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With few exceptions, notably the early study by Gerald Reitlinger and the monumental work of Raul Hilberg, detailed research on the decisions and policies of genocide began as late as the 1970s, expanding greatly over subsequent decades, especially once the archival repositories in the former eastern bloc were opened. Only in the light of such research has it become possible to evaluate more precisely the role Hitler played in the emergence of the ‘‘Final Solution’’. Yet even now, after exhaustive analysis, much remains obscure or contentious. The problems of interpretation arise from the complexities and deficiencies of the surviving fragmentary evidence, reflecting in good measure the obfuscatory language of the Nazi leadership as well as the extreme unbureaucratic leadership style of Hitler, who, especially once the war had begun, placed a high premium upon secrecy and concealment, with orders on sensitive issues usually passed on verbally, and on a ‘‘need-to-know’’ basis.

Until the 1970s it was generally taken for granted that a single, direct Hitler order launched the ‘‘Final Solution’’. The presumption emanated from a Hitler-centric approach to the Third Reich, which placed heavy emphasis upon the will, intentions, and policy-directives of the dictator. This sometimes went hand in hand with the claim, as voiced in Lucy Dawidowicz’s influential book, that Hitler had followed a ‘‘grand design’’ or ‘‘program of annihilation’’ dating back to his traumatic experience of the end of the First World War, and that, though there had on occasion been necessary tactical adjustments, the implementation of the plan merely awaited the right opportunity, which then came in 1941. Gerald Fleming, one of the first historians to investigate systematically the evidence for Hitler’s involvement in the implementation of the ‘‘Final Solution,’’ concurred in seeing ‘‘a strategic plan’’ for the realization of Hitler’s aim, dating back to his experience of the German revolution of 1918. Early biographers of Hitler followed a similar line. A ‘‘psychohistorical’’ explanation for this pathological aim was offered by Rudolph Binion, who saw Hitler entering politics in order to kill the Jews as revenge for Germany’s defeat, in subliminal association with the death of his mother in 1907 under treatment from a Jewish doctor.

A reaction to this pronounced Hitler-centrism gained ground in the 1970s. It formed a general alternative approach to interpreting the Third Reich—what came to be known as the ‘‘structuralist,’’ or sometimes ‘‘functionalist,’’ in distinction from the ‘‘intentionalist,’’ approach. Rather than looking to Hitler’s personal direction of policy, the fragmentation of policy-making in a ‘‘polycratic’’ system of government with confused and chaotic lines of administration, led by a ‘‘weak dictator’’ concerned primarily with propaganda and upholding his prestige, came to be emphasized. As regards anti-Jewish policy, too, ‘‘structuralist’’ approaches looked away from the role of the individual— not that Hitler’s paranoid antisemitism, indispensability to the barbaric persecution that led to genocide, or moral responsibility were doubted—to the ‘‘structures’’ of rule in the Third Reich, and the ‘‘functions’’ of competing agencies as they strived to implement hateful, but vaguely couched ‘‘guidelines’’ for action.

In a seminal article published in 1977, stirring a debate that has rumbled on ever since, Martin Broszat argued that Hitler had given no ‘‘comprehensive general extermination order’’ at all. Rather, problems in undertaking deportation plans, arising from the unexpected failure swiftly to defeat the Soviet Union during the summer and autumn of 1941, had prompted Nazi satraps in the occupied territories of the east to start taking the initiative in killing the Jews in their regions. The killing gained retrospective sanction from above, but only gradually, by 1942, turned into a comprehensive extermination program. There had been, therefore, no long-term design for the physical annihilation of Europe’s Jews. And there had been no specific Hitler order.

