Christopher Browning - Browning's Interpretation of The Holocaust

Browning's Interpretation of The Holocaust

Browning is a functionalist in the origins of the Holocaust debate, following the principles of the "moderate functionalist" school of thought, which focuses on the structure and institution of the Third Reich, moving the focus away from Hitler. Functionalism sees the extermination of the Jews as the improvisation and radicalization of a polycratic regime. Functionalists do not vindicate Adolf Hitler yet they recognize that many other factors were involved in the Final Solution.

Browning has argued that the Final Solution was the result of the "cumulative radicalization" (to use Hans Mommsen's phrase) of the German state, especially when faced with the self-imposed "problem" of 3 million Jews (mostly Polish), whom the Nazis had forced into ghettos between 1939 and 1941. The intention was to have these and other Jews resident in the Third Reich expelled eastward once a destination was selected. For a time in 1940, the Madagascar Plan, in which after Germany defeated Britain, France was to cede Madagascar to Germany, and then all of the Jews of Europe were to be expelled to that island, was considered as an option. Germany's inability to defeat Britain prevented the execution of the Madagascar Plan. Browning has been able to establish that the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", first used in 1939, meant until 1941 a "territorial solution". Owing to the military developments of World War II and to turf wars within the German bureaucracy, expulsion lost its viability such that, by 1941, members of the bureaucracy were willing to countenance committing mass murder against the Jews.

In a speech given in Paris in 1982, Browning summarized the state of the historiography as follows:

In recent years the interpretations of National Socialism have polarized more and more into two groups that Tim Mason has aptly called Intentionalists and Functionalists. The former explain the development of Nazi Germany as a result of Hitler's intentions, which came out of a coherent and logical ideology and were realized due to an all-powerful totalitarian dictatorship. The Functionalists point out the anarchistic character of the Nazi state, its internal rivalries and the chaotic process of decision-making, which constantly led to improvisation and radicalization...These two modes of exposition of history are useful for the analysis of the strongly divergent meanings that people attribute to the Jewish policy of the Nazis in general and to the Final Solution in particular. On the one hand, Lucy Dawidowicz, a radical Intentionalist, upholds the viewpoint that already in 1919 Hitler had decided to exterminate European Jews. And not only that: He knew at what point in time his murderous plan would be realized. The Second World War was at the same time the means and opportunity to put his war against the Jews into effect. While he waited for the anticipated moment for the realization of his great plan, naturally he tolerated a senseless and meaningless pluralism in the Jewish policies of the subordinate ranks of state and party. Against the radical Intentionalism of Lucy Dawidowicz, which emphasizes the intentions and great plan of Hitler, the Ultrafunctionalism of Martin Broszat constitutes a diametrically opposed view of the role of the Führer, especially with respect to the decision on the Final Solution. It is Broszat's position that Hitler never took a definitive decision nor issued a general order for the Final Solution. The annihilation program developed in stages in conjunction with a series of isolated massacres at the end of 1941 and in 1942. These locally limited mass murders were improvised answers to an impossible situation that had developed as a result of two factors: First the ideological and political pressure for the creation of a Jew-free Europe that stemmed from Hitler and then the military reverses on the eastern front that led to stoppages in railway traffic and caused the buffer zones into which the Jews were to be removed to disappear. Once the annihilation program was in progress, it gradually institutionalized itself until it was noticed that it offered the simplest solution logistically and became a program universally applied and single-mindedly pursued. From this standpoint, Hitler was a catalyst but not a decision-maker. For Lucy Dawidowicz, the Final Solution was thought out twenty years before it was put into practice; For Martin Broszat, the idea developed from the practice of sporadic murders of groups of Jews, which produced the idea of killing all Jews systematically.

Browning divides the officials of the Government-General of occupied Poland into two factions. One, the "Productionists", favored using Jews of the ghettos as a source of slave labor to help with the war effort. The other, the "Attritionists", favored letting the Jews of the ghettos starve and die of disease. At the same time, there were struggles between the SS and Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland. The SS favored "The Nisko/Lublin Plan" of creating a "Jewish Reservation" in Lublin, Poland, into which all the Jews of Greater Germany, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia were to be expelled. Frank was opposed to the "Lublin Plan" on the ground that the SS were "dumping" Jews into his territory. Frank together with Hermann Göring wished for Government-General of Poland to become the "granary" of the Reich, and opposed the ethnic cleansing schemes of Heinrich Himmler and Arthur Greiser as disruptive of economic conditions.

An attempt to settle these difficulties at conference between Himmler, Göring, Frank and Greiser at Göring's Karinhall estate on February 12, 1940 was scuttled in May 1940, when Himmler was able to show Hitler a memo entitled "Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Population in the East" on May 15, 1940, which Hitler called "good and correct". Himmler's memo, which called for expelling all of the Jews of German-ruled Europe into Africa and reducing Poles to a "leaderless laboring class", and Hitler's approval of the memo led, as Browning noted, to a major change in German policy in Poland along the lines suggested by Himmler. Browning called the Göring/Frank-Himmler/Greiser dispute a perfect example of how Hitler encouraged his followers to engage in turf battles with one another without deciding for one policy option or other, but clearly hinting at the direction he preferred policy to go.