Gerlach has previously stirred intense debate among Holocaust historians with his thesis surrounding 12 December 1941, as the date on which Adolf Hitler made the decision to annihilate the Jews of Europe.
His history of the Holocaust, The Extermination of the European Jews, does not use the term,[7] and in a 2023 interview with the World Socialist Web Site he called genocide "an analytically worthless concept made for political purposes" and "an instrument of liberal imperialism".
[9] Gerlach's thesis was criticized by a number of scholars, among them Peter Hoffmann from McGill University and Klaus Jochen Arnold [de], from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a political party foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU).
For example, the research by Johannes Hürter, a historian at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, confirms the culpability of the staff of Army Group Centre in war crimes and Nazi atrocities.
He concludes that Tresckow and his circle of conspirators within the Army Group Centre were well informed about the mass murder of Jews following Operation Barbarossa and provided required cooperation.