Torben Jørgensen :
'Holocaust research'

After years of consensus on Hitler´s role and the genesis of the genocide on the Jews, many historians in the sixties and seventies began to interpret the Third Reich as a polycratic structure, dominated by overlapping competences and internal rivalry. This approach to the study of the Final Solution (Endlösung) is known as the "functionalist" school. Having had a great impact on holocaust scholars for a long time this position today has largely lost out to a so called "synthetic" view, which leaves room for structural factors as well as ideology. In particular the study of the lower echelons of the perpetrators, the "foot soldiers" of genocide, has gained further impetus by, among others, the important studies by Christopher Browning and D.J. Goldhagen. This line of studies has lately come very much in focus of the holocaust studies, as have studies of the impact of local decision makers on the overall Jewish policies in the Third Reich.