In an influential essay published in 1983, Hans Mommsen presented a forceful argument pushing in much the same direction. Mommsen accepted without question Hitler’s knowledge and approval of what was taking place. But he saw a direct Hitler order as incompatible with the dictator’s endeavors to distance himself from direct personal responsibility and reluctance to speak of the ‘‘Final Solution,’’ even among his close entourage, except in oblique terms or propaganda statements. For Mommsen, the key to the emergence of the ‘‘Final Solution’’ was not to be found in the implementation of Hitler’s will to exterminate the Jews but in improvised bureaucratic initiatives whose dynamic prompted a process of ‘‘cumulative radicalization’’ in the fragmented structures of decision-making in the Third Reich.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the time that these programmatic essays by Broszat and Mommsen appeared, detailed research into the decisions that launched the ‘‘Final Solution’’ was still little developed. Important works, beyond Hilberg, had in the meantime, of course, appeared, damaging beyond repair the notion of a ‘‘grand design’’ for extermination, a plan reaching back to 1918. Yehuda Bauer, one of the foremost Israeli experts on the Holocaust, summed up the general revision by pointing to a number of stages of development in anti-Jewish policy, all of them rooted in the unchanging notion of removing the Jews from Germany, though not following any long term extermination program. This verdict followed two penetrating analyses of anti-Jewish policy by Karl Schleunes and Uwe Dietrich Adam which pursued the vagaries and cul-de-sacs of Nazi persecution, ruling out the notion of a simple strategy of implementing a longstanding extermination plan determined by Hitler. Far from being a straight path, the road to Auschwitz, according to Schleunes, was a ‘‘twisted’’ one.

Directly prompted by Broszat’s hypotheses, one of the first researchers to explore the intractable and highly complex source material for the crucial months in 1941 which saw the emergence of the ‘‘Final Solution’’ (meaning not just the mass killing of Jews in the Soviet Union in the wake of ‘‘Operation Barbarossa,’’ but a program to exterminate all the Jews of Europe in Nazi occupied areas) was Christopher Browning—in the early stages of a career which saw him advance to become one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust.

Rejecting Broszat’s emphasis upon local initiatives only gradually congealing into a program, Browning insisted upon central direction and returned to an emphasis upon a decision by Hitler, which, like Hilberg and others, he placed in summer 1941. He saw this decision crucially reflected in the mandate given by Göring to Heydrich on July 31, 1941, ordering him to prepare a ‘‘total solution of the Jewish question.’’ The novelty of Browning’s interpretation, however, was that he envisaged Hitler commissioning Göring to work out a plan for the ‘‘Final Solution’’ to be confirmed at a later date—in effect the first part of a two-staged order. The next months witnessed radicalization at various levels, during which the killing of Jews escalated greatly. There was confusion, contradiction at times, and much improvisation. But none of this was incompatible, in Browning’s view, with a mandate to work for the extermination of the Jews dating back to the previous July. Browning concluded that in late October or November 1941, with the attack on the Soviet Union stalled, Hitler approved ‘‘the extermination plan he had solicited the previous summer.’’ In numerous impressive detailed studies that he has published on the topic since this early essay, Browning has never substantially revised this interpretation.

The timing, as well as the nature, of any Führer decision for the ‘‘Final Solution’’ had by now become a central issue of interpretation. It was extensively debated at an important conference in Stuttgart in 1984. Most — though not all — of the experts participating accepted that there must have been a Führer order. However, on the date of such an order (which all agreed was at some point in 1941) interpretation varied considerably. The dominant view was that the crucial decision — mainly seen as linked to the Göring mandate — for the extension to the whole of Europe of the physical annihilation of the Jews already raging in the Soviet Union took place in summer, while the end of the war seemed imminent. Some, however, placed a Hitler decision not in the ‘‘euphoric’’ phase of the summer, but in the autumn, when it was realized that the war in the Soviet Union would drag on, and when the possibility of deporting Jews into Soviet territory, as earlier envisaged, had evaporated. The question of the timing of any Hitler decision had acquired wider significance. The ‘‘euphoria’’ interpretation had him planning to destroy the Jews from a position of strength, when ultimate triumph seemed within his grasp. It pointed in the direction of a determining intention to kill the Jews when the opportunity arose. The alternative, a decision taken from effective weakness, when the prospect of victory had receded and the problems of a protracted and bitter war were mounting, was more suggestive of a reaction to circumstances that had spiraled out of control, a response to the inability to bring about the desired territorial solution of the ‘‘Jewish question’’ by deporting Jews to the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union, and a vengeful determination to succeed in the ‘‘war against the Jews’’ even should ultimate victory in the military war prove impossible to attain.

