genocide of the European Jews constituted evidence against the standard Holocaust history. Browning maintained that such an order need never have been written since Hitler had almost certainly made statements to his leading subordinates indicating his wishes regarding the Jews, which rendered irrelevant the question of an extant written order. Browning testified that several experts on Nazi Germany believe there was no written Führer order for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" but that no historian doubts the reality of the Nazi genocide. Browning noted that Hitler's secret speech to his Gauleiters on December 12, 1941 alluded to genocide as the "Final Solution." Browning rejected Irving's claim that there was no reliable statistical information on the size of the prewar Jewish population in Europe or on the killing processes. Browning asserted that the only reason that historians debate whether five or six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust was a lack of access to archives in the former Soviet Union. Browning's interpretation of the Holocaust Browning is a "moderate functionalist" in the debate about the origins of the Holocaust and focuses on the structure and institution of the Third Reich, rather than Hitler's intentions and orders. Functionalism sees the extermination of Jews as the improvisation and radicalization of a polycratic regime. Browning has argued that the Final Solution was the result of the "cumulative radicalization" (to use Hans Mommsen's phrase) of the German state, especially when it was faced with the self-imposed "problem" of three million (mostly Polish) Jews, whom the Nazis had imprisoned in ghettos between 1939 and 1941. The intention was to have those and other Jews resident in the Third Reich expelled eastward once a destination was selected. Browning argued that the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," which was first used in 1939, meant until 1941 a "territorial solution." The military developments of the Second World War and to turf wars within the German bureaucracy made expulsion lose its viability such that by 1941, members of the bureaucracy were willing to countenance the mass murder of Jews. Browning divides the officials of the General Government of occupied Poland into two factions. The "productionists" favored using Jews of the ghettos as a source of slave labor to help with the war effort. The "attritionists" favored letting them starve and die of disease. At the same time, there were struggles between the Schutzstaffel (SS) and