1998, Jäckel argued that Hitler began the Holocaust in mid-1941 by playing Himmler against Heydrich. Jäckel argued that Himmler was antisemitic but was less enthusiastic about genocide than Heydrich, who saw genocide as a way of obtaining Hitler's support for building a power base outside Himmler's control. In Jäckel's view, antisemitism was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Holocaust under the grounds that people had been intensely antisemitic in Europe for centuries without genocide occurring. In contrast to the functionalists, who have argued for the "weak dictator" thesis about Hitler's power, Jäckel has supported the "master of the Third Reich" thesis and has described Hitler's power as Alleinherrschaft (sole rule). Uniqueness of the Holocaust Against Nolte's claim that the Holocaust was not unique but rather one of out many genocides, Jäckel rejected Nolte's view and those of his supporters like Joachim Fest by writing: I, however claim (and not for the first time) that the National Socialist murder of the Jews was unique because never before had a nation with the authority of its leader decided and announced that it would kill off as completely as possible a particular group of humans, including old people, women, children and infants, and actually put this decision into practice, using all the means of governmental power at its disposal. This idea is so apparent and so well known that it is quite astonishing that it could have escaped Fest's attention (the massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War were, according to all we know, more like murderous deportations than planned genocide). Jäckel accused Nolte, Fest and Klaus Hildebrand of engaging in a "game of confusion". Jäckel wrote that the "game of confusion" comprised posing hypotheses disguised as questions without proof, and when one demands proof, there is an angry response: "One is after all still allowed to ask!". In response to Jäckel's attack, Nolte in an essay that was published in the Die Zeit newspaper on 31 October 1986 wrote that Jäckel's attack was something that one might expect in an East German newspaper: "I am amazed at the coldheartedness with which Eberhard Jäckel says that not every single bourgeois was killed." During a debate in London in 1987 to consider the Historikerstreit, Fest and Jäckel again clashed over the question of the "singularity" of the Holocaust, with Fest accusing Jäckel of presenting a "caricature"