User:Howard C. Berkowitz/AH/Historiography

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This is an edited version of the Historiography section of the Adolf Hitler article in User: Howard C. Berkowitz/AH0, updated to deal with additional sources. At such time as this variant of the Hitler article returns to mainspace, it is intended that this material will go into an article-specific Historiography subpage.

Beginning with Konrad Heiden's 1936 book, biographers, began studying Hitler during his life. Heiden's work ended in the summer of 1934. After Hitler's death, an early and specialized work was Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler (1947).

A great many works have tried to explain Hitler, with varying perspectives and conclusions. Indeed, Ron Rosenbaum analyzed twenty views, by recognized scholars, in his book Explaining Hitler; no two reach the same conclusion. Joseph Nyomarkay was among the earliest Adolf Hitler scholars to suggest that Hitler's authority was based on personality and charisma, rather than a strict ideology. Lothar Machtan, in the Hidden Hitler, which focuses on Hitler's sexuality and relationships, presents a model of Hitler historiography. Perhaps the first major biography was Alan Bullock's 1952 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. That was among the first to deal with Hitler's sexuality, although there had been a classified wartime study of his psyche, with substantial attention to sexuality, done by psychiatrist William Langer for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. Bullock, to some extent, revised some observations, but not their core, in a 1991 biography Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. While a general history of Nazi Germany, William Shirer's 1959 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich provides much information. It discusses both Hitler and his close associates.

Another major work, among the first published in German, was Joachim Fest's 1972 book, Hitler. By the 1970s, there were two main schools of Hitler biography: the functionalists and the intentionalists. Functionalists saw Hitler as motivated by the exercise of power regardless of purpose, while the intentionalists focused on his specific vision. Lucy Dawidowicz, in her 1975 The War against the Jews, saw antisemitism and nationalism at the core of his vision, so falls into the intentionalist school.

According to Machtan, Hans Mommsen was the leader of the functionalists. He considered Hitler a "political counterfeiter" who succeeded because he was constantly overrated, extremely effective with propaganda but not in performance. Machtan considers Ian Kershaw to be the leading current historian, attempting to unify the two schools.

A more recent aspect of the functionalist versus intentionalist debate is described by Ian Kershaw in a 2008 book: did Hitler actually issue an explicit, if oral, order for the Final Solution? For many years, this had been assumed: that he gave verbal instructions to Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, who conveyed it to Reinhard Heydrich. While Kershaw has said, in interviews, that had there been no Hitler, there would have been no Holocaust], he increasingly doubts there was a direct order. By no means is this universally held, and none of the significant historians doubt Hitler intended the effects of the Holocaust. Rather, the argument is that the extremely non-bureaucratic Hitler might have set conditions, but never directed. Yehuda Bauer calls the Final Solution the result of a "stage by stage development in 1941," and, with respect to the two schools, explains the functionalist view as assuming that central ideology and decisions were less important than had previously been thought, but they agree that "without approval by Hitler and his inner circle, the murder would have been impossible."