of theories denying the Holocaust is a crime in some
European countries (including France, Poland, Austria and Germany).
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust
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