 Intentionalists maintained that Adolf Hitler intended from the earliest days of his political career to exterminate the Jews.Functionalists (or structuralists) argued that although Hitler had a longstanding murderous hatred of Jews, his plan to exterminate them did not arise until bureaucratic opportunities and world events (such as war with Russia) converged to make extermination functionally possible.The debate largely faded away after 1980 as such scholars as Ian Kershaw and Michael Burleigh increasingly agreed that "intention" and "structure" are both essential to understanding Nazi Germany and need synthesis rather than opposition.