Klaus Hildebrand

Klaus Hildebrand (born 18 November 1941, Bielefeld, Germany) is a German liberal-conservative historian whose area of expertise is 19th–20th-century German political and military history.

Hildebrand is an Intentionalist on the origins of the Holocaust question, arguing that the personality and role of Adolf Hitler was a crucial driving force behind the Final Solution. Writing in 1979, Hildebrand stated:

"Fundamental to National Socialist genocide was Hitler's race dogma...Hitler's programmatic ideas about the destruction of the Jews and racial domination have still to be rated as primary and causative, as motive and aim, as intention and goal of the "Jewish policy" of the Third Reich".

Working closely with Andreas Hillgruber, Hildebrand took the view that such events as the Shoah and Operation Barbarossa were all the unfolding of Hitler's master plan. Along similar lines, in a 1976 article, Hildebrand commented on left-wing historians of the Nazi Germany that in his view they were:

"theoretically fixed, are vainly concerned with functional explanations of the autonomous force in history and as a result frequently contribute towards its trivialization".

Hildebrand has argued that the distinction drawn by the functionalists between the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Jews in the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union in 1941-42 and between the rest of the Shoah is largely meaningless. Hildebrand wrote that:

"In qualitative terms, the executions by shooting were no different from the technically more efficient accomplishment of the 'physical final solution' by gassing, of which they were a prelude".

In 1981, the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason in his essay 'Intention and explanation: A current controversy about the interpretation of National Socialism' from the book The "Fuehrer State" : Myth and reality coined the term "Intentionist" as part of an attack against Hildebrand and Karl Dietrich Bracher, both of whom Mason accused of focusing too much on Hitler as an explanation for the Holocaust.

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