 To understand two historical interpretations of the Nazi persecution of minorities.  To decide whether the Allies could have done more to stop the Holocaust.

 How would you define it?

From, Williamson D.G., The Third Reich (fourth edition), 2011, p.73. As in so many other areas of government, Nazi policy towards the Jews after the seizure of power was often hesitant and contradictory. The intentionalists, particularly Dawidowicz (1986), Hildebrand (1991) and Bracher (1973), argue that Hitler consistently planned the mass murder of the Jews, even though events might at times have forced him to make tactical retreats. The structuralists, on the other hand, the most prominent of whom are Broszat (1985), Mommsen (1986) and Schleunes (1972), seek rather to find the ultimate cause of the Holocaust in the fragmented and chaotic way in which policy was made in Nazi Germany. Government departments and Nazi leaders, they argue, vied with one another to formulate anti-Semitic policies, and thus set in motion a spiral of ever more radical policies. Both positions, as Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann argue, ‘have a number of merits and demerits’ (Burleigh and Wippermann, 1991: 96). Structuralists put Nazi anti-Semitic policy firmly into the the context of the structure of the Nazi state with its chaotic decision-making process and the system of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’. Understandably, such attempts to depersonalise the responsibility of what ultimately ended up as the Holocaust are bitterly resented by the intentionalists, who see such an approach as initiating a new ‘cycle of apologetics’ in German history (Dawidowicz, 1986: xxvi). In fact to understand the Nazi persecution of the Jews neither the structuralist nor the intentionalist approach can be excluded.

How significant was anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945? Explain your answer analysing and evaluating the content and authorship of Sources D and E and using your own knowledge. (16)