Functionalism Versus Intentionalism - Origins of The Debate

Origins of The Debate

The search for the origins of the Holocaust began almost as soon as World War II ended. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of 1945–6, the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe" was represented by the prosecution as part of long-term plan on the part of the Nazi leadership going back to the foundations of the Nazi Party in 1919. Subsequently, most historians subscribed to what would be today considered to be the extreme intentionalist interpretation. Starting in the late 1960s with the publication of such work as Martin Broszat's The Hitler State in 1969 and Karl A. Schleunes's The Twisted Road to Auschwitz in 1970, a number of historians challenged the prevailing interpretation and suggested there was no master plan for the Holocaust. In the 1970s, advocates of the intentionalist school of thought were known as "the straight road to Auschwitz" camp or as the "programmeists", because they insisted that Hitler was fulfilling a programme. Advocates of the functionalist school were known as "the twisted road to Auschwitz" camp or as the "structuralists", because of their insistence that it was the internal power structures of the Third Reich that led to the Holocaust.

In 1981, the British historian Timothy Mason published an essay entitled "Intention and Explanation" that was in part an attack on the scholarship of Karl Dietrich Bracher and Klaus Hildebrand, both of whom Mason accused of focusing too much on Adolf Hitler as an explanation of the Holocaust. In this essay, Mason called the followers of "the twisted road to Auschwitz"/structuralist school "functionalists" because of their belief that the Holocaust arose as part of the functioning of the Nazi state, while the followers of "the straight road to Auschwitz"/programmeist school were called "intentionalists" because of their belief that it was Hitler's intentions alone that explained the Holocaust. The terms "intentionalist" and "functionalist" have largely replaced the former names for both camps. Mason wrote that:

"In their recent essays Karl Dietrich Bracher and Klaus Hildebrand are largely concerned with the intentional actions of Hitler, which, they believe, followed with some degree of necessity from his political ideas. They formulate the question: why did the Third Reich launch a murderous war of genocide and destruction of human life on a hitherto unprecedented scale? They come in the end to the conclusion that the leaders of the Third Reich, above all Hitler, did this because they wanted to do it. This can be demonstrated by studying early manifestations of their Weltanschauung, which are wholly compatible with the worst atrocities which actually occurred in the years 1938-1945. The goal of the Third Reich was genocidal war, and, in the end, that is what National Socialism was all about. From this it seems to follow that the regime is "unique", "totalitarian", "revolutionary", "utopian", devoted to an utterly novel principle for the public order, scientific racism. The leaders, in particular Hitler, demonstrably wanted all this, and it is thus, as Hildebrand recently suggested, wrong to talk of National Socialism; we should talk of Hitlerism.

This approach does not lead its advocates to concentrate narrowly upon Nazi race and occupation policies, nor upon Hitler himself. They range widely in their writings, but the above point is their central point of reference. And having identified the problem in this way, intentionalist historians then appear to stand back from their subject and to meditate on the enormity of the regime's crimes, on the enormity of the destruction of human life. This entails trying to understand National Socialism, for an intentionalist historian must understand (in the German sense of verstehen). In this case understanding is possible only through an empathy born of hatred. This probably yields a less sure type of understanding than does an empathy born of respect or admiration, but given the historical personages concerned, there is no choice, but to take these risks. They then invite the readers to hate and abhor too. This is where the political and moral responsibility of the historian comes in: it is clearly implied that it is the historian's public duty to write in this way. Faced with genocidal war, historians should not emphasise decision-making procedures, administrative structures or the dynamics of organisational rivalries. These things were at best secondary. To make them a vital part of a general interpretation of National Socialism is to trivialize the subject, to write a morally incompetent history. What really matters is the distinctive murderous will of the Nazi leadership...

First, the intentionalist attack on the incorporation of functionalist types of explanation into our understanding of National Socialism proposes, implicitly but clearly, a retreat by the historical profession to the methods and stance of Burckhardt. On the evidence above all of his "Reflections on World History" (a book which greatly impressed anxious conservatives when it was re-issued in the late 1930s) Burckhardt saw the historians' task as to investigate, to classify and to order, to hate and to love and to warn-but not, except on the smallest of scales, to explain. This approach had almost no explanatory power at all. The attempt at explanation in any and all of the various traditions of rationalist historiography seems to be put on one side in intentionalist writing on National Socialism. The view that Hitler's ideas, intentions and actions were decisive, for example, is not presented in these works as an argument, but rather as something which is both premise and a conclusion. It can perhaps be said that historians have a public duty to attempt to explain, and that informed explanatory reasoning about the past (however indirect or surprising its routes may be) has its own moral purposes and power...

The second methodological point concerns the role of individualism in ethics and the social sciences. Following the arguments of Steven Lukes, methodological individualism simply cannot work as a way of giving a coherent account of social, economic and political change. Marx, Weber, Durkheim and their successors buried this approach with a variety of different funeral rites and still it lives on, on borrowed time-a commodity with which historians are especially generous. Unless virtually the whole of modern social science constitutes an epochal blind ally, "Hitler" cannot be a full or adequate explanation, not even of himself. To dismiss methodological individualism is not, of course to abolish the category of individual moral responsibility in private or public life: explanation is one thing, responsibility something else...

Thus to argue that the dynamic of Nazi barbarism was primarily institutional and/or economic does not entail any denial that Hitler was a morally responsible political leader who made choices which were inspired by distinctive malevolent intentions-it is only to insist that his will cannot carry the main burden of explanation." —Mason, Timothy "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism" pages 3-20 from The Nazi Holocaust Part 3, The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder Volume 1 edited by Michael Marrus, Mecler: Westpoint, CT 1989 pages 8-10.

In a speech given in Paris in 1982, Christopher 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 practice of sporadic murders of groups of Jews led to the idea to kill all Jews systematically. — Christopher Browning, "La décision concernant la solution finale" from Colloque de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales, L'Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif (Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1985), p. 19