On January 27, 1945, the Red Army took control of Auschwitz away from the Nazis, where more than one million Jewish victims were liquidated that comprised roughly 1/6 of all the murders committed during the Holocaust. Unlike the Operation Reinhard death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdankek, and Chelmo, which saw almost two million murders combined, Auschwitz functioned as both a concentration and a death camp. After the Operation Reinhard death camps had largely exterminated Polish Jewry by 1943, and since they had started to become a liability with the war effort swinging in favor of the Red Army, Auschwitz, located farther to the west, began killing more and more Jews as the war came to its final climax.

Auschwitz entrance Photo credit: xiquinhosilva

Less well known, most of the remaining prisoners at Auschwitz, together with many other concentration camp prisoners located throughout German occupied territories, were removed before the Soviets took control of the area. They were then forced to go on a brutal, winter death march to any number of other concentration camps located within Germany proper. The madness of this final march certainly contributed to the appalling conditions of the Nazi concentration camps witnessed by the Allies when they finally liberated them from German control in the early spring of 1945. Such unbridled Nazi fervor to mete out destruction to the Jews even in the face of utter defeat at the end of the war perhaps may help resolve a long-standing dispute between historians of various persuasions who debate over how intentional the Holocaust was.

While this may surprise many, there is actually an old dispute between historians over the intentionality of the Holocaust. In academic circles, it is called the Intentionalism vs. Functionalism debate. Intentionalists simply argue the Nazis intended to annihilate the Jews all along consistent with their oft-repeated statements, and finally took seriously their plans to do so from 1938 onwards. Functionalists, on the other hand, strongly argue that in spite of the earlier violent shrills of Nazis rhetoric against the Jews, the Holocaust itself occurred in a rather ad hoc manner based largely on differing and evolving circumstances that became increasingly radicalized into a gigantic snowball of sorts that could not be stopped once it started rolling down the mountainside, creating wider and wider swaths of destruction the farther it went downslope.

For example, the historical records show that in the early years of the war, the Nazis simply wanted to expel the Jews. Later, as the war effort took center stage, the Nazis gradually became more bent on annihilation, but even then, only on a situational basis beset by competing concerns in the midst of a wartime atmosphere. Furthermore, no order from the Fuhrer has ever been found to demonstrate when the Nazi leadership intentionally decided to destroy European Jewry. While there are, of course, plenty of murderous statements made by any number of leading Nazis against the Jews before and during the war, their destruction was not accomplished in a  simple straight line from political vitriol to the Holocaust itself – but was carried out in fits and starts, if not even haphazardly – which finally precipitated what is otherwise known today as “The Final Solution.”

In particular, in the early years of the war, ghettoization, which hastened one million Jewish deaths alone, proved to be an economic, logistical, and medical nightmare for all involved. The shooting sprees of the Einsatzgruppen behind the Russian Front in the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine after Operation Barbarossa was unleashed claimed almost two million Jewish lives. However, it was an incredibly messy operation that required massive amounts of ammunition, not to mention manpower that could have been much better used on the front together with an untold number of deep grave pits that were dug out and then filled to the brim with dead bodies stacked like German cord wood. 

Even throughout the rest of the war, the Holocaust was unevenly carried out – in spite of the infamous Wannsee Conference held in 1942 that administratively formalized and prioritized the planned destruction of European Jewry, which seemed to have authorized cleaner, more “humane” methods of liquidation using carbon monoxide and poisonous gas. Yet, even as early as the summer of 1941, SS Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler informed camp commandant Rudolf Hoess that Auschwitz needed to start making plans to handle the imminent destruction of the Jews. Himmler strongly told Hoess, “Every Jew that we can lay our hands on is to be destroyed now during the war, without exception. If we cannot now obliterate the biological basis of Jewry, the Jews will one day destroy the German people.” In November 1941, Himmler was also in Mogilev, Byelorussia making very similar plans before the Battle of Moscow turned the tide in the East so that such plans had to be abandoned, which invariably meant Auschwitz would become more strategic as the war continued.

While the gassing methods became more widespread, its concentrated industrialization created a gigantic problem with corpses – something which Hoess even anticipated early on, “As a camp commandant I saw all my plans for making Auschwitz a clean and healthy place begin to dwindle.” There are also records that show the SS was very concerned about how all of the dead bodies in various graves in the Auschwitz environs were poisoning local rivers and waterways. After they started to set fire to all the bodies in order to burn up the evidence of their great crimes, letters were written to air pollution administrators in Prussia asking how to handle smoke related to what they deemed to be the construction of heating plants.

In other words, in spite of all of the functional barriers, chaotic wartime exigencies, economic difficulties, massive population transfer and containment obstacles, devastating defeats on the great battlefields of World War II, among many other incredible snags and complications including environmental pollution, the Nazis still managed to murder six million Jews. All of this clearly demonstrates that the Nazi intention to kill the Jews was deep-seated and serious in spite of all of the unfavorable circumstances that stood in their way to implement the “Final Solution.”

While some scholars combine the Intentionalist and Functionalist theories of the Holocaust, Ockham’s razor teaches the simplest answers are usually the best answers. The more complicated the supposition, the less likely the theory is true. The simplest answer is that the Nazi leadership desired to eliminate the Jews all along, and did their best to accomplish that goal in spite of the gargantuan task that such an endeavor would turn out to be, all the while trying to fight the biggest war ever seen in the history of the world. Worse, the great problem with the Functionalist theory of the Holocaust is that we are left with an enormous murder case without a strong motive. Yet, this is precisely what is desired as very few have been or are even now interested in plumbing the ideological depths of National Socialism which was deeply rooted in the German Academy of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries - the lion’s share of which is still very popular and dominating many western educational institutions today.

Mark Musser is a part-time missionary, author, and a farmer, depending on what time of day and year it is. His home is in Olympia, Washington, but he spends most of his time on the mission field in the former Soviet Union. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Corban University in Salem, Oregon, and is a contributing Writer for the Cornwall Alliance.  His book Nazi Ecology provides a sobering history lesson on the philosophical foundations of the early German green movement, which was absorbed by National Socialism in the 1930s and proved to be a powerful undercurrent during the Holocaust.