was to analyse the way the overall policies of genocide were engineered within the otherwise conflicting politics of Nazi factions. It helped that the Americans classifying the huge amount of Nazi documents used, precisely, the categories his future mentor Neumann had employed in his Behemoth study. Hilberg came to be considered as the foremost representative of what a later generation has called the functionalist school of Holocaust historiography, of which Christopher Browning, whose own life was changed by reading Hilberg's book, is a prominent member. The debate is that Intentionalists see "the Holocaust as Hitler's determined and premeditated plan, which he implemented as the opportunity arose", while functionalists see "the Final Solution as an evolution that occurred when other plans proved untenable". Intentionalists argue that the initiative for the Holocaust came from above, while functionalists contend it came from lower ranks within the bureaucracy. It has often been observed that Hilberg's magnum opus begins with an intentionalist thesis but gradually shifts towards a functionalist position. At the time, this approach raised a few eyebrows but only later did it actually attract pointed academic discussion. A further move towards a functionalist interpretation occurred in the revised 1985 edition, in which Hitler is portrayed as a remote figure hardly involved in the machinery of destruction. The terms functionalist and intentionalist were coined in 1981 by Timothy Mason but the debate goes back to 1969 with the publication of Martin Broszat's The Hitler State in 1969 and Karl Schleunes's The Twisted Road to Auschwitz in 1970. Since most of the early functionalist historians were West German, it was often enough for intentionalist historians, especially for those outside Germany, to note that men such as Broszat and Hans Mommsen had spent their adolescence in the Hitler Youth and then to say that their work was an apologia for National Socialism. Hilberg was Jewish and an Austrian who had fled to the United States to escape the Nazis and had no Nazi sympathies, which helps to explain the vehemence of the attacks by intentionalist historians that greeted the revised edition of The Destruction of the European Jews in 1985. Hilberg's understanding of the relationship between the leadership of Nazi Germany and the implementers of the genocide evolved from an interpretation based on orders to the RSHA originating with Adolf Hitler and proclaimed by Hermann Göring, to a thesis consistent with Christopher Browning's The Origins of