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Friday, June 22, 1984 57

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS .

OBSERVATIONS

Scholars seek Hitler role in 'Final Solution'

BY VICTOR BIENSTOCK

Special to The Jewish News

Four decades after the
fact, historians and stu-
dents of the Holocaust are
still debating Adolf Hitler's
role in the "Final Solution"
to the Jewish problem.
The question that seems
to bother them most is
whether Hitler directly and
specifically ordered the
measures that resulted in
the murder of six million,
Jewish men, women and
children or was the greatest
crime in history to be
blamed on his eager aco-

Adolph Hitler
lytes who took the expres-
sion of his desires literally
and put into motion the
processes that developed
and magnified into monstr-
ous proportions with the
zeal and enterprise of Nazi
officialdom?
This was, basically, the
major issue at a recent
three-day international
congress in Stuttgart, Ger-
many, sponsored by the
Stuttgart University's his-
tory department, the Li-
brary of Contemporary His-
tory and the German Sec-
tion of International Society
on the History of the Second
World War. It was attended
by some 200 experts, includ-
ing participants from Israel
and the United States.

Numismatic
group to meet

The Israel Numismatic
Society of Michigan, Inc.,
will have its next meeting
at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the
Jimmy Prentis Morris
Branch of the Jewish Com-
munity Center.
Dr. H. Saul.Sugar will
present a program on
"Judea Capta Coins." Jack
H. Schwartz will speak on
the Jewish War Veterans
and exhibit JWV medals.
Refreshments will be
served.

Neo-Nazi cell

Geneva (JTA) — Accord-
ing to the Swiss Radio, the
German neo-Nazi activist
Michael Kuhnen has suc-
ceeded in setting up in Swit-
zerland a cell of the Neo-
Nazi movement, the Na-
tional Socialist Front.

- .YA,•••

..••••*•••••• ■ ••7

Norbert Kampe, a Ger-
man journalist who has
shown considerable
enterprise in probing the
record of Nazism, discussed
the Stuttgart parley in the
widely read German daily,
Der Tagesspiegel. He noted
that the conference was
largely occupied with the
question of the still un-
clarified decision-making
procedures which resulted
in the policy of deliberate
and methodical annihila-
tion of the Jews between
1941 and 1944.

Controversy on this issue
had arisen, he reported,
"because source material on
how decisions were reached
in Hitler's immediate
entourage is scanty. Writ-
ten instructions of the
Fuehrer have not been
found."
None of the participants
in the conference attempted
to absolve Hitler of the ul-
timate responsibility for the
Holocaust, although some of
them came close. In his
speech opening the meet-
ing, Prof. Eberhard Jackel
of the university asserted
that none of the partici-
pants felt that any serious
consideration should be
given to the theory that Hit-
ler had nothing to do with
the Final Solution. What
had to be clarified, he said,
was whether the genocide
was the result of a direct in-
itiative by Hitler or the
commulative consequence
of many actions taken by
Nazi officials lower
levels.
Who took the decision (to
annihilate the Jews) and
when and by what methods
and in what sequence were
European Jews to be anni-
hilated?
The conference split on
the answers. As in almost
every scholarly dispute,
separate schools of thought
emerge. Prof. Saul Fried-
lander, the brilliant Israeli
thinker and historian of the
Nazi era, identified the two
dominant schools on this is-
sue. The intentionalists, he
told the meeting, believe in
a direct link between Nazi
anti-Semitic ideology and
the slaughter of the Jews by
the Nazi regime and hold
that Hitler had envisaged
this outcome early in his
career.
Summarizing the inten-
tionalist position as ex-
pounded by Prof. Raul Hil-
berg of the United States,
the author of The Destruc-
tion of the European Jews,
Prof. Helmut Krausnick
'and others, Kampe likened
it to "a straight path run-
ning from planning to im-
plementation with Hitler
issuing the crucial order
immediately before or dur-
ing the invasion of the
Soviet Union in July 1941."

The functionalists, as re-
ported by Kampe, held that
anti-Semitic ideology had
merely been a device enabl-
ing the Nazis to mobilize
the masses and that it had
not, in itself, necessarily led
to the genocide. The func-
tionalists did not accept the
claim that a general order
had been issued in 1941
when the organized mass
killings of Jews began. The
killings in the Polish ghet-
tos, repOrted then, were,
these scholars claimed, the
work of local Nazi officials
because of the chaotic condi-
tions in the ghettos and the
food shortages. The func-
tionalists also challenge the
claim that the Wannsee
Conference in January 1942
accepted the plan for the
Final Solution.
The functionalist thesis
was carried to its ultimate
degree by Prof. Hans
Mommsen, of Bochum, who
argued that anti-Semitism
had been merely a rhetori-
cal tool used by the Nazis to
capture public support. Hit-
ler, he said, had drawn up
"vague, apocalyptic visions
at an extremely theoretical
level" but had never dealt
with their practical applica-
tion (the actual killing of
the Jews) as had Heinrich
Himmler, commander of the
SS and Hitler's Minister of
the Interior.
The machinery of mass

program which began in
1939 for "the destruction of
life unfit to live."
Even before the invasion
of Russia got under way,
Prof. Krausnick told the
conference, Hitler had is-
sued orders that all Soviet
political officers (commis-
sars) and all Jews serving in

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murder, according to the
functionalists, in Kampe's
reporting, "got under way
without specific orders by
Hitler who merely let the
murderers get on with the
job."
argued
Mommsen
strenuously that while Hit-
ler had been a vital re-
quirement for creation of
the climate of murder, once
the Nazi special units were
activated and the killing of
Jews begun, the machinery
of destruction set its own
course and developed its
own momentum. Hitler was
no longer needed to fuel it.
The German expert was
hotly disputed by Prof.
Friedlander, Prof. Karl
Schleunes of the United
States and others. Hitler's
personal involvement, Prof.
Schleunes insisted, was
evidenced by his energetic
advocacy of the euthanasia

Can the world expect a re-
crudescene of Nazism, the
attempt to seize total
power? Prof. Freidlander
answers in a pessimistic if
qualified affirmative. To-
day, he says, the aspirations
of Nazism "are still there,
and their reflections in the
imaginary as well."

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None of the
participants
attempted to
absolve Hitler of
the ultimate
responsibility for
the Holocaust,
although some of
them came close.

the Red Army were to be
shot out of hand if taken
prisoner. Krausnick attrib-
uted the absence of any
written orders by Hitler
with regard to the slaughter
of the Jews to his desire to
remain "internationally ac-
ceptable" in the event that
peace talks were to be held.

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