Both the Nürnberg Trial prosecutors, who sought to convict so-called criminal organizations as well as the major Nazi leaders, and the pleas of the defendants, which invariably cited binding orders, created an image of Hitler's dictatorial “SS state” as the engine driving the Final Solution from above. One of the great contributions of Raul Hilberg's magisterial work, first published in 1961, was to portray a much more extensive “machinery of destruction” that “was structurally no different from organized German society as a whole.” Indeed, “the machinery of destruction was the organized community in one of its specialized roles.” Moreover, the cadres of bureaucrats that staffed this machinery of destruction were not merely passive recipients of orders from above. Inspired by a Faustian sense of Erlebnis, the intoxicating experience of making history, on the one hand and armed with a series of rationalizations and language rules on the other hand, the bureaucratic perpetrators were innovators and problem solvers. With “uncanny pathfinding ability,” he concluded, they “found the shortest road to the final goal.”

In the revised edition Hilberg's work in 1985, the far-flung components of Hilberg's machinery of destruction became even more autonomous and the decision-making role of Hitler and the top leadership less central. Hilberg was clearly more concerned with how the system worked at the local level than with the chronology of decision making and policy evolution at the top.