A Functionalist View Of the Holocaust

Adolf Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany (1933-45) has gone down in history as one of the most horrific mass-murderers in history. Not only did he cause the bloodiest war ever seen, but his warped racial ideology precipitated the Holocaust, the organized slaughter of over twelve million persons. At the top of his list of ‘inferior’ groups were the Jews of Europe. Hitler sought to make the Reich Judenrein (‘free of Jews’), and did so in …

…is quite evident that the Nazis had made efforts to make the Reich Judenrein through emigration before they resorted to the large-scale slaughter of the Holocaust. Perhaps if other nations had not been so reluctant to accept Jewish refugees, the murder of millions of Jews might have been avoided. Hitler’s ideology of the Jews’ racial inferiority did not allow for their assimilation in German culture. Therefore, once emigration failed, the ‘Final Solution’ was born.