The first point I make in my thesis statement is that Jews were put into ghettos so that the Nazis could control and monitor them more easily. From an intentionalist perspective, the ghettos would be a conscious next step before total annihilation. You round up all Jews, concentrate them together, but isolate them from the outside world so that they lose hope and see who is really in control. Starving them inside of the ghettos could have been part of the plan as well, but when the Nazis realized it would take a very long time, as the Jews were able to smuggle in food and other things to sustain themselves a little, they had to turn to more advanced measures of elimination instead. From a functionalist perspective, the ghettos could have easily been unplanned but became a necessary and temporary holding place while Himmler figured out how to move around millions of Poles, Jews, and ethnic Germans to get Hitler the Reich he wanted. Once the Nazis figured out that rounding up all Jews into more contained locations, such as ghettos, would be more beneficial, instructions were sent out by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, to dissolve Jewish communities into those contained ghettos instead. (Yad Vashem, 73)
My second point is that the ghettos helped the Nazis exploit the Jews for labor. At the higher levels of Nazi leadership, there were conflicting opinions when it came to rounding up the Jews. Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Germany at that time, “opposed the deportation of any useful manpower, especially agricultural labor.” (Browning, 13) To balance this out, at first, ghettos were open and those who worked could do so when they produced the necessary documents. Later, ghettos were closed off and life inside became much worse for everyone as nobody was allowed to leave anymore. The intentionalist argument here makes less sense to me as you would not want to starve your workforce or round them all up if they are providing much-needed labor for you during the war. The functionalist perspective is unplanned and so it makes more sense that the Nazis believed they could still benefit from the Jews even inside the ghettos, and that they could exploit them for as long as possible that way. Those that were too weak to work, because of the inadequate food supplies inside the ghettos, could just be replaced by others who were willing and still able to work for the time being. In November of 1940, all Jews between the ages of 18 and 45 were forced to complete compulsory labor (Griech-Polelle, 183) thus keeping the labor pool large for the Nazis to exploit inside and outside of the ghettos.
My third point is that the ghettos made it easier to round up the Jews for deportation to concentration and extermination camps. From an intentionalist perspective, this is their ultimate goal, and the ghettos were just a temporary resting place while they were perfecting their instruments of death and torture. The Nazis were able to observe the starvation in the ghettos and knew they needed to come up with better and faster ways to eliminate the Jews. One way they did this was by introducing gassing vans as mass shootings were taking an emotional toll on their soldiers. (Becker, 999-1000) While the functionalist perspective did not plan for the Jews to be sent to ghettos in the first place, the Nazis still did not see them as human, and so it was only natural to either shoot them all and bury them in large mass graves on site, (Poliakov, 125-126) or move them to concentration and extermination camps when the time was right.
Whether you find the intentionalist or functionalist view more compelling, both perspectives, in the end, come to the same conclusion, that the only way to answer the Jewish question at that time, was to exterminate them all. The ghettos made control over the Jews easier, and the Nazis could monitor any resistance that was potentially forming. While the Nazis differed on their ideas on timing when it came to rounding up the Jews into the ghettos, as the Jewish population was heavily involved in the workforce, they still were able to exploit them until many were too weak to work. When the Nazis were ready to move onto their next phase, having the Jews in concentrated ghettos, all the cumulative efforts up to that point resulted in a successful outcome of the final solution. The intentionalist or functionalist viewpoint in reality actually does not matter, the outcome of the ghettos, as we have seen, performed its functions and cost millions their lives. Maybe adding a perspective helps break down the damage done in some ways, or helps others sort through the indescribable horrors. Maybe it can even help some find ways to explain why this was done to an entire group of people for reasons that in today’s society would not make sense, and really in the end can not be justified.
Sources:
Dr. August Becker, SS Untersturmführer, to SS-Obersturmbannführer Rauff, May 16, 1942, in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946.
Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching The Final Solution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1954.
Yad Vashem, Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981, Document no. 73.
[Paper written for HIST 4130 class UVU Fall 2024]
Amy Brouwer . 2024. All Rights Reserved
