Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Functionalist - Coggle Diagram
Functionalist
Evidence of criticism
-
-
Some members of the intentionalist school, accused functionalists of trivialising the role and wickedness of Hitler and the murderous ideological anti-Semitism that provided the driving force behind the progressive radicalisation of Nazi polices towards the Jews.
Mommsen in particular criticised for coming dangerously close to lending support to the arguments of Hitler apologist, David Irving.
According to synthesis Burrin, they “have swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction’”, by seeking to minimise too greatly both the personality of Adolf Hitler and the role of Nazi ideology as contributing factors in the emergence of the Holocaust.
Lothar Kettenacker attacked Mommsen view of Hitler being out of tough with reality and letting others make decisions, he considers Hitler’s leadership as the driving force behind more radical action.
Richard Evans and Daniel Goldhagen criticised functionalists for dismissing Hitler’s words, when they argue Hitler may have meant exactly what he threatened – the destruction of the Jews.
Intentionalist, Eberhard, stated that there is much evidence to suggest that some local officials were “shocked or appalled when the Final Solution came into effect”, but agreed reluctantly to the decision because it had resulted from a Fuehrer order (although due to the “euphemism and camouflage” – cloaking surviving Nazi documents – claim can not be verified.
-
Evidence of support
-
Path to the Holocaust was “circuitous, and largely improvised”.
Browning and Jackel agree that a coherent plan for extermination of the Jewish race simply did not exist.
Historians including Browning, Michael Marrus, Yahuda Bauer accept the functionalists’ contention that Nazi policy towards the Jews developed largely in improvised stages as competing agencies put forward one solution after the next to solve the Jewish problem.
Both Marrus and Baurer support view that expulsion rather than extermination was for years the Nazi’s primary goal for the Jews.
Ian Kershaw support idea that systematic extermination of Jews had roots in a series of ‘improvised’ local killings in the occupied territories in the Autumn of 1941.
-
Moderate Functionalists
Moderate functionalists, such as Christopher Browning, believe that the rivalry within the unstable Nazi power structure provide the major driving force behind the Holocaust. Another moderate functionalist belief is that the Nazis aimed to expel all if the Jews from europe, but only after the failure of these schemes did they resort to genocide. This is sometimes referred to as the "crooked path" to genocide.
Extreme functionalists
Extreme functionalists such as Gotz Aly believe that the Nazi leadership had nothing to do with the initiating of the Holocaust and that the entire initiative came from the lower ranks of the German bureaucracy. Aly has made much of the documents from the bureaucracy of the German Government-General of Poland arguing that the population of Poland would have had to decrease by 25% to allow the Polish economy to grow. Criticism centres around the idea that this explanation does not really show why the Nazis were concerned with, and why the Jews of Poland were targeted instead of the random of 25% of the Polish population.