SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 219
8. The Führerbefehl and the Origins of the
“Extermination Camps” in the East
8.1. The Führerbefehl and Holocaust Historiography
During the Nuremberg trial, at the morning hearing of 15 April
1946, the former commander of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Höß, declared
that, in the summer of 1941, he was ordered, by Reichsführer SS
Heinrich Himmler to come to Berlin and that Himmler told him on that
occasion that Hitler had given the order to exterminate the Jews. 633 This
Führerbefehl immediately became the cornerstone of mainstream Holocaust
historiography then taking shape but still lacking any kind of documentation.
Over the following decades these historians went on to
build upon this meager foundation a fortress of assertions and hypotheses
so full of internal inconsistencies that in the late seventies David
Irving would go so far as to question whether Hitler was even aware of
the alleged genocide. 634 The ensuing debate of these theses, moved
along by Martin Broszat, then director of the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte,
592 generated new points of view which brought with them a
new historiographic concept, known as the functionalist or structuralist
concept. Right from the start and in a way inevitably, this concept was
at odds with the ailing Nuremberg concept – which we may call intentionalist
– because at heart it constituted a critical reaction to the teachings
of this “courtroom-based” historiography, the historiographic failings
of which it exposed all too clearly. Hitler’s role in the alleged genocide
was reassessed along entirely different perspectives, becoming
more and more obscure in the process and finally ending up in a “nod”
by Hitler or in a “meeting of minds.”
Mainstream Holocaust historians dedicated two major meetings to
these burning problems.
The first of them was an international congress on the topic “Nazi
Germany and the extermination of the Jews,” organized by the Ecole
633 IMT, vol. XI, p. 398.
634 D. Irving, Hitler’s War. Wiking Press, New York, 1977.