The case for placing a Hitler decision not in the euphoria of high summer expectations of imminent victory, but some two months later, when pessimism over a long war in the east was starting to grip the dictator, was most cogently advanced by Philippe Burrin, writing in the late 1980s. In contrast to Browning and others, Burrin argued—a point meanwhile more widely accepted— that it would be mistaken to see in the Göring mandate of 31 July 1941 a reflection of a fundamental order by Hitler for the ‘‘Final Solution’’, that is, to extend the genocide already taking place in the Soviet Union into a program for the physical extermination of the whole of European Jewry. Rather, according to Burrin, the Göring mandate still fell within the remit of attaining a territorial settlement in the east once the war was over. The mandate, which had been drafted in Heydrich’s own office for Göring’s signature, was aimed at establishing the authority—in an issue where there were many competing instances—of the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in all matters pertaining to the solution of the ‘‘Jewish Question’’. The lack of clarity that evidently still prevailed among Nazi authorities in the late summer and early autumn of 1941 meant, for Burrin, that no decision for the ‘‘Final Solution’’ had yet been made. He argued that such an order in September 1941 was synonymous with the decision to deport the Jews to the east—one unquestionably made by Hitler, and at a time when he was gloomy about the slowing advance in the Soviet Union and the growing prospect of a long conflict.

Soon after Burrin’s study appeared, the archives of the former eastern block started to divulge their secrets. Predictably, a written order by Hitler for the ‘‘Final Solution’’ was not found. The presumption that a single, explicit written order had ever been given had long been dismissed by most historians. Nothing now changed that supposition. In fact, little was discovered in Moscow or other east-European archives that cast new light directly on Hitler’s role in the ‘‘Final Solution.’’ Indirectly, nevertheless, new perspectives on the emergence of a genocidal program did provide fresh insights into Hitler’s own role.

One outstanding work which profited from the new research opportunities was Götz Aly’s study, published in 1995, of the interconnection of Nazi plans to resettle hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans in the occupied territories of Poland and the twists and turns of policy to deport the Jews. In his detailed reconstruction of racial policy-making in the eastern territories between 1939 and early 1942, Aly was able to show how increasingly radical anti-Jewish measures resulted from blockages produced by the brutally unrealistic resettlement plans of the Nazi authorities. Aly concluded that there was no single, specific decision to kill the Jews of Europe. Rather, analogous to Mommsen’s notion of a system of ‘‘cumulative radicalization,’’ he posited a ‘‘long and complex process of decision-making,’’ with notable spurts in March, July, and October 1941, but continuing still as a series of ‘‘experiments’’ down to May 1942. Hitler’s role, according to this interpretation, was confined to decisions as an arbiter between competing Nazi leaders whose own schemes to deal with the ‘‘Jewish question’’ had created insoluble problems.

Aly’s argument that there had been no precise point at which Hitler had given a single decision for the ‘‘Final Solution’’ has gained backing from a number of detailed regional studies into the emergence of genocide in the occupied territories. One outcome has been a clearer understanding of how, in the critical months of autumn 1941, regional Nazi authorities resorted to increasingly radical ‘‘self-help’’ and local initiatives to free their areas of Jews. While there were evidently signals from Berlin indicating an approaching comprehensive ‘‘solution’’ to the ‘‘Jewish problem’’ and prompting regional Nazi leaders to adopt drastic measures to resolve their own difficulties, the conflicting interpretations of the aims of anti-Jewish policy in this phase seem to imply that a fundamental decision had not yet been taken. Some local extermination programs, set in motion by local Nazi satraps in coordination with Berlin, did commence. In November 1941 construction began of a small extermination camp at Belzec, in the Lublin District of the Generalgouvernement, instigated by the SS Police Chief of the area, Odilo Globocnik, with the aim of liquidating Jews in that area incapable of working. In the ‘‘Warthegau’’, the annexed part of western Poland, the regional police chief, Wilhelm Koppe and the Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, liaised with Berlin about locating gas-vans at Chelmno. These began operations in early December to kill Jews from the overcrowded Lodz ghetto and elsewhere in the region as part of a deal to compensate for the influx of yet more Jews sent eastwards as part of the first wave of deportations from the Reich. But localized ‘‘solutions’’, including the shooting of Jews on arrival from Germany in the Baltic in autumn 1941, did not yet form part of a fully-devised, comprehensive program. A ‘‘Final Solution’’ was still evolving, still in an ‘‘experimental’’ phase.

