Navigating the Functionalist vs. Intentionalist Debate

What I have been especially interested in this week is the functionalist versus intentionalist debate in terms of Hitler and WWII. Every brain cell in this ADHD challenged head wants to dispute the legitimacy of this debate in and of itself: is there really anything to debate? Hitler was the twentieth century’s fiend; of course he knew what he was doing all along.

I think, however, that it would be too easy for me to argue this point. In fact, I don’t even think it would be an argument at all, given that I, like 99.99% of the rest of the world, think that there is no excusing Hitler’s actions on any grounds. Instead, I want to work through the logic of the other side.

The way that I understand it, the functionalist argument is that Hitler’s attempt at cultural genocide of the Jewish population was not premeditated. He did not have everything planned out from the get-go. Rather, a string of chance circumstances and decisions led to the concentration camps and the Holocaust. The original plan was perhaps the relocation of Jews to Madagascar. The fact that there is a real and concrete prejudice there is indisputable. Nothing that happened in the early 1930s could have happened had Hitler not had some sort of bias against these people. But the question of whether he planned on doing what he did takes things deeper to a level of entanglement that is difficult to navigate.

As I said, the prejudice is there either way. And although I nor anyone else could probe his brain on the subject, I would be inclined to say that he most likely did harbor fantasies of doing away with the Jewish population. If he didn’t, I don’t think he would have been capable of what he did. The question is whether or not he intended to act on such fantasies. Perhaps he was realistic in some sense (as much as a psychopath can be) at first; maybe he believed that such fantasies could come to no fruition, so why not go for the next best bet: just get rid of them, ship all the Jews off to Madagascar and be quit of them.

Maybe the practicality of a psychopath envisioned this at first, and then when other unexpected doors opened he took his chance…

I really am trying. I have spent the better part of forty-five minutes just looking over what I have written thus far and trying to manipulate my thoughts in such a way that I could approach this from a totally new perspective, but I can’t. I really do think what I have said for the fundamentalist side is the best I can do. Were I to slip through a wormhole and go back to the early 1940s (or earlier), I think Hitler would definitely live up to the reputation that shrouds him today. I think he knew what he wanted from the start and set out to do it, but I suppose if I am interested in really pushing my intellect I might could understand the fundamentalist view--but only the way that I have portrayed it already. Had he not the cultural genocide of the Jewish population in mind from the start, he had the prejudice and the will, simply not the concrete proof of the viability of such a thing. If this were the case, as soon as he had the chance after multiple forks in the road, he took it without looking back, and really this is no better than the intentionalist argument.

I do not even feel like I’ve gone in a circle right now. I feel like I’ve pushed forward a few feet only to backtrack immediately over the ground I’ve already covered. It’s a tough subject and hard to really see through anything other than the lens we’ve been raised to see Hitler and WWII through, but maybe someone else could shed some light on my confusion.