Jäckel wrote that since Hitler regarded the conquest of Lebensraum as his most important project, and since that could only be accomplished through war, domestic policy comprised simply preparing the nation for the inevitable struggle for Lebensraum.

Jäckel takes the view that Hitler's ideology developed in stages in the 1920s, and wrote " It is an important fact that the final completion Hitler's ideology, contrary to Hitler's own statements, in 1919 had only begun ".

Jäckel wrote that he had " easily " discovered the " lost " document, which the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers wrote to the Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger that Hitler ordered him to put the " Jewish Question " on the " back-burner " until after the war.

Jäckel wrote in a 1986 essay entitled " The Impoverished Practice of Insinuation: The Singular Aspect of National-Socialist Crimes Cannot Be Denied " first published in the Die Zeit newspaper on September 12, 1986 that " Hitler often said why he wished to remove and kill the Jews.

Jäckel wrote that the " game of confusion " comprised posing hypotheses disgused as questions without proof, and when one demands proof, there is an angry response that " one is after all still allowed to ask !".

In response to Jäckel's attack, Nolte in an essay published in the Die Zeit newspaper on 31 October 1986 wrote that Jäckel's attack was something that one might expect in a East German newspaper and that :" And I am amazed at the coldheartedness with which Eberhard Jäckel says that not every single bourgeois was killed .".

During the " Goldhagen Controversy " of 1996, Jäckel was a leading critic of Daniel Goldhagen, and wrote a very hostile book review in the Die Zeit newspaper in May 1996 that called Hitler's Willing Executioners " simply a bad book ".

On March 23, 2006 in a feuilleton ( opinion ) piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jäckel wrote a book review that approved of Guenter Lewy's thesis in his book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey about the 1915 Armenian Massacres, that there were massacres, but no genocide of the Armenians.

In a 1979 article, Jäckel considered the possibility that the order for the Holocaust may have been sent out as early as the summer of 1940, but feels it was more likely that a series of orders was given by Hitler starting in the spring of 1941 for Soviet Jews, followed by another order for Polish Jews in September 1941 and a final order for all European Jews in November 1941.

Jäckel went to argue that because the " Final Solution " was secret, it is not surprising that Hitler's servants were ignorant of the Holocaust, and that anyhow, five of Hitler's servants interviewed by Irving later claimed that they believed that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust.

Jäckel argued that on the basis of Hitler's statements in Mein Kampf the Führer was always committed to genocide of the Jews, and that because Hitler later attempted to execute the foreign policy he outlined in Mein Kampf, it is a reasonable assumption that Hitler was always committed to genocide.

Jäckel has argued during 1941-42, " the extermination of the Jews became increasingly the most important aim of the war as such ; as the fortunes of war turned against Germany, the destruction of the Jews became National Socialism's gift to the world.

Jäckel dismissed the argument made by Broszat in his 1977 essay " Hitler and the Genesis of the Final Solution " that local officials began the Holocaust on their own initiative under the grounds that a: " great deal of evidence that some officials were shocked or even appalled when the Final Solution came into effect.

Jäckel used Hitler's " Prophecy Speech " of January 30, 1939, where Hitler declared :" I shall once again be your prophet: if international Jewry with its financial power in and outside of Europe should manage once more to draw the peoples of the world into world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world, and thus the victory of Jewry, but rather the total destruction of the Jewish race in Europe " as a sign of Hitler's intentions.

" 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.

Jäckel first rose to fame through his 1969 book Hitlers Weltanschauung ( Hitler's Worldview ), which was an examination of Hitler's worldview and beliefs.

In addition, Jäckel's book was noteworthy as the first account of Hitler's beliefs written in Germany by someone from the left ( Jäckel joined the SPD in 1967 ).

In the late 1970s, Jäckel was a leading critic of the British author David Irving and his book Hitler ’ s War, which argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.

Despite his background in the functionalist historiography, Kershaw admits that his account of Hitler in World War II owes much to intentionalist historians like Gerhard Weinberg, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lucy Dawidowicz and Eberhard Jäckel.

* Intentionalist historians such as Andreas Hillgruber, Eberhard Jäckel, Klaus Hildebrand and Karl Dietrich Bracher have criticized Mommsen for underestimating the importance of Hitler and Nazi ideology.