Research had, in certain ways, then, moved away from the differing hypotheses about the date of Hitler’s decision for the ‘‘Final Solution’’ by implying — or explicitly stating — that no such decision had been made. By a different route, and on the basis of more profound research findings, this was returning to the broad thrust of the programmatic ‘‘structuralist’’ hypotheses of Broszat and Mommsen from the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the conclusions were far from universally accepted. The emphasis upon local initiatives, improvised measures, unsteered ‘‘processes’’ unfolding until they metamorphosed into an ‘‘unauthored’’’ program of extermination was not convincing to many historians.

Some experts—prominent among them Christopher Browning—felt that, for all the undoubted advances that detailed regional studies of emerging genocide had brought, the central direction of policy had been underplayed. The role of Hitler, too, seemed scarcely to figure in the new explanations. Was it likely, or plausible, that the most radical of radical antisemites had played no direct part in shaping the policies aimed at destroying his perceived archenemy?

As David Bankier then, in a magisterial survey, Saul Friedländer had demonstrated, even in the 1930s Hitler had been more active in anti-Jewish policy, down to points of detail, than the earlier work by Karl Schleunes, in particular, had implied. It was not easy, therefore, to accept that he had remained detached from decision-making at precisely the time when his long-professed aim of ‘‘removing’’ the Jews was turning into practical reality. Browning continued in an array of important publications also to maintain the importance of a Führer order, and to date this (as he always had done) to summer 1941– the time of ‘‘euphoria.’’ He remained unmoved by the objections raised to this dating, though he emphasized that he was not positing a single decision, but envisaging ‘‘the point at which Hitler inaugurated the decision-making process,’’ the first move in developments that would stretch over the subsequent months.

Other historians, equally anxious to emphasize Hitler’s direct role in steering policy towards an intended and planned ‘‘Final Solution,’’ reached different conclusions about the timing of a Führer order. Richard Breitman dated ‘‘a fundamental decision to exterminate the Jews’’ by the dictator to as early as January 1941, adding, however, that ‘‘if the goal and basic policies were now clear, the specific plans were not,’’ and followed only after some time, with the first operational decisions in July. In other words, Breitman was not positing an incisive policy-decision, rather a statement of intent. But Hitler had long held the view that another war would bring about the destruction of the Jews. And at this point, in early 1941, in the context of planning ‘‘Operation Barbarossa,’’ deportation of the Jews to the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union was opening up as a realistic prospect. There, over time, the presumption was that they would perish. It is difficult to see a Hitler decision in January 1941 stretching beyond that ultimate, though still vague, notion of a territorial solution. Though this was itself implicitly genocidal, the vagaries of policy over the following months speak against seeing January 1941 as the date when Hitler took the decision for the ‘‘Final Solution.’’

An entirely different suggestion for the date of a Hitler order came from Tobias Jersak. In Jersak’s view, the declaration of the Atlantic Charter by Roosevelt and Churchill on August 14, 1941 (meaning that Germany would soon be at war with the USA) was the trigger for Hitler, suffering at that point from a nervous collapse and reeling from the recognition of the failure of his strategy to defeat the Soviet Union, to take the fundamental decision that the Jews of Europe should be physically destroyed. However, Jersak probably exaggerates the impact of the Atlantic Charter on Hitler. It is doubtful that this in itself was sufficient to provide the vital spur for such a momentous decision— one in Jersak’s interpretation, taken swiftly and without any consultation. Jersak is left, in fact, with little but speculation to support his claim that Hitler had already taken the decision when he met Goebbels on August 19, to agree to proposals put to him by the Propaganda Minister to force Jews in Germany to wear the Star of David.

