Intentionalists

   A school of Holocaust historians who argue that the path to the murder of millions of Jews was a straight one. From the beginning of the Nazi movement in the 1920s, radical antiSemites, like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, used the language of extermination as one of many options in solving the Jewish question. In their objective of genocide, the Nazis were supported by large segments of the German population whose hatred of Jews was characterized by a virulent eliminationist anti-Semitism.

   In support of their argument, the intentionalists cite Hitler’s threat to exterminate the Jews in Mein Kampf, and his speech before the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, where he predicted that “if international Jewish financiers in and outside of Europe succeed in plunging the nations once more into world war, then the result will not be the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” The intentionalist argument contends that the murder of European Jewry was always uppermost in Hitler’s mind, and that World War II provided the opportunity to implement the Final Solution. Historians associated with the intentionalist school include Lucy Dawidowicz (The War against the Jews, 1975), Gerald Fleming (Hitler and the Final Solution, 1984), and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioner’s: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 1996).

   See also Functionalists.