put in place by the Nazis and the ultimately uncontrollable process of what Hans
Mommsen termed ‘cumulative radicalization’. The debate between the two schools
of thought had at that point moved through all the usual phases of academic
debates—hypotheses had been developed, the different sides had confronted each
other, arguments had been improved and intensified, positions had become
entrenched, and the discussion had become increasingly polarized. Research on
the decision to implement a ‘final solution’ had become deeply embedded within
2
Introduction
this debate and followed the basic pattern that intentionalist scholars assumed the
decision had been reached at an early point—in the context of the attack on the
Soviet Union or even in the period preceding this2—whilst functionalists either assumed, like Christopher Browning, that the decision had been taken in the
autumn of 1941, 3 and took the form of a step-by-step process, 4 or took the view that the mass murder of the Jews was the result of developments within the Nazis’
apparatus of power that ultimately tended towards a ‘final solution’ without there
being any need for an explicit decision to be taken. 5 Saul Friedländer and Raul Hilberg took a position midway between the two by opting for ‘Summer 1941’. 6 In 1997 the debate was revived once more by a suggestion made by Christian Gerlach
to the effect that a decision on the ‘Final Solution’ was made in December 1941 as a
direct reaction to the entry of the United States into the war. 7
The fact that such divergent interpretations were possible is partly explicable by
the context of the heated debate between intentionalists and functionalists and
their apparently irreconcilable, even mutually antagonistic positions. The style in
which this debate was conducted—in the particularly dogmatic manner typical of
controversies between German historians—strongly affected the overall character
of research on the history of Holocaust perpetrators. Even after the intentionalist-
functionalist debate died down, research on the perpetrators in recent years has
continued to be dominated by strong dichotomies.
This needs to be explained in more detail. Far from receding, in the last ten
years the flood of new work on the Holocaust has swollen. This is particularly true
of research into the perpetrators, the so-called Täterforschung, a facet of Holocaust
research that is overwhelmingly though not exclusively the province of German
scholars. Within the field of Täterforschung there are clearly three areas in which
work has been concentrated: first, the study of the apparatus and membership of
the SS and Police, in which the principal focus has been on the Security Police
(Sicherheitspolizei) and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), 8 concentration camps, 9 the bodies responsible for deportations, 10 and the Einsatzgruppen or other murder squads; 11 second, regional research so that we now have almost complete coverage of the implementation of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; 12 third, attempts to find new thematic approaches to the topic of the Holocaust such as ways of
establishing a connection between the mass murders and economic planning, 13
vast projects for the deportation of whole ethnic groups, 14 the National Socialists’
forced labour programme (Arbeitseinsatz), 15 or the expropriation of Jewish property, 16 amongst other areas.
Just as was the case in the debate between structuralists and intentionalists, here
too similar attempts can be discerned to try to shape the discussion along the lines
of major dichotomies: regional research has initiated a discussion of the role of
‘centre and periphery’, 17 and the appearance of works emphasizing the ‘utilitarian’—which is to say material—interests that were at stake in the murder of the
Jews have led to the opposition of ‘ideology’ and ‘rationality’. Within the context
Introduction
3
of the disagreement between Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen on the
motivation of the executions (Todesschützen) in the police battalions a debate
emerged about whether the perpetrators were mainly driven to carry out these
killings by ‘situational’ factors or whether they were predisposed towards these
crimes by the anti-Semitic milieu in which they grew up. 18 The tendency of recent research to emphasize an individual's mindset or Weltanschauung, his capacity for
independent initiative and the room for manoeuvre available to him is clearly a
counter-trend to the older image of a perpetrator at a desk, merely carrying out
orders within anonymous structures, behaving like a cog in a great machine. 19
Whilst such dichotomies and polarized debates can be of use to research, they
create the danger that—as was the case with the debate between the intentionalists
and structuralists—new polemics are kindled without ever leading to significantly
new insights into their subject matter. It seems to me that Holocaust research has
now reached a point where the debate has to reach out beyond such oppositions
and dichotomies and become accustomed to a mode of discussion that is more
complex in structure. It is clear that the battles between one-dimensional explan-
ations can no longer do justice to the complexity of the object of our study—the
systematic murder of the European Jews.
