Mental_Health.

Intentionalism versus Functionalism: Thoughts on the Nature of the Debate on the Origins of the ‘Final Solution’ The Nazi regime’s so-called ‘Final Solution’ was implemented to systematically annihilate the European Jews. After the end of the Second World War, it was established that six million Jews had been deported and murdered by factory methods (gassed, shot, starved, worked to death) under the programme of this ‘Final Solution’.[1] The efforts of historians to make sense of this appalling, deliberate and violent destruction of human life have been hampered by two main difficulties. The first is of a practical nature: Many aspects of the genesis of the Final Solution have been obscured by the destruction of pertinent files, (mainly by the Nazi Security Police) and by the misleading phrasing of the extant documents.[2] The second difficulty is more abstract: In an historical analysis of the genocide, historians of National Socialism are confronted with the question not only of how they can provide a rational explanation of the inhumane phenomenon, but whether such a rational explanation can possibly exist. These difficulties have led to a diversity of often conflicting interpretations of the Final Solution. Moreover, these conflicting interpretations have been coupled with a heated debate about the fundamental purpose of historical writing, the methods of interpretation, and the moral and historical responsibility of historians in general. Most interpretations of the origins of the Final Solution fall into either the so-called intentionalist or the functionalist school of thought. ‘Intentionalism’ refers to the position of those historians who argue that the self-conscious decisions made by Hitler and his immediate followers were decisive to the National Socialist rule. In their view, an indisputable continuity exists between Hitler’s anti-Semitic writings in Mein Kampf, and the Nazi racial policies that were pursued by Germany both before and during the War. This intentionalist explanation was widely accepted in the immediate years after the Second World War. However, further research and analyses of the persecution and murder of the European Jews led historians in the 1970’s to discover that a “broad spectrum of military officers, civil servants and technocrats, as well as representatives of big industries willingly served a system that was characterized by a cumulative inhumanity and barbaric violence”.[3] These disturbing discoveries caused some historians to re-interpret the Final Solution in what has come to be called a ‘functionalist’ model. ‘Functionalism’ is the position of those historians who criticize the intentionalists for ascribing the primary “burden of explanation” to the will of Hitler and other prominent Nazi leaders.[4] From their perspective, a more complex understanding of the Third Reich entails the consideration of “collective processes”, that is, the dynamic interaction between the different governmental institutions and its effects on the decision-making processes in the Nazi regime.[5] It should be noted that the functionalists are ascribing the origins of the Final Solution to an abstract entity (governmental structure). Whether or not they are correct, their methodology makes it difficult to assign blame via a victim/perpetrator dichotomy. One could, of course, consider the governmental structure to be the perpetrator, however, such a perpetrator leaves both the public, and the historians themselves, little outlet for moral outrage. This displacement of the blame for the Final Solution has led intentionalists to accuse functionalists of trivializing and/or relativizing the role of Hitler and his immediate followers. Thus, since the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s an aggressive and heated debate has raged between the proponents of the functionalist and the intentionalist schools of thought. The purpose of this essay is to critically assess the conflict between the intentionalist and the functionalist approaches in their analysis of the origins of the Final Solution. I have chosen to examine two positions that have emerged as representative of the two schools of thought: That of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the ultra-intentionalist; and that of Hans Mommsen, a representative functionalist. Additionally, I examine a third position, that of Christian Browning, who attempts to synthesize the two schools. Lucy Dawidowicz, the ‘arch-intentionalist’, argues in her book, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945[6], that it is grossly inaccurate (even immoral) to deny that all of the racial policies of the Third Reich fall directly in line with Hitler’s will. The annihilation of the Jewish people was incorporated in his quest for Lebensraum (‘living-space’) and the supremacy of the ‘Aryan’ race.[7] Hitler, according to Dawidowicz, made no distinction between his foreign and domestic policies. The realization of his monstrous ‘utopian’ dream included two main steps: First the internal restoration of the pure ‘Aryan’ race through the purging of the Jewish people. Second, the remilitarization of Germany, the blueprint for which was set down in 1933, when Hitler created the National Defense Council, and then, six months later, withdrew from the League of Nations.[8] Dawidowicz argues that Hitler conceived the period from 1933 to 1939 as the preparation phase for the greater ‘Aryan’ expansion into the East.