Historikerstreit

[23] In 1984, the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited the U.S. President Ronald Reagan to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe by attending a memorial service at a military cemetery in Bitburg.

[36] Hillgruber in Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45 was also concerned with the "justified" last stand of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in 1944–45, giving a lengthy account of Red Army war crimes against German civilians.

[88] Habermas charged that as long as the Wehrmacht held out, the Holocaust continued, but that Hillgruber's approach which emphasized the war on the Eastern Front from the viewpoint of the ordinary German soldier and the "desperate civilian population" serves to sever the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" from history.

[96] Brumlik wrote though Zweierlei Untergang only covered the period from June 1944 to May 1945, it did serve to implicitly to turn what was a war of conquest on the part of Germany into a defensive struggle to protect Germans while pushing the Jews being exterminated by the Reich into the background.

[115] Fest argued against the "singularity" of the Holocaust under the grounds that:"The gas chambers with which the executors of the annihilation of the Jews went to work without a doubt signal a particularly repulsive form of mass murder, and they have justifiably become a symbol for the technicized barbarism of the Hitler regime.

[129] Kocka dismissed Fest's claims that Habermas was a racist for rejecting comparisons with Cambodia, writing "it has to do with historical knowledge about the connection between economic development and the possibilities of sociopolitical organization, and also with taking seriously the European tradition, in consideration of which the Enlightenment, human rights and the constitutional state cannot be simply ignored".

[136] The Swiss journalist Hanno Helbling in an essay first published in the Neu Zuricher Zeitung newspaper on September 26, 1986, accused Nolte and his allies of working to destroy "the 'negative myth' of Nazi Germany, not only by revising our inevitable understanding of this reign of terror, but also by restoring the national past.

[140] Mommsen wrote the theory of totalitarianism served Cold War needs so "that could not only decorate itself with the epithet "anti-Fascist" but could also rule out and criminalize leftist efforts" and for the "bracketing out the period of the Third Reich from the continuity of German history".

In another essay first published in the Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik magazine in October 1986, Mommsen was to call Nolte's claim of a "causal nexus" between National Socialism and Communism "not simply methodologically untenable, but also absurd in it premises and conclusions".

[147] Mommsen wrote in his opinion that Nolte's use of the Nazi era phrase "Asiatic hordes" to describe Red Army soldiers, and his use of the word "Asia" as a byword for all that is horrible and cruel in the world reflected racism.

[152] Mommsen wrote" "To accept with resignation the acts of screaming injustice and to psychologically repress their social prerequisites by calling attention to similar events elsewhere and putting the blame on the Bolshevist world threat recalls the thought patterns that made it possible to implement genocide".

The fundamentally apologetic character of Nolte's argument shines through most clearly when he concedes Hitler's right to deport, through not to exterminate, the Jews in response to the supposed "declaration of war" issued by the World Jewish Congress; or when he claims that the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen can be justified, at least subjectively, as operations aimed against partisans fighting the German Army.

[162] The classicist Christian Meier, who was president of the German Historical Association at the time gave a speech on October 8, 1986, before that body, in which he criticized Nolte by declaring that the Holocaust was a “singular” event that “qualitatively surpassed" Soviet terror.

In another feuilleton entitled "Standing Things On Their Heads" first published in Die Zeit on October 31, 1986, Nolte dismissed criticism of him by Habermas and Jäckel under the grounds that their writings were no different from what could find in an East German newspaper.

Habermas's “expulsion of the kulaks” speaks for itself"[178]Hillgruber defended his call for the identification with the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front in an interview with the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on 31 October 1986, on the ground that he was only trying "…to experience things from the perspective of the main body of the population".

[192] In a later newspaper feuilleton first published in the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 20, 1986, Meier again asserted that the Holocaust was a “singular” occurrence, but wrote that: “It is to be hoped that Ernst Nolte's suggestion that we should remain more keenly aware of the various million-fold mass murders of this century bears fruit.

[198] The political scientist Kurt Sontheimer in an essay first published in the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on November 21, 1986, accused Nolte and company of attempting to create a new “national consciousness” meant to sever the Federal Republic's “intellectual and spiritual ties to the West”.

[201] Sonthemier wrote that the great achievements of German historians since 1945 was seeking to understand why the Weimar Republic failed and how Nazi Germany came to be, stating:"We were attempting to overcome the past, not to invoke it...I cannot see what better lesson those who are struggling to provide meaning through history can offer us".

They were shipped to far-away concentration camps and in general were not killed right away, but were forced to suffer conditions that led in the course of time to a miserable death [216] Löwenthal wrote that: What Stalin did from 1929 both against peasants and against various other victims, including leading Communists... and returned soldiers, was in fact historically new in its systematic inhumanity, and to this extent comparable with the deeds of Hitler.

[228] Also in an essay published in the December 1, 1986 edition of The New Republic, the American historian Charles S. Maier rejected Nolte's claim of moral equivalence between the actions of the Soviet Communists and German Nazis under the grounds that while the former were extremely brutal, the latter sought the total extermination of a people, namely the Jews.

[246] Finally, Hillgruber accused Habermas of being behind the "agitation and psychic terror" suffered by non-Marxist professors in the late 1960s, and warned him that if he was trying to bring back "...that unbearable atmosphere that ruled in those years at West German universities, then he is deluding himself".

"[248]Euchner went to argue that there was no comparison of German and Soviet crimes in his view because Germany had had an "outstanding intellectual heritage" and the Nazis had carried out a policy of genocide with the "voluntary support of a substantial part of the traditional elites".

[258] Perels wrote that Hillgruber's book Zweierlei Untergang which praised those German officers who stayed to Hitler as making the correct ethical choice served to put him in the same moral camp as the judges of the Supreme Court who regarded Bonhoeffer and Dohnányi as traitors who were properly executed.

But that the most incensed objections would come from those who from the beginning were the spokesmen of historicization-this was no less surprising then the recognition that yesterday's enlighteners are today's intolerant mythologues, people who want to forbid questions from being posed"[265] Fest predicated that scholarship in the future will vindicate Nolte and called Habermas and his allies "the advocates of a hopeless cause".

[275] The British historian Richard J. Evans was highly offended by Nolte's claims that German massacres of Soviet Jews carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht were a legitimate "preventive security" measure that was not a war crime.

[303] The American historian Charles S. Maier rejected Nolte's claims regarding the moral equivalence of the Holocaust and Soviet terror on the grounds that while the latter was extremely brutal, it did not seek the physical annihilation of an entire people as a state policy.

[308] In a letter to Nolte on July 18, 1986, Kulka wrote in defense of the "singularity" of the Holocaust that: "The uniqueness of the National Socialist mass murder of the Jews must be understood in the world-historical sense attributed to it-as an attempt to bring about a change in the course of universal history and its goals.

[324] Writing in 1989, the British historian Richard J. Evans declared that:"Finally, Nolte's attempts to establish the comparability of Auschwitz rest in part upon an extension of the concept of "genocide" to actions which cannot plausibly justify being described in this way.

The terrible massacres of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915 were more deliberate, on a wider scale and concentrated into a far shorter time, then the destruction of human life in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and they were not carried out as part of a military campaign, although they did occur in wartime.

Similar things may be said of the forcible removal of Greeks from Asia Minor during the 1920s, although this has not, in contrast to the events of 1915, generally been regarded as genocide.The Pol Pot regime in Cambodia witnessed the horrific spectacle of a nation's rulers turning upon their own people, in a manner comparable to that of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin a few years previously.