Andreas Hillgruber - Historical Perspective - The Intentionalist Historian

The Intentionalist Historian

Hillgruber was an Intentionist on the origins of the Holocaust debate, arguing that Adolf Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust. This set Hillgruber against Functionalist historians such as Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, whose "revisionist" claims on the origins of the Holocaust Hillgruber found distasteful. Hillgruber was well known for arguing that there was a close connection between Hitler's foreign policy and anti-Semitic policies and that Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 was linked to the decision to initiate the Holocaust. Hillgruber argued that the Kernstück (Nucleus) of Hitler's racist Weltanschauung (world view) was to be found in Mein Kampf. He believed that the Holocaust was meant to be launched only with the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Hillgruber's view, Hitler's frequent references to "Judaeo-Bolshevism", to describe both Jews and Communism, betrayed his desire to destroy both simultaneously. In Hillgruber's opinion, Operation Barbarossa had been conceived as, and was, a war of total extermination against what Hitler saw as "Judaeo-Bolshevik" system in the Soviet Union. Hillgruber was noteworthy as the first historian to argue for the connection between Operation Barbarossa and the decision to begin the Holocaust. In Hillgruber's opinion, for Hitler:

"The conquest of European Russia, the cornerstone of the continental European phase of his program, was thus for Hitler inextricably linked with the extermination of these "bacilli", the Jews. In his conception they had gained dominance over Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia thereby became the center from which a global danger radiated, particularly threatening to the Aryan race and its German core. To Hitler, Bolshevism meant the consummate rule of Jewry, while democracy - as it had developed in Western Europe and Weimar Germany - represented a preliminary stage of Bolshevism, since the Jews there won a leading, if not yet a dominant influence. This racist component of Hitler's thought was so closely interwoven with the central political element of his program, the conquest of European Russia, that Russia's defeat and the extermination of the Jews were - in theory as later in practice - inseparable for him. To the aim of expansion per se, however, Hitler gave not racial, but political, strategic, economic and demographic underpinnings".

In a 1985 conference, Hillgruber declared that the history of the Second World War could not be treated as a separate event from the Holocaust, and that for the National Socialist leadership, there were no difference between the war against the Jews and the war against the Allies-both events were different sides of the same coin. As such, Hillgruber decried the tendency on the part of historians' to sever the history of World War II from the "Final Solution", and urged historians to start writing histories that took account that the National Socialist "racial revolution" and plans for a German "world power status" were all part and parcel of the same process. In the 1984 essay "War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews", Hillgruber argued that based on a reading of Hitler's early speeches and writings that Hitler associated Jews and the Communists as one and the same, and accordinlgy Hitler regarded the destruction of the Jews and the Soviet Union as part and parcel of the same process. Hillgruber argued that the decision to begin the Holocaust was probably taken during the very earliest stages of the planning for Operation Barbarossa in late June-early July 1940, but that the surviving documentary evidence was not conclusive on this point. Based upon Hitler's statements to his generals about the coming war of annihilation against “Judeo-Bolshevism” and Reinhard Heydrich's orders to re-establish the Einsatzgruppen, Hillgruber argued that the decision to start the Endlösung was not taken later than March 1941. Through Hillgruber noted that the massacres of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen that were to culminate in their extermination were often justified under the grounds of anti-partisan operations, that this was just a mere "excuse" for the German Army's considerable involvement in the Holocaust in Russia and the term war crimes and crimes against humanity were indeed correct labels for what happened. Hillgruber maintained that the slaughter of about 2.2 million defenceless men, women and children for the reasons of racist ideology cannot possibly be justified for any reason, and that those German generals who claimed that the Einsatzgruppen were a necessary anti-partisan response were lying. Hillgruber described the relationship between the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht as follows:

"The practical cooperation of the regular army and the Einsatzgruppen with regard to Jews took this form: Immediately after gaining control of an area the army commander issued orders for the Jews to be registered. Instructions for Jewish residents to come forward and identify themselves were provided on large-format posters, making it easy for the units of the security police and SD to place them under arrest-unless some of them, having learned of their intended fate, fled to the woods or otherwise "went underground"...Just like the Einsatzgruppen in the Rear Army areas, in parts of the Soviet Union placed under German civilian administration the "Higher SS and Police Leaders" had a prescribed set of duties-that included the systematic killing of Jews".

Hillgruber took a rather extreme "No Hitler, no Holocaust" position. He believed it was Hitler alone who made the Holocaust possible. He argued that, even if the Nazis had come to power under some other leader such as Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels, for example, the Jews would have suffered persecution and discrimination, but not genocide. Hillgruber once presented at a historians' conference in 1984 a counter-factual scenario whereby, had it been a coalition of the German National People's Party and the Stahlhelm that took power in 1933 without the NSDAP, all the anti-Semitic laws in Germany that were passed between 1933 and 1938 would still have been passed, but there would have been no Holocaust. He maintained that the other Nazi leaders such as Göring, Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler willingly participated in the Holocaust, as did many other Germans in the ever-widening "rings of responsibility" for the Holocaust, but that without Hitler's decisive role there would have been no Holocaust. Despite his emphasis on the role of Hitler, Hillgruber often stressed that the Holocaust was the work of both the German state bureaucracy and the Nazi Party, the apolitical and committed Nazis while "the mass of the German population" accepted "unvermeidlicherweise nur unzulänglich verschleierten Vorgangs" ("a process that could never be more than inadequately concealed").