The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Decision-Making Process 179
The ‘intentionalist/functionalist’ debate reached its apogee – some might say
its nadir – in May 1984, when most of the protagonists assembled in Stuttgart
at a conference organized by Eberhard Jäckel. 32 By then the lines had been drawn
and virtually everyone – with the significant exception of Eberhard Jäckel
himself 33 – reiterated his now familiar and finely honed position. In addition,
however, a new front in the debate over the decision-making process, focusing
exclusively on the origins of the genocidal assault against Soviet Jews, surfaced.
In 1981 Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm had published their
massive study of the Einsatzgruppen. Citing both the testimony of various Einsatzgruppen
officers, especially Otto Ohlendorf, and documents like the Stahlecker
report of October 1941, Krausnick articulated a position that was at the time
virtually taken for granted by everyone but Uwe Adam, namely that the Einsatzgruppen
had received orders for the systematic destruction of Soviet Jewry
sometime before the invasion on 22 June 1941. 34 Three years earlier, Christian
Streit had published his pioneering work on the German treatment of Soviet
POWs. Without fanfare he briefly argued that prior to the invasion the Nazi goal
was indeed to achieve (quoting Stahlecker) the ‘most comprehensive as possible
removal’ (möglichst umfassenden Beseitigung) of the Jews, but that this meant in
initial expectation and practice what Heydrich relayed on 2 July 1941, namely
all Jews in state and party positions. Only stupendous military success on the
one hand, and the unexpected degree of military cooperation with the SS on the
other, opened up the hitherto unforeseen possibility of killing all Soviet Jews. 35
Alfred Streim, who had earlier prepared the preliminary judicial case against
the notorious Einsatzkommando 4a for the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen,
also published a book on the treatment of Soviet POWs in 1983. On the
basis of his work on Einsatzgruppen cases, he added an ‘excursus’ to his book
exploring what orders had been given by whom and when to the Einsatzgruppen.
Examining the testimonies of witnesses for later German trials, he concluded
that the Nuremberg testimony of Ohlendorf and others, claiming that an order
from Hitler to kill all Soviet Jews had been relayed to the Einsatzgruppen by
Heydrich’s chief of personnel, Bruno Streckenbach, prior to the invasion, was
contrived as a defence strategy to hide behind superior orders. Given the
ambiguous and conflicting testimony of different witnesses, Streim concluded
that there had never been a single, comprehensive Führerbefehl either before or
after the invasion, but rather a series of escalating instructions to incite
pogroms, kill Jews in state and party positions, kill Jews who were potential
threats and finally kill Jewish women and children, which, taken together,
constitute what we now understand as the Hitler order. 36 Krausnick and Streim
went head to head with their contrasting interpretations at Stuttgart and carried
on their exchange even after. 37
One year after the Stuttgart conference, Raul Hilberg published the revised
and expanded edition of The Destruction of the European Jews. Standing aloof