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Article: DECODING THE HOLOCAUST.(Review)
- Article from:
- The New Leader
- Article date:
- February 8, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 American Labor Conference on International Affairs. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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OVER THE PAST GENERATION, historians have debated two competing theories of the Holocaust's origins: intentionalism and functionalism. Intentionalists, like the late Lucy Dawidowicz, believe the destruction of European Jewry was inspired by Nazi racial ideology and probably initiated by Hitler himself at the start of World War II. That is not necessarily to say he intended from the outset to exterminate all of Europe's Jews. Perhaps he did, but as Richard Breitman points out in Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (Hill and Wang, 325 pp., $25.00), there is "no satisfactory way to demonstrate it empirically."
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