The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Decision-Making Process 185
nuances of weighting and emphasis. Which in a series of decisions should be
considered more important, more pivotal, than others?
Second, there has been a shift towards emphasizing continuity over discontinuity
in the decision-making process. The events of 1941 did not represent
a sharp break with those of 1939–40. The Nazis’ expulsion plans and visions of
demographic engineering are taken more seriously than before and are also
seen as policies of destruction in their own right. As Magnus Brechtken has aptly
concluded, the Madagascar Plan amounted to a ‘death sentence’ for European
Jewry which differed from Auschwitz only in the place and method of murder. 57
If scholars increasingly appreciate the importance of Nazi policies and decisions
preceding 1941, many also now accept that important decision-making
continued after 1941. Peter Witte and Peter Longerich have both noted the
importance of decisions taken in the spring of 1942. 58 I sketched out the
importance of July 1942 as the point of a ‘final decision’ for the Final Solution. 59
And Christian Gerlach has developed a much more detailed argument concerning
the ‘acceleration’ of the mass murder in the summer of 1942, focusing in
particular on the murder of Jewish labour in connection with the Reich’s crisis
in food production. 60 Even with the construction of the gas chambers and the
onset of deportations and ghetto liquidations, the decision-making process did
not stop.
Third, most – though certainly not all – scholars in the field have gravitated
towards the Streit-Streim position that the decision and dissemination of orders
for the murder of all Soviet Jews did not occur before the invasion. 61 Beginning
in late July – at different times in different places at different rates – the killing
was gradually expanded from adult male Jews to encompass all Jews except
indispensable workers – a process nearly complete in the Baltic by the end of
1941, but not yet elsewhere on occupied Soviet territory until 1942. There is
still considerable disagreement concerning the relative roles of regional and
local authorities on the one hand and Hitler and central authorities on the
other, as well as disagreement on the historical context of euphoria of victory
or growing frustration and desperation.
Finally, there is a growing awareness among historians that the Final Solution
was based on a form of consensus politics. In the 1970s much emphasis, at least
among ‘functionalists’, had been placed on the polycratic nature of the Nazi
regime and its internal rivalries. Nazi Jewish policy was seen as simply one more
arena in which Nazis competed with one another, and this rivalry was a source
of radicalization. In line with Hilberg’s conclusions in his revised edition of 1985
about ‘consonance and synchronization’ within a far-flung and decentralized
machinery of destruction, recent scholarship has placed greater emphasis on
what united rather than what divided German policy-makers. Dieter Pohl noted
the importance of consensus politics behind the Final Solution in his pioneering
1993 regional study of the Lublin district. Subsequent studies have emphasized