[9] She attacks functionalists, such as Hans Mommsen, for inaccurately drawing a line between the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic domestic policies and their foreign policies. In Hitler’s mind, the general connection between domestic and foreign policy was greatly enhanced. That is, for him, domestic policy should serve as a tool to strengthen his people to the point where they could impose their own foreign policy on other nations; conversely foreign policy was a tool to sustain the spirit of his people.[10] Dawidowicz is outright appalled by the functionalists’ assertion that the ‘Final Solution’ was a product of a chaotic system, run by ad hoc laws and improvised actions, where no one really foresaw the atrocious end-results. She accuses functionalists of evoking a “science-fiction fantasy of government by automation” and “despotism without human intervention and without human leadership”.[11] There is plenty of evidence that the large bureaucratic machinery had to be mobilized to create the racial state, and that Hitler could not have conceived of every single detail in his dictatorship’s anti-Semitic policies. However, according to Dawidowicz, an explanation that places greater responsibility for the Final Solution on the flaws of the government structure, overlooks the human agents who direct the government, and denies the fact that “people are always motivated by ideas, values, beliefs and the force of passion”.[12] Unfortunately, despite Dawidowicz’s clearly noble intentions, she seems to have oversimplified the functionalist argument. Hans Mommsen provides a representative functionalist explanation of the origins of the genocide in his essay, “The Realization of the Unthinkable: The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in the Third Reich”[13]. A closer examination of his position reveals that he does not assign political and moral responsibility for Nazi policies to blind forces and pressures. In contrast to Dawidowicz, who examines the particularity of Hitler’s anti-Semitic and Social Darwinist ideology to understand the origins of the Final Solution, Mommsen seeks to arrive at an explanation by examining how the role of the Nazi political leaders as well as the middle-ranking officials in the Nazi power structure. He shifts the focus away from Hitler and the Nazi elite and concentrates on the particularity of the Third Reich’s structural organization, which permitted many ordinary civilians to actively contribute to the inhumane persecution of the European Jews that culminated in genocide. Mommsen claims that: The utopian dream of exterminating the Jews could become reality only in the half-light of unclear orders and ideological fanaticism. Then, despite all opposing interests, the process developed its own internal dynamic. It is therefore impossible to assign sole responsibility for events to Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Bormann, the SS and the activists in the German Foreign Ministry. [14] Mommsen’s attempt to delimit the nature of the Nazi leadership’s responsibility has been interpreted by Dawidowicz as an effort to absolve Hitler and his subordinates of all responsibility for the conception and implementation of the Final Solution. Historians generally agree that the intensified persecution of Jews in the history of the Third Reich was legitimized by the dictator’s authority. Mommsen, however, puts to question “how much influence Hitler exerted on the detailed moves to force Jews out of German social and economic life and to deprive them of legal rights”.[15] He argues that without reliable proof of Hitler’s direct order of the ‘Final Solution’, one cannot deduce from his anti-Semitic rhetoric alone that he conceived a comprehensive programme for the extermination of the European Jews.[16] In his view, Hitler’s hatred for the Jews was a means to mobilize the mass support for his party.[17] Once the regime was installed, however, Hitler became the slave to his public prophecies. The ‘Jewish question’ was no more than an “almost metaphysical objective” that served as a useful and popular focal point for the German nation. He asserts that Hitler’s anti-Semitic ranting was not uncommon, but “typical of radical anti-Semitic wishful thinking since the late nineteenth century”.[18] Mommsen is critical of the intentionalist perspective that Hitler’s ultimate goal was from the beginning the literal, physical extermination of the European Jews. Mommsen portrays Hitler as an indispensable agent of the Nazi movement. He holds him morally responsible for cultivating an atmosphere of hatred in order to rally mass support for himself and his party. However, Mommsen assumes that the absence of any explicit documentation of Hitler’s personal order of racial domestic policies (in the years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War) indicates that the Führer initially lacked interest in transforming his anti-Semitic rhetoric into a bureaucratic and social reality. Instead, Hitler’s subordinates, who interpreted his propagandistic rhetoric literally, are held responsible for creating a legal space within which the targeted Jewish population progressively lost all legal rights to defend themselves. For example, the November pogrom (Kristallnacht), was instigated not by Hitler, but by Goebbels; and the racial Nuremberg Laws, which sought to segregate the ‘Aryans’ from the ‘Non-Aryans’, were conceived by Goering, not Hitler. In both of these cases, Hitler never publically approved of the actions of his subordinates. Hitler’s non-intervention in the domestic sphere, Mommsen argues, should be seen as a sign of his limited influence in the Third Reich. There is a certain force of logic in this argument – that is, in the absence of any hard evidence, it is impossible to say conclusively whether or not Hitler approved of his follwers’ actions. Mommsen himself recognizes that Hitler most likely approved of the anti-Semitic policies, especially in light of his anti-Semitic rantings[19], but stresses that even the likeliest inference is less compelling than hard evidence. Germany’s early successes in the Russian campaign of June 1941 stimulated the conception of the Commissar Order in the same year. This was a written order that called for the use of Einsatzgruppen to liquidate the Jewish people in the occupied areas. Mommsen insists that a distinction must be made between the Commissar Order and the Final Solution, although the latter was developed from the former. He claims that the systematic policy of the Final Solution emerged bit by bit, and the preparations for the Final Solution were begun only in the late autumn of 1941. However, again, Mommsen notes that these preparations were ‘not based on a written order’.