For example, Browning offers a view contrary to Goldhagen, but even he discusses how Hitler's decisionmaking evolved toward the holocaust, rather than being the end goal from the beginning.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/23/historybooks.features1
At least Browning went some way to open up one of the two great questions left by the Holocaust: 'How could they have?' The other question is whether the Nazis always meant to kill the Jews, or whether they drifted into murder when other 'final solutions' became impossible. Now Browning has tried to answer that puzzle too.
The main argument between 'intentionalists' and 'structuralists' is pretty much over. Few historians now think Hitler, insane Jew-hater as he was, planned the gas chambers before he even came to power. But neither do they think that struggles inside the Nazi structure led to Auschwitz almost without conscious human agency. Browning shows how the decision for total extermination was crystallised by changing circumstances, but against the background of a driving impetus to radicalise racial policy which derived ultimately from Hitler. The centre almost never issued direct orders. But local commanders, whether SS officers or administrators in occupied territory, always sensed that more extreme action on the ground would find approval above them.
* * *
Up to 1939, Hitler's 'destruction of Jewry' meant driving the Reich's Jews into emigration. The conquest of Poland that September changed the picture. The atrocities there were aimed at Poles as much as at Jews, and the scene was soon dominated by Himmler's gigantic ethnic cleansings as he sought to empty western Poland and replace Poles by Germans from the Baltic and Ukraine. The Jews were simply to 'disappear', by emigration to Madagascar or by being shoved into Soviet-held territory. Himmler observed, no doubt sincerely in 1940, that 'the Bolshevik method of physical extermination... is un-German'.
Slowly a Final Solution by emigration shifted towards solutions by expulsion. By early 1941, with war against Russia being prepared, some Nazis were playing with ideas of deporting Polish and perhaps German/Austrian Jews into the Ural steppes where they would be worked and starved to extinction (the concept of 'expulsion' was always linked with 'decimation'). But the brutality of the 'Barbarossa' plan made this irrelevant. Behind the Wehrmacht, the Nazi slaughter-squads were assembled for a 'total war of destruction' against Soviet society. Millions had to die and in this programme the Jews - who in Poland had been perceived as 'vermin' - now became Satanic, central to the 'Judaeo-Bolshevik' hate image.
= new reply since forum marked as read