One of the most difficult tasks for historians studying the Holocaust has been trying to understand why the Nazi leadership acted as it did — did Nazi racial policy make genocide inevitable? Intertwined with this has been the task of trying to analyse the decision-making process that led to the genocide of the Jews. The debate has tended to focus on whether Hitler always intended to murder the Jews or whether the ‘Final Solution’ as a policy was arrived at more gradually. Historians who support the idea that Hitler always intended to kill the Jews have been known as ‘intentionalists’, while those who argue that Hitler and his henchmen decided to murder the Jewish race later on and in reaction to other events have become known as ‘functionalists’.
anti-Semitism
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