There are two schools of thought on the origins of the Holocaust. The first is the intentionalist, the belief that it was the Nazis' determined and unwavering attempt to physically destroy European Jews. The other is the functionalist belief, that being that the decision to slaughter the Jews was reached via a twisted road, being a result of forces outside of Germany as well as within.

This paper will argue the functionalist view of the Holocaust, discussing different avenues pursued by the Germans to make their land Judenrein, and how the failure of those attempts led the Nazis to their horrific Endlosung ('Final Solution').

Many people would be shocked to learn that Adolf Hitler was not always an anti-Semite. In his famous book Mein Kampf (My Struggle),

However, despite this unambiguous genocide occurring in Russia, documents of high Nazi officials actually point to the Hitler-Order which officially began the Final Solution being issued in December of 1941. There are two recently discovered documents to support this.

5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons... Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible.

During the First World War, Britain had made contradictory promises to Arabs and Jews. Britain had helped the Arabs win their independence from Turkey, and Palestine was to be held as a British mandate until it was judged fit for independence, at which point it would become Arab land. However, Britain had also promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It seems that Britain, in her haste to gain support in the war, had lent little thought to the future problems these contradictory promises would wreak.

If you were a member of Congress, would you vote 'yes' or 'no' on a bill to open the doors of the U.S. to a larger number of European refugees than now admitted under our immigration quotas?

The debate exists because no official document containing an order to massacre Jews in Europe has ever been found. It is unknown whether Hitler himself would have penned such an order, or if it may have been verbally conveyed. There are a number of surviving documents which make reference to the Final Solution, but they are invariably carefully vague. Even the term 'Final Solution' sounds pretty unequivocal, but there is still some wiggle room who those who would contest it's meaning. No concrete definition of the Final Solution was offered until the War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg in 1945. At that trial, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss stated that "The 'final solution of the Jewish question' meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe."

However, this is not to say that anti-Semitism was exclusively a German phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has a very long history. In the middle ages, it was an uncontested part of Christian doctrine that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, an accusation which would cause untold trouble for the Jews as time progressed. In 1095, the year of the First Crusade, Jews throughout Europe were slaughtered as the Crusaders undertook their mission of liberating holy Christian lands. Martin Luther advocated the burning of synagogues, and denounced Jews as "a bloody and revengeful people."

Some common words found in the essay are:
Nuremberg Laws, Final Solution, Mein Kampf, Zionism Palestine, Gestapo Jewish, Security Service, Reich Judenrein, Goebbels December, Goring Hitler's, European Jews, final solution, nuremberg laws, 'final solution', world war, jewish question, jews europe, jewish refugees, december 1941, mein kampf, solution jewish, term 'final solution', organizational functional material, solution jewish question,
Approximate Word count = 3282
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)