ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The German Workers' Party, later named the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party, was founded in 1918. The Nazi Party, like other social movements, required financial resources to sustain its activities. Although Hitler and other Nazi officials sometimes encouraged hooliganism and random violence against Jews, they preferred a more systematic, legal approach in order to acquire and maintain public support for their policies. The functionalist view posits that the Final Solution emerged only gradually through a process of incremental decision-making and cumulative radicalization, as German territorial expansion made emigration/deportation less viable as an overall solution to the "Jewish problem". In violation of the Hitler-Stalin pact, planning for Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of the Soviet Union that took place in June 1941, constituted the next major radicalization of the anti-Jewish policy.