* Jäckel, Eberhard Hitler in history Hanover, NH: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1984.

Broszat often attacked historians such as Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber and Eberhard Jäckel for concentrating upon Hitler and his beliefs as explanations for Nazi actions.

Jäckel sees Hitler as being the historical equivalent to the Chernobyl disaster.

Jäckel argued that far from being an opportunist with no beliefs as had been argued by Alan Bullock, Hitler held to a rigid set of fixed beliefs and he had consistently acted from his " race and space " philosophy throughout his career.

Jäckel has argued that Hitler felt there were three factors that determined a people's " racial value ", namely its awareness of itself, the type of leadership it had, and its ability to make war.

Jäckel asserts that for Hitler " the originators and bearers of all three counterpositions are the Jews ".

In regards to the foreign policy debates, Jäckel is a leading " continentalist ", arguing that Nazi foreign policy aimed only at the conquest of Eastern Europe against the " globalists " who argue that Hitler wanted world conquest

Jäckel is one of the leading intentionalists in regard to the functionalism versus intentionalism debate, arguing from the 1960s on that there was a long range plan on the part of Hitler to exterminate the Jewish people from about 1924 on, views that led to intense debates with functionalist historians such as Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat.

" By 1945, Jäckel has claimed that for Hitler the Shoah had become so important that it " now appeared to him as his central historical mission ".

In 1998, Jäckel argued that Hitler was able to begin the Holocaust in mid-1941 by playing Himmler against Heydrich.

Jäckel attacked Irving for claiming that an entry in Heinrich Himmler's notebook saying " Jewish transport from Berlin, not to be liquidated " on November 30, 1941 proved that Hitler did not want to see the Holocaust happen.

Jäckel maintained that the order referred only to that train, and argued that if Hitler had ordered the people on that train to be spared, it must stand to reason that he was aware of the Holocaust.

Jäckel used Hitler's tendency to involve himself in minutia to argue that it is simply inconceivable that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.

Jäckel charged that Fest was guilty of diverting attention away from the issues by attacking Habermas's motives in criticizing Nolte, and not with concerning himself with what Habermas had to say Jäckel maintained that the Holocaust was indeed a " singular " historical event and criticized Fest for claiming otherwise Mommsen accused Fest of subordinating history to his right-wing politics in his defence of Nolte Mommsen went on to accuse Fest of simply ignoring the real issues such as the " psychological and institutional mechanisms " that explain why the German people accepted the Holocaust by accepting Nolte's claim of a " causal nexus " between Communism and fascism.

Jäckel also argued that the entry in Joseph Goebbels's diary on March 27, 1942 mentioning the Führer's " Prophecy " was coming true was a sign that Hitler had ordered the Holocaust, and accused Irving of dishonesty in claiming that there was no sign in the Goebbels diary that Hitler knew of the Holocaust.

Jäckel ended his essay that the " lost " document in no way proved that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust, and accused Irving of deceitfulness in claiming otherwise.

In defence of Habermas, Fest was attacked by Hans Mommsen and Eberhard Jäckel.

As a student, Hillgruber was a leading protégée of the medievalist Percy Ernst Schramm, an academic who, as Eberhard Jäckel commented, regarded World War II as a normal war that regrettably the Nazis were not as skilled at waging as they should have been.

Motivated by historian Eberhard Jäckel, she was one of the primary forces who lobbied from 1988 onwards for over 17 years for the construction of the widely controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, completed in May 2005.

After the success of an exhibition on Prussia, which was shown in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in 1981, the then Governing Mayor of ( West ) Berlin, Richard von Weizäcker, commissioned four prominent historians – Hartmut Boockmann, Eberhard Jäckel, Hagen Schulze and Michael Stürmer – to prepare a memorandum, which appeared in January 1982 under the title Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

In this way, Jäckel argues that Mein Kampf was not only a " blueprint " for power, but also for genocide.

Jäckel argued that though Himmler was antisemitic, he was less enthusiastic about genocide than Heydrich, whereas the latter saw genocide as a way of obtaining Hitler's support for building a power base outside of Himmler's control.