The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

EXTERMINATION OF JEWS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY
notwithstanding its extaordinary success with the wider public in a number of
countries, particularly Germany.
On the origins of the “Final Solution”
Even with regard to the general background of the “Final Solution,” the approach
which I defined as traditional and some of the new trends may converge. In the
debate as it is circumscribed here, the issue is not that of the date of the order of
total extermination but rather that of the historiographical interpretation of the
genesis of that order, either as a direct result of Hitler’s anti-Jewish fury carried to
its ultimate pitch by the new circumstances of the Russian campaign, or as the
result of a huge extension of the plan for the annihilation of groups “unworthy to
live,” a view closely linking the onset of the “Final Solution” to the ongoing murder
of tens of thousands of German mental patients. 33 In the first instance we would
be facing the ultimate consequence of the impact of the deadly myth of the Jewish
world enemy, that is, the ultimate consequence of redemptive anti-Semitism; in
the second case, one could argue for the convergence of a gruesome instrumental
logic with some general tenets of racism.
The point of convergence lies in the fact that both redemptive anti-Semitism
and the policies of racial extermination of groups “unworthy of living” were fostered
at the same time by Hitler and by party and state agencies as entirely compatible
though distinct elements of the overall worldview. There seems to be little doubt
that redemptive anti-Semitism was Hitler’s dominant obsession and that it inspired
the guidelines that determined the fate of the Jews and established the framework
for their extermination. But, as we well know, general racial “cleansing” was also
on Hitler’s agenda and, thus, radical anti-Semites and diverse categories of more
“scientifically” oriented race specialists readily cooperated by furthering their own
murderous agendas.
At this point, however, brief mention of a seemingly related historiographical
interpretation is necessary, namely, that propounded over a number of years by
Götz Aly and his different coauthors. In most of his work, until his recent synthesis
on the “Final Solution,” Aly stressed the central importance in the planning of
Nazi exterminations of a group of middle-ranking economists and demographers
who, free of anti-Semitic or other racial, ideological motivations, were calculating
the cost–benefit effect of the extermination of millions of human beings. In this
view, the “Final Solution” was the first result of this program of economic rationality,
although it was merely the beginning of a much wider extermination process. 34 I
would have presented the extremely cogent arguments formulated by Graml,
Browning, Diner, Herbert, and others against these propositions had Götz Aly
himself not recently again changed the focus of his interpretation. In his
interpretation of the “Final Solution” published in 1995, Aly now perceives the
evolution of the increasingly murderous policies directed against the Jews to be
the result of the massive transfers of populations that the Nazis started in Eastern
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