Introduction

Analyzing Nazi Germany means scrutinizing the attempt to organize a society wherein state and party institutions set out to break down the boundaries between the private and the public. Although the 'short' twentieth century witnessed several such collective experiences of dictatorship, the degree remained unsurpassed by which Nazi state and party institutions succeeded in accomplishing their goal in a relatively short span of time. In Nazi diction, the Holocaust had, in fact, the name Endlosung der Judenfrage. The term is usually rendered as 'Final Solution to the Jewish question'. The rendering is tenable if it is understood that the term underwent a change of meaning from 1940 to the summer of 1941. The process of decision-making for the Holocaust reflected the change of meaning of the term Endlosung. During the 1980s, historians were united in assuming that understanding the decisionmaking process was crucial to the understanding of the Holocaust as a whole.