Eberhard Jäckel - Knowledge

360:'s notebook saying "Jewish transport from Berlin, not to be liquidated", on 30 November 1941 proved that Hitler did not want to see the Holocaust happen. Jäckel maintained that the order referred only to that train and argued that if Hitler had ordered the people on that train to be spared, it must stand to reason that he was aware of the Holocaust. Jäckel went on to argue that because the "Final Solution" was secret, it is not surprising that Hitler's servants who were ignorant of the Holocaust, and anyhow, five of Hitler's servants interviewed by Irving later claimed that they believed that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust. Jäckel argued that on the basis of Hitler's statements in 444:, a collection of primary documents that record all of Hitler speeches and writings from 1905 to 1924. Included in the book were every surviving letter, postcard, note and poem written by Hitler. In their opinion, the editors concluded, there was a real change in Hitler's personality in 1919, with his writings before that year having been relatively apolitical and his writings starting in 1919 showing an increasing obsession with antisemitism. In April 1981, it was revealed that 16 of the 600 documents published in 31: 538:

children and infants, and actually put this decision into practice, using all the means of governmental power at its disposal. This idea is so apparent and so well known that it is quite astonishing that it could have escaped Fest's attention (the massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War were, according to all we know, more like murderous deportations than planned genocide).

398:'s diary on 27 March 1942 mentioning the Führer's "Prophecy" was coming true was a sign that Hitler had ordered the Holocaust. Jäckel accused Irving of dishonesty in claiming that there was no sign in the Goebbels diary that Hitler knew of the Holocaust. Finally, Jäckel noted the frequent references to the "Prophecy Speech" in Hitler's wartime speeches as a sign that Hitler had ordered the Holocaust. 585:"simply a bad book". The Canadian historian Fred Kautz, in defence of Goldhagen, wrote, "Jackel is not a 'structuralist', but a Hitler biographer. He expounds the theory that Hitler alone was driven by the explicit desire to kill all the Jews and that in essence only he is guilty. This narrows down the question of guilt to only one evil person and absolves the 'ordinary Germans'". 255:, Hitler held to a rigid set of fixed beliefs and consistently acted from his "race and space" philosophy throughout his career. In Jäckel's opinion, the core of Hitler's worldview was his belief in what he saw as the merciless struggle for survival between the "Aryan race" and the "Jewish race" and in his belief that stronger "races" possessed large amounts of 303:

annihilated there would very soon no longer be any struggle for living space, nor therefore any culture and consequently nations would die out; not just the German nation, but ultimately all nations. But if, on the other hand, the German people failed to conquer new living space, it would die out because of that and the Jews would triumph.

370:, it is a reasonable assumption that Hitler was always committed to genocide. As a sign of Hitler's intentions, Jäckel used Hitler's tendency to involve himself in minutiae to argue that it is inconceivable that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. Jäckel used Hitler's "Prophecy Speech" of January 30, 1939 in which Hitler declared: 513:

Jäckel argued that Himmler was antisemitic but was less enthusiastic about genocide than Heydrich, who saw genocide as a way of obtaining Hitler's support for building a power base outside Himmler's control. In Jäckel's view, antisemitism was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Holocaust

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in contempt and therefore could not have possibly felt threatened by the Soviets, as Nolte suggested. Jäckel attacked Nolte's statement that Hitler had an especially-vivid fear of the Soviet "rat cage" torture by arguing that Hitler's statement of 1 February 1943 to his generals about captured German

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Jäckel takes the view that Hitler's ideology developed in stages in the 1920s. Jäckel wrote: "It is an important fact that the final completion , contrary to Hitler's own statements, in 1919 had only begun". In addition, Jäckel's book was noteworthy as the first account of Hitler's beliefs written in

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I, however claim (and not for the first time) that the National Socialist murder of the Jews was unique because never before had a nation with the authority of its leader decided and announced that it would kill off as completely as possible a particular group of humans, including old people, women,

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of engaging in a "game of confusion". Jäckel wrote that the "game of confusion" comprised posing hypotheses disguised as questions without proof, and when one demands proof, there is an angry response: "One is after all still allowed to ask!". In response to Jäckel's attack, Nolte in an essay that

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In response to Jäckel's first article, Irving announced that he had seen a document from 1942 proving that Hitler had ordered the Holocaust not to occur but that the document was now lost. Jäckel wrote that he had "easily" discovered the "lost" document in which the head of the Reich Chancellery,

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Jäckel argued that Hitler's order to Lammers to tell Schlegelberger that to wait until after the war before concerning him about the "impracticable" details of the divorce laws between German Jews and "Aryans" was simply Hitler's way of putting Schlegelberger off. Jäckel ended his essay that the

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Hitler often said why he wished to remove and kill the Jews. His explanation is a complicated and structurally logical construct that can be reproduced in great detail. A rat cage, the murders committed by the Bolsheviks, or a special fear of these are not mentioned. On the contrary, Hitler was

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I shall once again be your prophet: if international Jewry with its financial power in and outside of Europe should manage once more to draw the peoples of the world into world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world, and thus the victory of Jewry, but rather the total

