The Holocaust

The coming of the Holocaust 1938-41 

Historians that accept to view that the Holocaust was a result of a long-term
plan or intention of Hitler's part to exterminate the Jews are called
‘intentionalists’ and argue that such a blueprint can be found in Hitler's book. 
Structuralist or functionalist historians accept the explanation that the ‘final
solution’ was a response to wartime emergency.

Kristallnacht 
Before 1938 incidence of violence against Jews were on a relatively small
scale.

7 November 1938 -  Paris, France

-> Herschel Grynszpan,a 17 year old Jew, shot and fatally wounded Ernst
vom Rath (a diplomat at the German embassy ( ironically he was under
surveillance by the Nazi secret police because he was suspected to be a
member of the anti-Hitler resistance Movement in Germany)).
 Grynszpan did so because the German government dumped 17,000
Jews along the polish-German Frontier in appalling conditions, two of
these were his parents.
9 November - Ernst vom Rath died.

9 - 10 November 1938 - Kristallnacht (crystal night)

-> Upon hearing of Ernst vom Rath death, the SA and members of NSDAP
attack and burned and Jewish synagogues throughout Germany, Jewish
homes and businesses were destroyed and physical assaults were made on
Jewish men, women and children.
-> 191 synagogues were burned down and 36 jews killed in Berlin alone.
-> In Germany 91 people died and 7500 businesses were destroyed.
 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps at Dachau,
Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

The responsibility for Kristallnacht 

Lucy Dawidowicz, an intentionalist historian, emphasize the fact that Hitler
himself said nothing publicly either about vom Rath’s death or the anti-Jewish
violence that it allegedly provoked. 
Joseph Goebbels’, the propaganda minister, had a lust for power. He gave a
speech on 9 November which inspired the attacks on Jewish lives and
properties.

During Kristallnacht, half the amount of plate glass produced annually in

Belgium was estimated to have been destroyed. 
-> Hermann Goring (The organiser of Hitler's your plan for the economy)  said
that ‘they don't hurt the Jew but me, who is the final authority for coordinating
the German economy.’ 

The aftermath of Kristallnacht 

12 November 1938 - Goring convened General Meeting of Nazi leaders and
took initiative in the acceleration of the plan to eliminate ‘the Jews from the
community’. 
-> It was agreed in the meeting that if German insurance companies were to
retain their credibility they had to pay for the damages to the Jewish
businesses.
 Goring Suggested that the German government would allow the
payments to be made but would then confiscate the money from the
Jews so making them liable for the repair of the damaged buildings. 
-> Goring Issued a decree on the penalty payment by Jews, which required
the Jewish community to pay 1 billion in a fine imposed because of the jews’
‘hostile attitude towards the German Volk and Reich’.
-> Another Decree entitled the decree on eliminating the Jews from German
economic life excluded jews from the retail trade, the management of German
companies, the selling of any goods or services and Employment as
independent craftsmen.

November 1938 -  Jewish children were banned from attending state schools
and the local government authorities were allowed to impose curfew
restrictions on jews.
December 1938 - jews were to be banned from public places like theatres,
Cinemas and beaches.

The historical debate 

Lucy Dawidowicz, an intentionalist historian, sees Kristallnacht as an
important turning point in the Nazis’ anti-semantic policies. She argues that
the pogrom ‘provided the national socialist government with the opportunity,
short of actual war, to proceed with the total expropriation of the jews and the
complete removal of the freedom’

Structuralist historians, like Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, continue to

deny that there was a set plan behind the Nazis anti-Jewish policy before
1941.
-> Mommsen famously called Hitler a ‘weak Dictator’ surrounded by powerful
Nazis. 
-> According to this Kristallnacht was the manifestation of the Nazis’ internal
power struggle in which Hitler becomes a less significant figure.

Contemporary historians, like Ian Kershaw, support a synthesis of both

positions acknowledging the central importance of Hitler's position but also
seen the wartime situation as being crucial in the evolution of the holocaust.
The emigration option 
By the end of 1938, the Jews had effectively been driven out of everyday
German life. 
12 November 1938 - Heydrich noted at a meeting that Jews should be kicked
out of Germany, the so-called Jewish question remained for the Nazis. 
-> He suggested that if the Jews would not leave Germany voluntarily then
they must be forced to go.
 He would go on to assume an increasingly prominent role in the
evolution of anti Jewish policy in the Nazi regime. 

March - September 1938 - 45,000 Austrian jews had been persuaded to leave
their Homeland and another 100,000 would do so before the outbreak of the
Second World War.
-> This was achieved through a great deal of intimidation and thuggery.
-> Heydrich also admired the bureaucratic apparatus that Eichmann had
devised with which to deal with the jews.
 First he set up the central office for Jewish emigration.
 Then he had Re-established the old Jewish religious community and
through it worked with the Jewish leaders who had been released from
camps or prisons.
o Why Jewish leaders were able to cooperate with Nazis in this way
has become a controversial historical issue and many historians
argue that trapped as they were in an impossible situation, they
felt they had little choice.
 Eichmann used their influence to persuade fellow jews to leave Austria
but there was little doubt that these leaders were terrorised into
cooperation.
This experiment in Austria provided a model for the rest of the Third Reich.
January 1939 - Heydrich received authorisation from Goring to establish the
Reich the central office for Jewish emigration. The question was where should
these Jews go. 
The Nazis came up with three solutions - Palestine, Madagascar and Poland
(although in the event they would all be rendered inoperative by the coming of
War)

Palestine
In 1933 the Nazi is made the ‘Haavaara agreements’ with the Jewish agency
in Palestine, then a British mandate under the League of Nations, to allowed
German Jews to emigrate there. 
1938 - now non-German Jews were under German control following the third
Reich annexation of Austria as well as the Czech Sudetenland.

Madagascar
November 1938 - Hitler had spoken to Goring about the possibility of sending
Jews from Germany to the island of Madagascar. 
In the short term the Madagascar plan was put on hold until Germany's defeat
of France in the summer of 1940, it was then resurrected but remain
dependent on two things -
-> the Goodwill of Britain
-> a proposed peace settlement between Germany and Britain in 1940 (Which
was ultimately never concluded) 

Historians of the Holocaust pointed out that the Nazis’ interest in Madagascar
appears to show that Hitler, along with other Nazi leaders, took the
Madagascar plan seriously between 1938 and 1940. 

Poland
Poland remained a focus of Nazi interest as a possible site for a Jewish
reservation.
October 1939 - Eichmann received orders to deport a number of Jews living in
a Nazi protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia (formally Czechoslovakian territory
which had been occupied by the Germans in March 1939) and in upper Silesia
(formally polish territory which has been acquired by Germany after its victory
over Poland in September 1939)
-> A potential reservation site had been found at Nisko, on the river san, near
the polish city of lublin, before operation was abruptly cancelled leaving the
jews to find the wrong way back to their original point of departure.
 This was caused by the arrival of German-occupied territory in Poland
of a large number of Germans from Soviet-held territory in Poland
following the partition of Poland as agreed by the Nazi-Soviet pack of
August 1939.

The Nazi question of what to do with ‘unwanted jews; became more urgent
after German military victories in Poland and the USSR.
-> Goring suggested that rich US and Canadian jews should be persuaded to
buy land for Jewish resettlement in North America (this proved to be
impractical). 
November 1938 - Summer of 1941 - the emigration of Jew seems to have
been the preferred option of Hitler and his colleagues.

Hitler speech on 30th January 1939 

30th January 1939 - Hitler made one of his great, set-pieces speeches in the
Reichstag whose importance has been differently interpreted by the
intentionalist and structuralist historians. 
Days before Hitler had told to czech foreign minister ‘we are going to destroy
the jews, they are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November
1918’.
-> Hitler believes that his fatherland had been betrayed by the Jews and
bolsheviks in 1918 and that this was why Germany had lost the first world war
and he was determined not to allow it to happen again.
On 30th January, Hitler warned that if international finance Jewery within
Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the people's into a
world war, this would result in the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. 
-> Intentionalist, Lucy Dawidowicz, interpreted this speech as - regardless of
whether the Germans won the war, the Jews’ fate seemed sealed.
-> Michael Marrus points out, Hitler had made apparently unalterable
decisions before and had changed his mind. Like in 1938, shortly before the
Munich conference, Hitler said that he would ‘destroy Czechoslovakia’ by
force; yet two months later, he accepted a partial solution. 
Nonetheless, there is still good reason to believe Hitler’s threats (which he
eventually fulfilled). A German victory might have allowed a more leisurely
solution to the Jewish question (this is what the structuralists mean to imply).

