SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 231
“Aly concluded that there was no single, specific decision to kill
the Jews of Europe. Rather, analogous to Mommsen’s notion of a
system of cumulative radicalization, he posited a long and complex
process of decision-making, with notable spurts in March, July, and
October 1941, but continuing still as a series of experiments down to
May 1942. Hitler’s role, according to this interpretation, was confined
to decisions as an arbiter between competing Nazi leaders
whose own schemes to deal with the Jewish question had created insoluble
problems.”
Other studies linked the alleged exterminations to decisions taken by
local authorities, but “the role of Hitler, too, seemed scarcely to figure
in the new explanations. Was it likely, or plausible, that the most radical
of radical anti-Semites had played no direct part in shaping the policies
aimed at destroying his perceived arch-enemy?” 662
David Bankier (1988) and Saul Friedländer (1997) had shown that
during the 1930s Hitler had been more active in anti-Jewish politics
than was believed earlier and that it was therefore difficult to accept that
he would later stay out of the decisional process leading to the alleged
genocide.
In 1994 Browning maintained the importance of the Führerbefehl,
which he dated to the summer of 1941, stressing that, in this way, he
“was not positing a single decision, but envisaging the point at which
Hitler inaugurated the decision-making process, the first move in developments
that would stretch over the subsequent months.” 662
In 1991 Richard Breitman “dated ‘a fundamental decision to exterminate
the Jews’ by the dictator to as early as January 1941, adding,
however, that ‘if the goal and basic policies were now clear, the specific
plans were not,’ and followed only after some time with the first operational
decisions in July,” something which Kershaw himself believes to
be unsustainable. 663
Against this Kershaw summarizes Tobias Jersak as stating in 1999
that “the declaration of the Atlantic Charter by Roosevelt and Churchill
on August 14, 1941 (meaning that Germany would soon be at war with
the USA) was the trigger for Hitler, suffering at that point from a nervous
collapse and reeling from the recognition of the failure of his strategy
to defeat the Soviet Union, to take the fundamental decision that the
Jews of Europe should be physically destroyed.” But Kershaw states
662 Ibid., p. 21.
663 Ibid., p. 21f.