Re: blame hitler?
What is really addressed in this thread is the (rather) old but still vital structuralist-intentionalist dilemma.Originally Posted by Byzantine Prince
The historiography of nazi Germany was initially dominated by intentionalists, i.e. those who held that Hitler and a few others fully planned and intended the programme they carried out between 1933 and 1945, including the decisions to wage war on various nations, to exterminate the Jews, etcetera. They assumed that Hitler c.s. had full control of political developments and that nazi Germany was a centralised, administratively efficient state that followed his will. I still remember German historian Golo Mann reiterate during a lecture at Leyden University in 1978 that 'Hitler, and Hitler alone, forced the German nation to indulge his delusions, submit to his political will and implement his programme'.
In the 1960's a new school of thought developed: the structuralists held that nazi Germany was a far less centralised, coherent and efficient state than had been assumed and that many policies, including the attempt to exterminate the Jews, were the result of bureaucratic processes, improvisation and an in-built radicalisation process within the nazi elite. In particular, they reconsidered Hitler's personal weight in the decision-making processes; they stressed the absence of planning for the Holocaust as well as for various wars and demonstrated that Hitler rarely initiated planning and often merely sanctioned the initiative of his subordinates. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg was the first and for some time also the most prominent proponent of this view.
More recently Hitler-biographers Hans Mommsen and Ian Kershaw have attempted to transcend the dilemma.
I am afraid that the claim that 'Hitler is in no way directly responsible for the war' would be shrugged off by all three sides in the debate; of course he was, even though others shared in that responsibility.
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