The decision for genocide 

Summer 1940 - due to the failure to reach any terms with Britain, Nazis ruled
out the Madagascar plan. The Nazi regional leaders dislike the Ghetto solution
(herding Jewish people into specific areas of polish cities) - Nazi regional
leaders (Gauleiter) in occupied Poland complained bitterly about the number
of Jews were being forced into the constructed areas.

1941 - the advantages of a programme of mass killing of jews was beginning

to be favoured by the Nazis over the concept of a mass expulsion.
-> SS chief, Himmler was aware that the technology for mass gasing was
available and had been tried in Germany in the so-called ‘operation
Euthanasia’ where 70,000 chronically sick and disabled hospitalized patients
had been deliberately murdered. 

Lucy Dawidowicz argues that the crucial decision of mass killing the juice has
taken place between December 1940 and March 1941. She argues that
operation Barbarossa (the codename for the German invasion of the USSR)
and the ‘disorder of the war would provide Hitler with the cover for unchecked
commission of Murder’.
-> The problems with this argument are the preparations for the systematic
murder of the Jews did not begin until 1941 and secondly as Marrus points out
the systematic gassing of the Jews did not between until March 1942. 
During the early phases of the war the Nazis favoured Mass shooting - not
only for the Jews but also of Poles, Russians and gypsies.

A war of revenge 
Andreas Hillgruber supports Dawidowicz’s views that the invasion of the
USSR can be linked with Hitler's long-standing intentions to murder the Jews.
Broszat and Mommsen, structuralists historians, claim that under the pressure
of War and as a result of German set backs on the eastern front, the Nazi
campaign against the Jews escalated partly in response to the Complaints by
the Gauleiter that they had too many Jews under the jurisdiction.
-> The final solution became an act of revenge.
 
The problem with the structuralist theory, as pointed out by Karl Dietrich
Bracher, is ignoring the issue of responsibility ‘they have fallen into the danger
of… underestimating and trivialising national socialism.’ 

Right wing British historian David Irving put forward a view that there was no
document in existence ordering the final solution signed by Hitler which proves
that Hitler did not know about it. This argument is debatable as Hitler often
gave orders verbally, a technique which became known to his subordinates as
‘it is the Fuhrer's wish’. 
-> Philippe Burrin concludes that ‘for things To escalate into a holocaust
Hitler's to Impetus was needed, an impetus with deep roots’. He occupies a
middle position between the internationalists and structuralists.

The road to the death camps 

One signpost on the road to genocide that has been recognised by historians
was the order given ti the German army to use ‘ruthless and enegertic
measures’ against Jews and anti-German resisters in the USSR after the
German invasion began. 
-> Issued on 6 July 1941 by the German High Command.
31 July 1941 - Goring sent Heydrich a directive ordering him to solve the
‘Jewish question’. 

The Einsatzgruppen were finding the crude method of mass shooting

unsatisfactory and by September 1941, they were in possession of a truck
which used exhaust gasses to kill its victims. Eichmann recommended the use
of carbon-di-oxide. 
-> It is important to note that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in so-
called ‘pit killings’ (mass shooting) before the death camps began. 

The first death camp was built in Chelmno, in Poland where the gassing of the
Jews began on 8 December 1941.

The Wannsee conference 

20 January 1942 - Heydrich convened at Wannsee. 
Historians see the Wannsee conference as the final phase of the decision-
making process which led to the ‘final solution’. 
-> Much of the time at the conference was spent discussing the status of the
Jewish partners in mixed marriages but the main purpose of the conference
seems to have been to co-ordinate the efforts of the nazi govenrment in the
furtherance of their common aim - the mass murder of the european Jewry. 
Burrin sees the Wannsee conference as merely recording a ‘solution reached
in mid-october by Himmler and his men’.
Ian Kershaw believed that the conference was merely about the logistics of
mass murder. 

Conclusion
There is a measure of agreement among the historians about the point when
the decision about the final solutions was made - upto mid-september 1941,
the Nazis preferred the expulsion of the Jews from Germany.
The fact that Germany had not won over the Soviet Red army after three
month of fighting since June 1941 clearly contributed to the decisions of killing
the Jews. 
-> The nazi Gauletter were also complaining that there were too many Jews in
the occupied territories.