Or was it just Himmler and the SS being overzealous?
When the Gauleiter of West Prussia, Albert Forster, was commanded to Aryanize the territory, he just made all the Poles there register as Germans and sign documents stating they had German ancestry.
Himmler got really pissed because he wasn't adhering to "racial purity" and kept trying to get Hitler to do something about it, but Hitler didn't care and just told Himmler to piss off.
Was Hitler actually involved in the final solution? I think he was too busy looking at maps, war plans, and architectural plans. The actual governance of occupied territories and Germany itself was more done by the SS, Himmler, Speer and the Gauleiters. I doubt Hitler had any involvement beyond giving non-specific instructions and telling them to do what they want, saying "no questions would be asked".
He was but there is no outright 100% explicit proof, there is enough evidence to be far beyond reasonable doubt however.
Logan Smith
>Did Hitler actually a specific order to kill all the Jews? Probably not.
But senior officers usually deliver their intent instead of delivering orders and he would have made his intent very well known. He would have been well aware of it regardless, so either way he is culpable.
Gavin Harris
It's generally viewed that Hitler ran it like a mafia where he was the don who just told his underlings to get rid of inferior peoples and to install aryan control in lebensraum. He didn't sign any orders.
Landon Carter
Hitler was not at the Wansee Conference where the Final Solution was finalised. However, this can't remove all guilt, it would have been impossible for a project of such size within Nazi Germany, taking away resources from the war effort, to be able to have passed under his radar. He'd been giving hundreds of anti-semitic speeches before the war and throughout it. Be in directly or indirectly, he was responsile.
Kayden White
fpbp
Dominic Campbell
At least this is a relatively well-thought out question instead of /pol/memeing
Jose Myers
On January 30, 1939, Hitler warned that if Jewish financiers and Bolsheviks initiated war, "The result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."[2] On, September 21, 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, SD chief Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units operating in German-occupied territory) to forcibly concentrate Polish Jews into ghettos, alluding to an unspecified "final aim." [3]
In the summer of 1941, with preparations underway for invading Russia, large-scale mass murder initiatives - already practiced domestically upon the mentally ill and deformed (see Aktion-T4, the euthanasia program) - were broadly enacted against Jews. Heydrich, acting on Hitler's orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in the Soviet Union of Jews and Soviet commissars.[4] On July 31, Heydrich received orders from Goering to prepare plans "for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question" in all German-occupied areas, which is the shown document above.[5] Eichmann, while awaiting trial in Israel in 1960, related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that "the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews."[6] Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that "In the summer of 1941... Himmler said to me, 'The Führer has ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish Question... I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose.' "[7]
Bentley Adams
On January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference to discuss and coordinate implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann later testified at his trial:
"These gentlemen... were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination."[8]
Ten days after the conference, while delivering a speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin that was recorded by the Allied monitoring service, Hitler declared: "The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. . . the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least or a thousand years."[9] On February 24, 1943, he stated: "This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.[10]
Keep in mind that many of Hitler's orders, particularly on the extermination campaigns after the Aktion T4 fiasco, were made verbally, as the testimonies of Nazi higher ups confirm. Eichmann recorded in his diaries and memoirs, to Hitler propagandist and history distorter David Irving's chagrin (and Irving has spent his life saying Hitler had no clue about the holocaust), that Hitler gave Himmler the final verbal orders for the extermination campaign in October 1941.
The underlings were expected to determine the Führer's wants and do their best to achieve them. They knew what he wanted, because he outlined what he wanted often enough in his repetitious table talks, speeches, and harangues, for decades.
Chase Long
Hitler, seeing himself as a visionary and artist, was not interested in the details of how things were done, except with military operations, where he threw himself into tiny details, like the number of towed anti-tank guns in an infantry division. He was fascinated with this stuff, from his World War I experiences as a soldier. This mania for detail on minor military subjects turned Führer conferences into lengthy ordeals for all attending, as they often focused no trivialities instead of the big picture. After a few years, the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) officers knew that the way to present Hitler with bad news was to sandwich stories of an isolated incident of heroism or a small victory, so he would be less infuriated by the defeat, and still focus on the small victory.
Hitler also saw warfare in terms of propaganda, and designed a lot of his military strategy in those terms. The Battle of the Bulge was not designed as much to take Antwerp and cut off the British 21st Army Group as it was to set the Western Allies squabbling amongst each other. He did not understand how well SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) worked, compared to his feuding bureaucracies.
One of the major facets of how Hitler developed his image in Germany was that he was a leader who was above and beyond the normal political fray, an ordinary man who had given up all normal desires (family, civilian career, time, art) to achieve Germany's destiny. When things went wrong in Germany, they were not the Führer's fault. It was somebody else's. It helped enable him to take the credit, avoid the blame, and keep anyone from noticing his shortcomings and health issues.
Ryan Thomas
on orders of Hitler, others on orders from Martin Bormann. God knows what valuable incriminating evidence was lost. We can be certain that at least a good portion of it was sensitive information, as it wouldn't have been burned otherwise. Hitler regarded his war on the Jewish people (and Bolshevism as an extension in accord with his belief) as central to his life and career, and a subject for which he believed he would be considered a great hero decades later. Bormann likely destroyed a lot of key papers.
Another load of key papers went down in one of the planes flying to the Berghof, Hitler's private residence in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, crashing in what became East Germany. This crash became the tool by which Konrad Kujau displayed his fake "Hitler diaries" in 1983, which apparently were going to whitewash Hitler. In all likelihood, that plane contained many of the Table Talks that Bormann had transcribed.
But the key point...many of Hitler's orders and desires were given verbally, particularly after the Aktion-T4 mess.
Sources: [1]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 489. [2]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 490., speeches also available on youtube [3]: Holocaust, Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1974, p. 104 [4]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 657 [5]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 492. [6]: Ronnie Duggar, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, D. 48 [7]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, pp. 641-642. [8]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 657. [9]: Ronnie Duggar, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, D. 48. [10]: Holocaust, pp. 105-106.
Mason Flores
Hitler rarely gave specific orders about much of anything. His immediate subordinantes took his inferences and did whatever they could to join favor by carrying them out proactively.
Make no mistake. Hitler hated the Jews and wanted them gone, but he had no desire to get involved in how they went about doing it, so long as they were gone. He had a war which had his complete focus on, so that detail was left up to Himmler and the rest of the men in attendance of the Wansee conference.
Juan Rogers
Bless your heart, user.
Ryder Walker
These. The 3rd Reich was a messy Behemoth and not a bureaucratic Leviathan. This is what you get for terminating Prussia.
Brandon Garcia
>on orders of Hitler, others on orders from Martin Bormann. God knows what valuable incriminating evidence was lost. Forgot to write that lots of documents were burned in the last days of WW2 in Berlin.
Adam Young
>A 10/10 response to a 1/10 bait tread My man
Aiden Cox
Actually a good thread as it summaries the holocaust views among Historians >functionalist (typically jewish) >structuralist (typically german) >moderate structuralist (typically english) (look up Ian Kershaw) We don't have an explicit order of GAS THE KIKES RACE WAR NOW, mainly because the Nazis cloaked their language following the mass popular opposition to Operation Euthanasia. I tend to agree with the moderate structuralists in that Hitler had a dream to kill jews, but he was a weak man, shown by Hess flying to england, and Goebbels ordering Kristallnacht, and that his underlings became increasingly more radical in their treatment towards the jews to win hitler's favour
Elijah Turner
impyling all the junkers didn't stay in power
Gabriel Diaz
Sorry should be >functionalist (normally German) >moderate functionalist/ structuralist (mean same thing) (normally English) >intentionalist (normally Jewish)
Logan Fisher
Wait... Most of these are biased wikipedia articles... How fucking lazy you have to be to copy paste wikipedia bs here.
Angel Hill
Most of the historians I know in the functionalist and intentionalism school are German.