The more research develops and is intensified, the more obvious it becomes that
oppositional pairings such as intention and function, centre and periphery, ration-
ality and ideology, situation or disposition are not mutually exclusive but illumin-
ate varying aspects of historical reality in complementary, even interdependent
ways. 20 However, when one attempts to read the relationship of the antagonisms defined as so irreconcilable by historical research in dialectical terms, it seems
virtually pointless to keep on trying to play off one element of the opposition
against the other. The contradictions can only be resolved if they are regarded as
the starting point for developing historical connections on a higher level.
For example, if one looks back on the debate between structuralists and
intentionalists with a degree of hindsight, it becomes clear that both schools
have emphasized differing aspects of the same phenomenon that on closer
inspection prove to be by no means mutually exclusive. People who pursue
their intention to carry out mass murder do so within certain structures; these
structures do not act of their own volition, they do so via human beings who
combine their actions with intentions. It is the same with centre and periphery: as
will be shown as this study progresses, the initiatives of Nazi potentates in the
various regions of Germany were an essential component of centrally managed
policies, but the leadership role of the centre was itself safeguarded by competi-
tiveness between the various functionaries. Similarly the ‘pragmatic’ basis for Nazi
Judenpolitik—Aryanization, the confiscation of living space, the exploitation of
the labour force, and so on—was matched up with ideological strategies designed
to justify it; and at the same time Nazi ideology was itself validated by the
‘successes’ of its pragmatic implementation.
4
Introduction
In order to set these historical connections into a context, for the 1998 German
; version of this book I turned to the concept of Judenpolitik. This was a contem-
porary coinage, used by the perpetrators themselves and applied many times
before in historical research, particularly in scholarship in German. This presents
a difficulty here in that the phrases ‘Jewish policy’, or better still, ‘anti-Jewish
policy’ are inadequate as translations of Judenpolitik since the German word
Politik combines the senses of ‘politics’ and ‘policy’. This makes it very well suited
as a term to describe and analyse the complex process of the persecution of the
Jews. In my view, the concept of Judenpolitik—which will be used in German
throughout this study—comprises the following factors.
First, Judenpolitik has the sense of ‘policy’, the Nazis’ long-term intentions and
goals in respect of the Jews, their strategy for making real the utopian dream of a
racially homogeneous national community via the systematic exclusion, segrega-
tion, and elimination of the Jews.
Historical experience shows that even the most radical of political aims, pur-
sued by a determined leadership and implemented by an extensive apparatus of
power can seldom be put into practice in a simple and straightforward manner.
Political decision-making processes develop their own structures and modalities.
What this means for an analysis of the persecution of the Jews and for a study of
the Holocaust is that Nazi Judenpolitik carved out its own political territory
comparable with that of foreign policy, economic policy, and social policy, for
example. In this field of politics, whilst the top-level strategies and far-reaching
intentions of the major players were undeniably effective, they were subject to the
same sorts of friction and distraction as in other political fields or in any large
organization. These include rivalry between the protagonists (for which the
structures of the Nazi regime were particularly favourable), communication
problems between the various levels of the hierarchy, the ponderousness of the
mechanisms of power, and so forth.
Above all, however, the field of Judenpolitik did not develop autonomously or
independently, but functioned within a context determined by the other areas of
political activity. It penetrated them and radically transformed them. The National
Socialists tended to understand traditional political fields (such as foreign, social, and labour policy) in a racist manner and to redefine them along racist lines. Their starting point was the assumption that there was something akin to an ‘international Jewish
problem’ that foreign policy had to focus on; they assumed that social policy in the
Nazi state took the form of welfare provision for ‘Aryans’ alone and not for the
‘racially inferior’; they took it as read that Jewish labour was essentially unproductive and parasitic and therefore, as a matter of principle, only used Jewish people for
particularly onerous and humiliating physical work. Similarly they organized their
policies on nutrition and housing, the occupation of conquered territory, and other
policy areas according to racially determined hierarchies and racially determined
conceptual approaches in which anti-Semitism always played a major role.
Introduction
5
Finally the overall political context changed with time, and during the war did so
with ever-increasing speed. Nazi Judenpolitik thus took on quite different forms in
different phases of the progress of the ‘Third Reich’. For tactical reasons it was
modified, retracted, or accelerated; at critical points it developed erratically, disjoint-edly, and in sequences of action that developed their own internal dynamics. This
kind of development cannot be fully grasped by a conventional model of understand-
ing political decision-making (which stresses the formulation of political goals, the
process of decision-making itself, and the implementation of those decisions). The
implementation of Judenpolitik took on its own dynamic such that decision-making
and even the formulation of political aims were subsumed within it.