[20] The absence of a written order, Mommsen argues, clearly indicates that the Final Solution had not yet matured into a comprehensive plan. Instead, he argues that the conception and the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ took place simultaneously. The Germans were confronted by circumstances, such as the mass starvation of deported Jews that were difficult to deal with both from a logistical and a psychological point of view. The middle-ranking Nazi officials demanded rapid solutions to the devastating conditions in the East.[21] The Final Solution was implemented with great speed in early 1942. The transitional stage from the massacres of Russian prisoners of war and the Russian Jewish population by the Einsatzgruppen to the systematic extermination of the European Jews was marked by the use of gas vans as a factory method to destroy human life.[22] Mommsen sets out to draw a more detailed picture of how the political organization and the psychological state of the Nazi officials are interdependent factors that led to the ‘Final Solution’. Mommsen outlines a gradual and unconscious process by which the systematic murder of the deported Jews became a reality. The ‘unthinkable’ realization of the systematic mass murder was thinkable only after the fact. It seems that Mommsen believes the suppressed intention for the mass murder to have surfaced only as an after-thought. Christopher Browning proposes that only by synthesizing elements of the intentionalist and the functionalist perspective can historians arrive at a better understanding of the factors that led to the realization of the systematic mass killing. Browning calls his interpretation a ‘moderate functionalist’ interpretation. He argues that there was no single comprehensive ‘blueprint’ for the mass extermination of the European Jews. Instead, the Final Solution was the product of the following converging factors: Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the anarchical competitive nature of the Nazi state, the vulnerable status of European Jews (the ‘self-imposed Jewish Question’) and the war.[23] Browning does not doubt that Hitler intended the war in the East to be a Vernichtungskrieg, a war for destruction. He also finds that the functionalist interpretation sheds new light on the nature of the Führer Order. He asserts that there was no single order in a single time and place for the planning and implementation of the mass killings.[24] However, whereas Mommsen casts doubt on the existence of a definitive Hitler decision for the ‘Final Solution’, Browning argues that the Nazis were working on an extermination program even while the deportation of the Jews within the German sphere of influence was happening. He disagrees with the functionalist explanation that the confusion and chaos around the improvised deportations caused the ‘Final Solution’. Like Dawidowicz, he is critical of the functionalist assertion that the ‘Final Solution’ is the by-product of the incoherent flow of information in the Third Reich.[25] Just because some of the Nazi high-ranking officials were ignorant of the ‘Jewish Solution’, does not mean there were no officers who realized Hitler’s desires. Browning insists that high ranking officers understood Hitler’s desire. There was great rivalry between Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, and all were eager to gain Hitler’s favor and approval. “If a nod from Hitler could set Himmler and Heydrich in motion, others eagerly looked for similar signs”.[26] Hitler deliberately encouraged a “policy of maximum ambiguity”[27] in order to deflect responsibility for Nazi political and social policies from himself. Browning argues that Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Heydrich were fully aware of what they were trying to do in the summer of 1941 (this is when Browning dates the beginning preparations for the Holocaust). In contrast to Mommsen, who argues that the planning for the genocide began in the fall of 1941 by the Nazis anticipation of Germany’s defeat on the eastern front, Browning argues that the “euphoria of victory in the summer of 1941 and the intoxication of Europe at their feet set the plans for the ‘Final Solution into motion.”[28] To summarize Browning’s argument, he concludes that German Jewish Policy was aggravated by two factors in late summer and autumn 1941: First the decision to deport Jews before the new killing facilities had been built; and second, Hitler and his underlings deliberately cultivated uncertainty by sharing information informally and orally. A rough outline of the plan emerged approximately two or three months after Hitler had approved the plan.