Abstract
Countless studies on National Socialism, notwithstanding debates on the Holocaust will not end. Although the development that led to the ›final solution‹ has been thoroughly investigated, the question will be asked again and again how the genocide of the Jews could happen and why it happened in Germany. The article presents the most important debates on the Holocaust of the past decades: the dispute among German historians (›Historikerstreit‹) of 1986/87, the debate on Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust of 1996, and the discussion between ›intentionalists‹ and ›functionalists‹ among the historians who have dealt with the Holocaust. The article then presents the history and meaning of the concept of ›political religion‹, it shows that Hitler and other leading Nazis cherished an apocalyptic worldview, and it argues that the apocalyptic worldview must be seen as the most poignant manifestation of the National Socialist political religion and as the only plausible explanation of the Holocaust.
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