Notable intentionalists have included William Shirer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Karl Bracher, Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, Eberhard Jäckel, Leni Yahil, Israel Gutman, Gerhard Weinberg, Walter Laqueur, Saul Friedländer, Richard Breitman, Lucy Dawidowicz and Daniel Goldhagen.
[citation needed] Books such as Karl Schleunes' The Twisted Road to Auschwitz which was published in 1970 influenced a number of historians to challenge the prevailing interpretation and suggested there was no master plan for the Holocaust.
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.
Those historians who take an intentionalist line, like Andreas Hillgruber, argue that everything that happened after Operation Barbarossa was part of a master plan he credited Hitler with developing in the 1920s.
[2] The German historian Helmut Krausnick argued that: What is certain is that the nearer Hitler's plan to overthrow Russia as the last possible enemy on the continent of Europe approached maturity, the more he became obsessed with an idea—with which he had been toying as a "final solution" for a long time—of wiping out the Jews in the territories under his control.
It cannot have been later than March 1941, when he openly declared his intention of having the political commissars of the Red Army shot, that he issued his secret decree—which never appeared in writing though it was mentioned verbally on several occasions—that the Jews should be eliminated.
[4] Klaus Hildebrand wrote that: In qualitative terms, the executions by shooting were no different from the technically more efficient accomplishment of the 'physical final solution' by gassing, of which they were a prelude.
[5] Against the intentionalist interpretation, functionalist historians like Martin Broszat argued that the lower officials of the Nazi state had started exterminating people on their own initiative.
[7] Broszat argued that in the autumn of 1941 German officials had begun "improvised" killing schemes as the "simplest" solution to the "Jewish Question".
[7] The American historian Christopher Browning has argued that: Before the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen were not given explicit orders for the total extermination of Jews on Soviet territory.
Additional criticism of functionalism points out that Hitler and other Nazi leaders delayed railcars providing supplies to front line troops in the Soviet Union so that Jews could be deported by rail from the USSR to death camps, thus demonstrating the pursuit of genocidal policies over pragmatic wartime actions.
[15] Moderate functionalists, such as Karl Schleunes and Christopher Browning, believe that the rivalry within the unstable Nazi power structure provided the major driving force behind the Holocaust.
Daniel Goldhagen went further, suggesting that popular opinion in Germany was already sympathetic to a policy of Jewish extermination before the Nazi party came to power.
Bryant concludes: "Hitler continued to dissemble his real intentions through the 1930s, falsely assuring the world of his peaceful inclinations toward countries he had rashly threatened in his memoir".
Its execution meant the liquidation of Jewry, of Rome, of liberalism with its tangled capitalistic connections; of Marxism, Bolshevism, Toryism—in short, an abrupt and complete break with the past and an assault on all existing world political forces."
Dawidowicz concludes that Hitler conceived his plans long before coming to power, and everything he did from then on was directed toward the achievement of his goal: "There never had been any ideological deviation or wavering determination.
"[24] Wolfgang Benz points out that Adolf Hitler had already called for anti-Semitism in a 1919 publication "Gutachten zum Antisemitismus" and declared: "Its ultimate goal, however, must unalterably be the removal of the Jews altogether.
"[26] On 3 July 1920 Hitler wrote to Konstantin Hierl: "As much as I cannot reproach a tubercle bacilli for an activity which means destruction for man but life for them, I am also compelled and entitled, for the sake of my personal existence, to wage the fight against tuberculosis by destroying its pathogens.
on the views of Karl Eugen Dühring: Without clear recognition of the racial problem, and thus of the Jewish question, a resurgence of the German nation will no longer take place.
[attribution needed] According to Lucy Dawidowicz, if Hitler's allies expressed surprise at the implementation of a systematic genocide, it was not because of "the suddenness with which they had to confront these plans, but because of lack of preparation".
Jäckel notes that Hitler himself had announced the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of a new war in a public speech on the anniversary of his "seizure of power" on 30 January 1939.
[34] This is supported by the fact that the Nazi leadership started introduced rearming shortly after coming to power in 1933; Richard Overy remarks that for Hitler the "economy was not simply an arena for generating wealth and technical progress; its raison d'etre lay in its ability to provide the material springboard for military conquest".
[35] In this context, intentional historians argue that the Madagascar Plan was ultimately never a serious option for the National Socialist leadership, but merely a consideration presented to the outside world in order to conceal from the public the actual goal that was being pursued.