Responsibility for the Holocaust

Responsibility for the Holocaust is the subject of a historical debate that has spanned several decades. The debate about the origins of the Holocaust is known as functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Adolf Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people as early as 1918 and personally oversaw its execution. However, functionalists such as Raul Hilberg argue that the extermination plans evolved in stages, as a result of initiatives that were taken by bureaucrats in response to other policy failures. Contemporary Holocaust scholarship has largely moved beyond the once rigid opposition between "intentionalist" and "functionalist" paradigms, arriving instead at a more historically grounded synthesis: one that situates Hitler’s ideological antisemitism and long-articulated vision of racial annihilation within the Third Reich's polycratic, competitive structures, where wartime contingency and cumulative bureaucratic radicalization converted doctrine into genocide.

The primary responsibility for the Holocaust rests on Hitler and the Nazi Party's leadership, but operations to persecute Jews, Poles, Romani people, homosexuals and others were also perpetrated by the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Wehrmacht, and ordinary German citizens, as well as by collaborationist members of various European governments, including soldiers and civilians. A host of factors contributed to the environment in which atrocities were committed across the continent, ranging from general racism (including antisemitism), religious hatred, blind obedience, apathy, political opportunism, coercion, profiteering, and xenophobia.