Hitlerist versus structuralist approaches

If ‘programme’, ‘plan’, or ‘design’ in the context of Nazi anti-Jewish policy are to have real meaning, then they ought to imply something more than the mere conviction, however fanatically held, that somehow the Jews would be ‘got rid of’ from German territory and from Europe as a whole, and the ‘Jewish Question’ solved. Before 1941, the evidence that Hitler had more than such vague and imprecise convictions is slender. Finally, the moral ‘lesson’ to be drawn from the ‘Hitlerlist’ position – apart from the ‘alibi’ it provides for non-Nazi institutions in the Third Reich – is by no means obvious. Fleming’s rather jejune moral conclusion based upon his ‘intentionalist’ account of the ‘Final Solution’ is that hatred feeds the animal instinct for destruction of human life which resides in us all. More important than such bland moralization is the question posed by ‘structuralist’ approaches, of how and why a political system in all its complexity and sophistica­tion can within the space of less than a decade become so corrupt that it regards the implementation of genocide as one of its supreme tasks.

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During the pre-war years, as the evidence assembled and analysed by Schleunes and Adam convincingly demonstrates, it seems clear that Hitler took no specific initiative in the ‘Jewish Question’ and responded to rather than instigated the confused and often conflicting lines of ‘policy’ which emerged. The main impulses derived from the pressure ‘from below’ of Party activists, the internal organizational and bureaucratic dynamism of the SS–Gestapo–SD apparatus, the personal and institutional rivalries which found an outlet in the ‘Jewish Question’, and, not least, from economic interest in eliminating Jewish competition and expropriating Jewish capital.

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The creation of the Nuremberg Laws demonstrates clearly how Hitler and the Nazi leadership responded to the considerable pressures from below in their formulation of anti-Jewish policy at this date.

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The agitation and terror of the Party rank-and-file in the summer and autumn of 1938, together with the expulsion in October of some 17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany – a move itself prompted by actions of the Polish government to deny them re-entry into Poland – shaped the ugly atmosphere which exploded in the so-called ‘Crystal Night’ pogrom of 9–10 November. And, as is generally known, the initiator here was Goebbels, who sought to exploit the situation in an attempt to re‑establish his waned favour and influence with Hitler. Other than giving Goebbels the green light verbally, Hitler himself took care to remain in the background, and to accept no responsibility for actions which were both unpopular with the public and castigated (though of course not from humane motives) by Nazi leaders.

—Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 121‑124, 127.