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Responsibility for the Holocaust: Functionalism versus Intentionalism, Lucy Dawidowicz, Raul Hilberg, Collaboration with the Axis Powers During World War II
Responsibility for the Holocaust Functionalism versus Intentionalism Lucy Dawidowicz Raul Hilberg Collaboration with the Axis Powers During World War II High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Historians differ as to where the responsibility for the Holocaust lies. Intentionalist historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people from as early as 1918, and that he personally oversaw its execution. Functionalists such as Raul Hilberg have argue... more »d that the extermination plans evolved in stages, as a result of initiatives from bureaucrats who were responding to other policy failures. The enormity of the Holocaust has prompted much analysis. Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 report on Adolf Eichmann, presented him as a symbol of dull obedience to authority in what was at first seen as a scandalous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which has since become a classic of political philosophy. Thus, Arendt opposed herself to the first, immediate, explanation, which accused the Nazis of "cruelty" and of "sadism".« less