Hi everyone and thank you for listening and thank you, /u/400-Rabbits for having me. It was very interesting and I enjoyed it a lot.

As previously mentioned, I am in a different time zone and also at work right now, so my answers to any questions might take a couple of hours. Please ask all the questions you have though. I very much look forward to them.

I was trying to come up with some more additional content/information to put here but what I came up with either doubles what I already said in the podcast or would lead away from the topic, so I'll just wait for questions to come in.

As my sources, further reading on the debate as well as some general introductory sources on the Holocaust (all in English), please see:

• Richard Bessel, "Functionalists vs. Intentionalists: The Debate Twenty Years on or Whatever Happened to Functionalism and Intentionalism?" German Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2003).

• Christopher Browning: Fateful Months : Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution, New York : Holmes & Meier, 1985.

• Christopher Browning: The Path to Genocide : Essays on launching the Final Solution, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998.

• Christopher Browning: The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus), Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

• Richard Evans: The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster , London: Allen Lane, 2008.

• Ian Kershaw: The 'Hitler Myth'. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987, rev. 2001).

• Ian Kershaw: "Working Towards the Führer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship" pages 103–118 from Contemporary European History, Volume 2, Issue #2, 1993; reprinted on pages 231–252 from The Third Reich edited by Christian Leitz, London: Blackwell, 1999.

• Ian Kershaw: The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, (London, 1985, 4th ed., 2000)

• Ian Kershaw: Hitler, Vol. 1 and 2 (rev. London 2008).

For now, I have only posted the ones in English because these are easily accessible and I assume everyone visiting and listening speaks English. If anyone wants more information on my German sources resp. on the actual German contributions to the debate, please ask and I'll be happy to provide. :)

Congrats on the excellent podcast and interview. My follow-up question has more to do with being a historian of the Third Reich studying in Central Europe. In the contemporary US academy, while historians do acknowledge the Functionalists vs. Intentionalist debate, it does not really animate discussions about German history. It has become something of a cliche in English-language German historiography to note that the debates of the 1980s devolved into intellectual tail-chasing and graduate students in European history are aware of the debate, but are not particularly invested in it. My question is, how do historians in Central European academy deal with the whole Functionalism vs. Intentionalism debate? Does Central European academic culture require a direct engagement with this I vs. F scholarship?

I ask because I rather recently listened to a DHI London podcast by Christoph Cornelißen about the generational cleavages in the German academy and how a specific German academic culture shaped the contours of historical debates and research.

Special thanks to Elm, Mark K., Vlad, Max M., Will R., Sarah G., and Bill R., for their generous support of the podcast through the AskHistorians Patreon.

Special mention to Matt F., for boldly being our first supporter, Andy B. for putting us over the top in meeting our first funding goal, and Bill R. for getting us to our second funding goal.

Just a quick note, but the vagaries of scheduling and time zones means /u/commiespaceinvader may not be able to quickly respond to follow-up questions today. Please do go ahead and post any comments and questions you might have though, and he will get to them when he can.

For my own follow-up question, I was wondering if you could expand a bit more on one of the numerous side topics we barely touched on: the experience of German occupation and the Holocaust in the Balkans. You cited it as the region where Jews were killed specifically just for being Jews (as opposed to be "Judeo-Bolsheviks" or for other political fig leaves). Was there something particular about the region that made it the first place this was done? Thinking on it, I realize I don't actually know much about the Balkan experience of WW2, but I imagine the mix of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, along with Jewish and Roma people could lead to pre-existing fraught tensions in the region, particularly once you factor in Orthodox Christianity and Islam.

It took me several days to listen to this. I have no questions, but just wanted to say thank you for the podcast, and that yet again, it was excellent.

Sorry, I'm a bit late to the party, but I'm interested in hearing /u/commiespaceinvader's views on how the racialist thinkers of the ;late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g. de Gobineau, Chamberlain, Rosenberg, etc.) informed the thinking around the holocaust, and how the fit into the intentionalism and functionalism debate.