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great deal of evidence that some were shocked or even appalled when the Final Solution came into effect. To be sure, they did not disagree with it. But they agreed only reluctantly, referring again to an order given by Hitler. This is a strong indication that the idea did not originate with

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He had to annihilate the Jews, thus restoring the meaning of history, and with the thus restored, nature-intended struggle for existence, he at the same time had to conquer new living space for the German people. Each of these tasks was inextricably linked to the other. Unless the Jews were

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is a long rant against the three principles that Hitler saw as the antithesis of his three sacred principles: internationalism, democracy and pacifism. Jäckel asserts that for Hitler "the originators and bearers of all three counterpositions are the Jews". In Jäckel's view, Hitler in the

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that Hitler ordered him to put the "Jewish Question" on the "back burner" until after the war. Jäckel noted that the document concerned was the result of a meeting between Lammers and Schlegelberger on 10 April 1942 concerning amendments to the divorce law concerning German Jews and

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Jäckel has argued that Hitler felt there were three factors that determined a people's "racial value": its awareness of itself, the type of leadership that it had and its ability to make war. According to Jäckel, those for Germany meant ultranationalism, the

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prison, and that was not, as Nolte argued, to be interpreted literally. Jäckel went on to argue that Nolte had done nothing to establish what the remarks about the "rat cage" had to do with the Holocaust. Jäckel went on to accuse Nolte of engaging in a

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In regard to the foreign policy debates, Jäckel is a leading "continentalist" and argues that Nazi foreign policy aimed only at the conquest of Eastern Europe, as opposed to the "globalists", who argue that Hitler wanted world conquest.

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newspaper on 31 October 1986 wrote that Jäckel's attack was something that one might expect in an East German newspaper: "I am amazed at the coldheartedness with which Eberhard Jäckel says that not every single bourgeois was killed."

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of 1943 and certain other statements on his part in 1944 referring to an "order" from an unnamed higher authority as proof that Hitler had ordered the Holocaust. In the same way, Jäckel noted Hitler's order of 13 March 1941 for the

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about the 1915 Armenian Massacres that massacres but no genocide occurred of the Armenians. Jäckel's critics accused him of disregarding the fact that Ottoman troops were crossing the border and exterminating Armenians outside the

502:, "is not an element of an organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The gigantic empire in the East is ripe for collapse." Hitler still believed this in 1941 when he had his soldiers invade Russia without winter equipment. 324:

debates. Since the 1960s, he has argued on that there was a long-range plan on the part of Hitler to exterminate the Jewish people from about 1924. Those views led to intense debates with functionalist historians such as

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on 23 December 1991, Jäckel argued against those who claimed that the East German dictatorship was just as inhumane as the Nazi dictatorship. During the Goldhagen Controversy of 1996, Jäckel was a leading critic of

333:. Jäckel dismissed the argument made by Broszat in his 1977 essay "Hitler and the Genesis of the Final Solution" that local officials began the Holocaust on their own initiative under the grounds that there was a 498:

always convinced that Soviet Russia, precisely because it was ruled by Jews, was a defenseless colossus standing on clay feet. Aryans had no fear of Slavic or Jewish subhumans. The Jew, Hitler wrote in 1926 in

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In contrast to the functionalists, who have argued for the "weak dictator" thesis about Hitler's power, Jäckel has supported the "master of the Third Reich" thesis and has described Hitler's power as

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More recently, Jäckel modified his position. He later believed that most of the initiatives for the Holocaust came from Hitler but that it was more the result of a series of

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established for the first time a logical link between his foreign policy conception and his antisemitism. They were synthesized in his view of history. With this, Hitler's

251:("Hitler's Worldview"), which was an examination of Hitler's worldview and beliefs. Jäckel argued that far from being an opportunist with no beliefs, as had been argued by 559:, Fest and Jäckel again clashed over the question of the "singularity" of the Holocaust, with Fest accusing Jäckel of presenting a "caricature" of his and Nolte's views. 487:

Jäckel wrote in a 1986 essay, "The Impoverished Practice of Insinuation: The Singular Aspect of National-Socialist Crimes Cannot Be Denied", first published in the

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like the Ministry of Justice, the "Final Solution" was a bureaucratic process to deprive Jews of their civil rights and to isolate them, and for representatives of

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Against Nolte's claim that the Holocaust was not unique but rather one of out many genocides, Jäckel rejected Nolte's view and those of his supporters like

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decisions than a master plan on the part of Hitler. In 1998, Jäckel argued that Hitler began the Holocaust in mid-1941 by playing Himmler against Heydrich.

356:. It attacked Irving and maintained that Hitler was very much aware of and approved of the Holocaust. Jäckel attacked Irving for claiming that an entry in 729:

Kriegswende Dezember 1941 : Referate und Diskussionsbeiträge des internationalen historischen Symposiums in Stuttgart vom 17. bis 19. September 1981

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The uniqueness and the singularity of the Holocaust is a major theme of Jäckel. In his view, it is like no other genocide. In an essay published in

366:, the Führer was always committed to genocide of the Jews and that because Hitler later attempted to execute the foreign policy that he outlined in 352:, which argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. Jäckel, in turn, wrote a series of newspaper articles that was later turned into the book 1755: 1484: