Historiography of the Holocaust Historiography essentially is “the history of history”. It looks into what historians have said about a given historically relevant event or topic, how their interpretations have changed over time and where, what and why are the disagreements between the historians. This paper tries to look into these aspects for the topic the Holocaust and explain how knowledge of the historiography of any given event is important in understanding the event itself. The Intentionalist historians like Lucy Dawidowicz see Hitler as a strong leader believe that the Holocaust was something that Hitler had planned for years Structuralist perspective Keywords Holocaust; Hitler; Jews; Intentionalism; Structuralism; Revisionism; Holocaust Denial THE HOLOCAUST …show more content…
Also, known as Shoah, it witnessed the setting up of concentration camps and extermination camps in today’s Germany, Poland, Austria and Yugoslavia, where around 11 million people were killed based on their racial inferiority and many more enslaved and tortured. It was the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’( which was a well discussed topic for many years in Europe). Only 10 percent of Polish Jewry and one-third of all European Jews remained by the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. To today’s history students it would be surprising to know that an event as popular as the Holocaust was ignored by historians until the 1960s when the trial of notorious SS killer Eichmann and the publishing of Gerald Reitlinger’s important book The Final Solution’: the attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-45 created a lot of interest among the Western