ABSTRACT
Why did the Third Reich launch a war of genocide that resulted in destruction on a hitherto unprecendented scale and what precisely was Hitler's role in all this? “Intentionalists” such as Klaus Hildebrand and Karl Dietrich Bracher concluded that Nazi leaders, above all Hitler, did so because they wanted to. The ultimate goal of Nazism was genocide and as such the Third Reich stands out as a unique epoch (an “accidental aberration”) in Germany's otherwise proud and healthy history. By tracing the worst atrocities that occurred in the years 1938–45 to Hitler's Weltanschauung they believed they could demonstrate a causal explanation. For “intentionalist” historians, Hitler was a “programmatist” consistently pursuing defined ideological objectives. Historians like Hildebrand have maintained that the mass murder of the Jews was the culmination of Hitler's pathological ideology: “Fundamental to National Socialist genocide was Hitler's race dogma” (Hildebrand 1984: 178). Hildebrand even suggested that we should refer to “Hitlerism” rather than “National Socialism”. While accepting that the Third Reich was a chaotic form of government, scholars such as Hildebrand nevertheless claim that this very chaos enhanced Hitler's authority and, by implication, the moral responsibility for the Holocaust.