Judenpolitik was subject to sudden shifts; it developed contradictorily, within a
complex series of linkages and without any form of precedent. It could not be
implemented by people who were merely following orders but required active
protagonists who could operate on their own initiative and understand intuitively
what the leadership required of them. Judenpolitik is characterized by the rela-
tively large scope afforded to the activities of those who put it into practice. This
system could only function if the most important aspects of Judenpolitik com-
manded a consensus amongst those involved with it. It would only function if it
was actively supported by at least part of the population, the active adherents of
National Socialism. It was thus necessary to be able to communicate the aims and
mechanisms of Judenpolitik to the public at all times and with varying degrees of
openness. Judenpolitik was thus publicly disseminated, debated, and legitimated—
albeit often in a disguised manner. 21
What seems to me to be crucial to any analysis of this complex phenomenon is
the fact that Judenpolitik was central to the whole National Socialist movement,
indeed that the very aims, the distinctiveness, and the uniqueness of National
Socialism as a historical phenomenon were determined by its Judenpolitik. This
can be clarified in a number of ways.
The basic aim of the Nazi movement was a racially homogeneous national
community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which the potential for creative energy inher-
ent in the German people could at last come to fruition and where the German
people could achieve full self-realization. The Nazi view was that the harmony of
the national community to which they aspired would permit the resolution of
virtually all the major problems of their age, whether they were aspects of foreign
or domestic policy, social, economic, or cultural in nature. It was not possible to
establish such a racially homogeneous community because it was based on
erroneous beliefs about the division of humanity into different ‘races’, so Nazi
racism could only operate negatively: via negative measures, via discrimination,
exclusion, elimination, via the removal of alien elements—in which process, for
historical reasons, anti-Jewish measures took on a central role. In the course of
this process of exclusion the NSDAP was supposed to succeed in bringing under
its control those areas of life that needed to be ‘made Jew-free’ (entjudet). Thus for
6
Introduction
the Nazis anti-Semitic policies became the key to gaining control first over
German society and later over almost the whole of Europe. Their anti-Semitic
ideology was not a mere Weltanschauung, a hotchpotch of aberrant and perverse
ideas, but the very basis of the Nazis’ claims for total domination.
This means, I believe, that we should abandon the notion that it is historically
meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a
single decision that led to the ‘Final Solution’. This approach is pointless not only
because the debate on the ‘Final Solution’ has evidently reached the limits of what
is provable bu
t above all because any attempt to identify a decision taken at a
single moment in time runs counter to the extreme complexity of the processes
that were in fact taking place. The truth is that those with political responsibility
propelled forward, step by step, a highly complicated decision-making process in
which a series of points where it was escalated can be identified.
This has a number of consequences for a depiction of the genesis of the ‘Final
Solution’. First, if we abandon the model that sees a single decision as the trigger
for the murder of the European Jews and if we advance beyond the notion of a
cumulative process of radicalization that had got out of control and could no
longer be steered by anyone, then the various phases in Nazi Judenpolitik take on
new significance. New perspectives are revealed that show the years 1939 to 1941
as a phase in which the National Socialist regime was already considering
genocidal projects against the Jews that appear all the more sinister in the light
of the racially motivated programmes of mass murder that were already been
carried out against the Polish population and the ‘congenitally ill’. It also becomes
clearer how in the period from spring 1942 onwards the lives of several million
Jewish people depended on how the Nazis’ Judenpolitik developed. Large Jewish
communities could be saved (as they were in France, Italy, Denmark, Old
Romania, and Bulgaria) or they were lost (as in Hungary and Greece). Bitter
conflicts were also fought over the fate of Jewish forced labour groups. It needs to
be made clear that even after the Europe-wide ‘Final Solution’ had been initiated
the continuing development of Judenpolitik depended on a chain of decisions and
did not merely consist in the ‘implementation’ of a single decision that had
already been taken.
However, when we treat the period 1939 to 1945 as one in which a series of
decisions regarding Judenpolitik were being taken rather than restricting our
analysis to a ‘decision-making period’ of a few months, then we also need to
take the years 1933 to 1939 into consideration as a preparatory period for the phase
in which the annihilation of the Jews took place. In the years preceding the war the
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 2
