I think a few here is fond of the old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but looking into the actions that he did during the years into the prelude of World War 2 was really interesting. At his behest, he supplied Joseph Stalin and the whole Soviet Union of military equipment and intelligence to prepare for the Nazis. I really don't think that Americans during at the time was on board with supplying another enemy, the communists, with their own handmade products just to hold off the Reich.
Let's not get started with the internment camps he did against Americans of Japanese lineage after the Pearl Harbor attacks, how the Democrats were tight-lipped about it to this day, and the communist project that the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt did in Arthurdale, Virginia, that was still left untold on how many people died due to starvation on that god forsaken experiment of hers.
'Influence' is not the same as determine. One can be influenced by Black Reconstruction without accepting everything in the book, and I don't think even neo-abolitionists accept everything in it.
Absolutely true. This is a major problem with how institutions have been so thoroughly corrupted that nothing that comes out of them can be relied on at all. But that is also no justification for espousing just about anything, as long as it is not coming from these institutions. Sometimes, quite by accident, they speak the truth.
In the same sense that "we don't know if we are brains boiling in a vat created by a mad scientist", yes. But of course, while Hitler often made sure to not have any written orders for undertakings that may turn out to be failures, the likelihood that what happened occurred without his command, approval and knowledge range from infinitesimal to impossible.
Who are those 'some people', other than such notorious frauds as David Irving? Because I don't know any serious historian who would say anything like that. Particularly because it's not as if there was a void between Mein Kampf and 1942. Even in January 1939, Hitler said that a world war would result in "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe". This was then later cited by Goering that "the war has come, the annihilation of the Jewish race must be the logical consequence".
Yet even after Mein Kampf, and after January 1939, the Nazis - Hitler - did not have an ideological commitment to killing Jews. They just wanted them out of Europe, to languish and die either in a place like Madagascar or a reservation in the USSR. Mass killing was a result of radicalization spurred by the war and by an overpopulation problem, where local Nazis who had Jews dumped on them resorted to the expedient of murdering them to avoid feeding them and outbreak of disease among the tightly cramped ghettos, a practice which then spread with the objective of making Europe free of Jews rather than solving local problems (this is the structuralist explanation for the Holocaust, which I do find more persuasive).
That it came from the top is most certainly a fact. There is an audio recording of Himmler, who was definitely at the top, affirming as much. That is as close to a fact as you can get.
The only speck of a doubt that you may say there is, is whether Hitler gave the order, or whether he went along with initiatives that came from below, or whether he saw initiatives from below and decided to extend them.
What you're saying is pretty tame. I think you know how to present stuff diplomatically.
Disagree. My understanding is that Hitler was cautious of written orders after Catholics complained about the euthanasia orders, but I could be wrong. However, it's still speculation. That's the point. I think it's highly unlikely that he had no knowledge of what was occurring, but there's no proof of any orders, which is what my statement of fact concerned. As I said before, history is a process of revision. It was unchallenged "fact" that the road to Auschwitz was straight, until the 70s.
Okay, admittedly, I did a horrible job of summarizing the functionalist vs intentionalist debate, but you got there anyway. It really seems likely to me that the Nazis stumbled and blundered their way into the holocaust. Hitler may have approved (and based on surrounding context, almost positively did), but that's just conjecture.