Historiography Paper
Mr. Deutsch
When did the Nazis decide to commit genocide against the Jews and what influenced their decision?
Hitler’s Nazi regime exterminated 6,000,000 Jews with unending effort until the close of the war. The execution of this mass murder required enormous manpower and large bureaucracies. However, was the idea of the Final Solution always envisioned? A major debate amongst historians was raised. Did Hitler intend for this mass slaughter? Or was it a matter of “going with the flow”; of various sectors of the Nazi regime doing what made the best sense to themselves at the moment, without a larger set of directives?
The functionalists and the intentionalists have taken their respective sides in …show more content…
She was born in New York in 1915 to Polish immigrants. She had worked in YIVO both in Vilna and in New York alongside Eastern European Jews, and helped sequence the thousands of books confiscated by the Nazis soon after the war ended. These experiences shaped her, and all of her works reflect her passion and love for the Jewish …show more content…
The two points of views he follows are those of AJ P. Taylor who sees Germany as having a romantic-nationalistic tradition that accentuated the worship of a powerful state and a great leader. Noakes notes that there is convincing evidence that Germany had a vigorous political culture along with a healthy participatory political culture. The second argument that he states is that many historians assess that the weakening of this democratic culture was due to crisis after crisis, such as the defeat of World War I, the revolution of November 1918, the hyperinflation of 1922 and the great Depression. Noakes feels that both arguments are correct. The overall political structure broke under the crises, but he believes undoubtedly that the German military and nobility held romantic views that enabled them to embrace Hitler