What to Do with the Jews?

Peter Kenez

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107338234.009

6 - What to Do with the Jews?

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Peter Kenez

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Peter Kenez: Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz

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Intentionalists and Functionalists

The development of Nazi policies toward Jews in the course of the 1930s is central to understanding the history of the Holocaust. Not surprisingly therefore, this period has been much debated by historians. The most controversial question has been this: Did Hitler and the Nazi leaders have a plan for mass extermination before they came to power, and if so, did they in the course of the 1930s lay the groundwork for carrying out such a plan? To find support for an affirmative answer to this question, historians needed only to turn to Hitler's statements before and after coming to power. The clear implication of Hitler's description of Jews in Mein Kampf as bacteria is that they had to be exterminated. After all, you do not negotiate with nor come to terms with bacteria. Hitler continued to “prophesy” mass extermination, most famously in his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, when he said, “If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of the Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

In general this approach to history, the so-called intentionalist approach, accorded well with those who perceived the Nazi state as totalitarian and thought of totalitarianism as a system that functions from the top down, where the decisions are made at the center and the institutions of the regime simply carry out these instructions. In this view, Hitler had decided to exterminate the Jews, and his underlings simply realized his long-standing plans. The infamous answer of the war criminals at the 1946 trial in Nuremberg to the charges against them, that “we were just carrying out orders,” supported this line of reasoning. In the immediate postwar period, when research was just starting to be undertaken on the extermination of Jews and the functioning of the Nazi bureaucracy, this approach was simply taken for granted not only by the general public but also by those who wrote on these subjects.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Coming of the Holocaust
From Antisemitism to Genocide
, pp. 103 - 124

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107338234.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2013

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6 - What to Do with the Jews?

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