foreign policy as driven by an opportunistic "next victim" syndrome after the Anschluss in which the "promiscuity of aggressive intentions" was nurtured by every successful foreign policy move. In Mason's opinion, the decision to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union and to attack Poland and to run of the risk of a war with the United Kingdom and France were the abandonment by Hitler of his foreign policy programme, which had been outlined in Mein Kampf, and was forced on him by his need to stop a collapsing German economy by seizing territory abroad to be plundered. Mason's theory of a "flight into war" being imposed on Hitler generated much controversy, and in the 1980s, he conducted a series of debates with economic historian Richard Overy on the matter. Overy maintained the decision to attack Poland was not caused by structural economic problems but was the result of Hitler wanting a localised war at that particular moment. For Overy, a major problem with the Mason thesis was that it rested on the assumption that although unrecorded by the records, that information had been passed on to Hitler about Germany's economic problems. Overy argued that there was a major difference between economic pressures that were inducted by the problems of the Four Year Plan and economic motives to seize raw materials, industry and foreign reserve of neighbouring states as a way of accelerating the Four Year Plan. Overy asserted that the repressive capacity of the German state as a way of dealing with domestic unhappiness was also somewhat downplayed by Mason. Finally, Overy argued that there is considerable evidence that the state felt that it could master the economic problems of rearmament. As one civil servant put it in January 1940, "we have already mastered so many difficulties in the past, that here too, if one or other raw material became extremely scarce, ways and means will always yet be found to get out of a fix". Intentionist vs. functionalist historical schools In a 1981 essay "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy About the Interpretation of National Socialism" from the book The "Fuehrer State": Myth and Reality, Mason coined the terms intentionist and functionalist as terms for historical schools regarding Nazi Germany. Mason criticised Klaus Hildebrand and Karl Dietrich Bracher for focusing too much on Hitler as an explanation for the Holocaust. Mason wrote: In their recent essays Karl