SOURCE: "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses," in Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. XIII, 1979, pp. 73-125.

Broszat was a German historian and a respected authority on the Holocaust. Director of the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History for seventeen years, he argued that the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews was not fully formed before World War IL Rather, he believed the strategy of extermination evolved during the war years in response to the pressures of the conflict. In the following essay, Broszat offers an assessment of David Irving's book Hitler's War.

The English Edition of David Irving's Hitler book [Hitler's War], published in the spring of 1977, two years after the expurgated German edition, has created a furore both in England and elsewhere. The British author, who gained a reputation as an enfant terrible with earlier publications on contemporary history, has propounded...