[29] The first concrete steps for implementing this plan were taken by October 1941, when Chelmno and Belzec were designated as locations where the systematic killing of the deported Jews was to take place. Browning outlines the mobilization of the euthanasia experts, the testing of gas vans, and the impression of hectic October plans. He demonstrates how the testimonies of surviving Einsatzkommando officials fail to provide accurate information about the course of the events in Operation Barbarossa. The testimonies show that it was unclear from whom they were receiving orders, and whether all members of the Einsatzgruppen were aware that they were to be used as killing machines to eliminate the Russians from the war. Browning concludes from his analysis of these testimonies that there was a general state of confusion among the lower-ranking officials. From a logistical point of view, the use of the Einsatzgruppen as executioners was problematic both because the methodology was inefficient for mass murder, and because the Einsatzgruppen suffered psychological pressures due to their intensely personal role in the mass killings. This led Heydrich and Himmler to seek more efficient killing methods that would displace the psychological pressure from individual Germans. Browning concurs with Mommsen, who portrays the Final Solution as the culminating result of radicalized anti-Jewish policies. He claims that there was “no single, comprehensive programme of persecution” between late 1939 and early 1940.[30] Mommsen explains that the ‘Jewish question’ grew significantly through Germany’s early territorial expansion. After the annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland there were more than 3 million Jews under the German rule. [31] The ‘emigration’ policy was no longer considered an adequate solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ and the German Foreign Ministry conceived of the long-term plan to ship the Jewish population to Madagascar. It is too early to tell for certain, but it appears that the arguments of functionalist and intentionalist historians are themselves becoming a part of history. That is, the current tide of historiography seeks to synthesize the two points of view. The reasons for this are manifold, but are perhaps best understood by Mommsen’s insistence that, due to the lack of solid evidence, we can never know the real truth. An historian such as Christopher Browning seems to sense that in the absence of what Mommsen would consider solid evidence, we can only create somewhat ideological platforms. Thus, instead of continuing a debate that can never be resolved, he seeks to extract the most useful elements from both sides, and move forward in the investigation of the origins of the ‘Final Solution’. BIBLIOGRAPHY Browning, Christopher R. Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. A Holocaust Reader. New York: Behrman House, 1976. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945. Toronto: Bantam Books,1984. Hilberg, Raul. “The Statistics”. pp.155-171. Furet, Francois. Ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. Mason, Tom. “Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism”. Hirschfeld, Gerhard and Kettensacker, Lothar. Eds. Der “Führerstaat“: Mythos und Realität, Studien zur Struktur Und Politik des Dritten Reiches. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1981. Mommsen, Hans. From Weimar to Auschwitz. Transl. Philip O’Connor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. ----------------------- [1] Raul Hilberg, “The Statistic”, Froincois Furet, Ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 156. [2] Martin Broszat, “Hitler and the Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ “, (Yad Vashem Studies XVI, 1984). [3] Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p 179. [4] Tim Mason, “Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism”, Gerhard Hischfeld and Lothar Kettensacker, Eds., Der „Führerstaat“: Mythos und Realität Studien yur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches, (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1981), p.30. [5] Ibid, p. 24. [6] This book was first published in 1975. [7] Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, 10th ed., (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986), 90. [8] Ibid, p. 89. [9] Ibid. [10] Ibid. p. 88. [11] Ibid, p.xxv. [12] Ibid. [13] Hans Mommsen, “The Realization of the Unthinkable: The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in the Third Reich”, From Weimar to Auschwitz, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 224-253. [14] Ibid, p. 251. [15] Ibid, p. 227. [16] Ibid, p. 179. [17] Ibid, p. 237. [18] Ibid, p. 227. [19] See Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader: Speech, NSDAP meeting, August 13, 1920, “Why Are We Anti-Semites'”: “If we wish to carry out these social reforms, then the struggle must go hand in hand against the opponents of every social arrangement: Jewry.” (30) Mein Kampf: “If at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under the poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” (Dawidowicz 31) Hitler’s Reichstag address, January 30, 1939: “During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state and thereby of the eintre Volk and then, among many other things, achieve a soution of the Jewish problem. [20] Mommsen 236. [21] “The Holocaust was not based upon a programme that had been developed over a long period. It was founded upon improvised measures that were rooted in earlier stages of planning and also escalated them. Once it had been set in motion, the extermination of those people who were deemed unfit for work developed a dynamic of its own.” (Ibid 150) [22] Ibid 249. [23] Christopher R. Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), p. 16. [24] Ibid, p. 18. [25] Dawidowicz xxvii. [26] Browning 36. [27] Ibid, p. 37. [28] Ibid, p. 32. [29] Ibid, p. 37. [30] Ibid, p. 244. [31] Ibid.