Another interpretation of a fundamental decision by Hitler to launch the ‘‘Final Solution’’ was proposed by Christian Gerlach. For him, the disparities in implementing anti-Jewish measures ruled out a specific central order by Hitler in summer or early autumn. Despite the evident escalation of genocidal actions, there was still a lack of clarity about the treatment of the deported Reich Jews, and the various regional liquidation measures were not yet coordinated. The need to provide precisely this clarification and coordination lay, he claimed, behind Heydrich’s invitation to significant figures in those agencies concerned to a meeting at the Wannsee on December 9, 1941. Pearl Harbor then intervened and the meeting was postponed. According to Gerlach’s interpretation, by the time the meeting eventually took place, on January 20, 1942, Hitler’s ‘‘basic decision’’ to kill all the Jews of Europe had taken place. In the context of a war that had now become global, Gerlach sees a speech made by Hitler to Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on December 12, and an accompanying series of private meetings with Nazi leaders during the following days, as tantamount to Hitler’s ‘‘basic decision’’ for the ‘‘Final Solution.’’ Gerlach certainly makes a good case for a further radicalization of extermination policy in December 1941. But it is difficult to imagine Hitler, who refrained from speaking on the extermination of the Jews in other than vague generalizations even to his intimate entourage, choosing to announce a ‘‘basic decision’’ to instigate the ‘‘Final Solution’’ to a meeting of around fifty Nazi leaders. None of those present later referred to this meeting as of any particular significance with regard to the ‘‘Final Solution.’’ And Goebbels, whose diary notes form the source for Hitler’s reported comments, summarized the remarks on the Jews in a few lines of an otherwise extensive diary entry without highlighting them as of special importance.

A recent, meticulous examination of the complex evidence of decision making on anti-Jewish policy between 1939 and 1942 offers yet another variant. Florent Brayard places the date of Hitler’s order to commence the ‘‘Final Solution’’ as a comprehensive program later than any other historian had done, to June 1942, immediately following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. At Heydrich’s funeral, June 9, Himmler told SS leaders that they would have completed the ‘‘migration’’ (Völkerwanderung) of the Jews within a year. This is the point, infers Brayard, linking Himmler’s comments to reported draconian remarks about the Jews by Hitler around that time, that the ‘‘Final Solution’’—meaning the program for the complete and rapid eradication of all Europe’s Jews—was initiated. It perhaps seems more plausible, however, to see it as the last major escalatory push in establishing a Europewide killing program. Peter Longerich’s magisterial study of the ‘‘politics of annihilation’’ had, in fact, already established—something by now widely accepted, also by Brayard—that a comprehensive program of extermination of European Jewry developed as an incremental process, with a number of acceleratory spurts, between summer 1941 and summer 1942. Already by March and April 1942, as Longerich shows, plans were being elaborated to deport the Jews from western Europe to the east, and to extend the killing in Poland and central Europe. Probably Heydrich’s assassination provided the impetus to draw the threads together. It seems certain, given the fragmentary and unsatisfactory evidence, that all attempts to establish a precise moment when Hitler decided to launch the ‘‘Final Solution’’ will meet with objections. And, of course, much depends upon what is envisaged as a Führer order. Was it a precise and clear directive, or merely a ‘‘green light’’ or ‘‘nod of the head?’’ Interpretation rests additionally upon whether decision-making on the ‘‘Final Solution’’ is regarded as a continuum, with adjustments and acceleratory phases over the period of a year or so, or whether a point is sought where one precise quantum leap can be distinguished as forming the decision.

And yet, structuralist or functionalist accounts in which Hitler’s role is minimized or marginalized also seem unsatisfactory. Aly’s emphasis, for instance, on the link between blockages in the Nazi plans for population transfer and resettlement of ethnic Germans and the radicalization of anti-Jewish policy, though valid, do not explain why the failure of deportation plans led to genocide solely in the case of the Jews. This leads directly back to the role of ideology, often underplayed in structuralist accounts. Building on long antisemitic tradition, the Jews occupied a quite singular place in Nazi demonology, and in plans for racial ‘‘cleansing.’’ The Jews had been the number one ideological enemy of the Nazis from the beginning, and their murderous treatment in 1941 followed not only years of spiraling persecution but also repeated statements by Nazi leaders, most prominently Hitler himself, advocating their ‘‘removal.’’ So we are back to Hitler, and to his role in the way the Nazi system of rule operated.

It seems impossible to isolate a single, specific Führer order for the ‘‘Final Solution’’ in an extermination policy that took full shape in a process of radicalization lasting over a period of about a year. At the same time, much indicates that the extermination program did not develop without a decisive role being played by Hitler himself. To reconcile these two statements, we should look both for a series of secret authorizations for particular radicalizing steps, which can only be deduced from indirect or secondary evidence, and for a number of public signals or ‘‘green lights’’ for action. We should also recognize that Hitler was the supreme and radical spokesman of an ideological imperative that, by 1941, had become a priority for the entire regime leadership. Within that framework, we now need to consider how Hitler shaped the path to genocide.