[3] While working as a student Baberowski advocated for the views of historian Ernst Nolte, who had launched the Historikerstreit controversy by arguing that the Germans did not deserve special culpability for The Holocaust.

[4] Beginning in 1989, Baberowski worked as a researcher in eastern European history at the Goethe University Frankfurt and earned his doctorate there in 1993 with a dissertation titled Autokratie und Justiz im Zarenreich ("Autocracy and Justice in Czarist Russia").

[8] As a student Baberowski joined the Communist League of West Germany, which was aligned with Maoism, even raising money for Pol Pot, though he later distanced himself from these views.

[9] In response to the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015, Baberowski called for a more restrictive policy toward immigrants in Germany and criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel's approach in a number of articles and interviews.

[10] In 2016, Baberowski sued the general students' committee (AStA) of the University of Bremen for distributing a leaflet that called him "radical right-wing" and "racist" and accused him of theses that were "glorifying violence" and "frighteningly brutal".

The Cologne district court ruled it illegal to label him as "racist", but permissible, under the freedom of speech, to claim that Baberowski advocated "radical right-wing positions".

He stated that Baberowski's "academic oeuvre and short-term political remarks" blended into "an amalgam of radical right-wing criticism that is interspersed with historical revisionist and nationalist motifs".

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the conflict may have begun after he invited British historian Robert Service, who has written critically about Trotsky, as a guest lecturer at his institute.

[17][18] The Presidium and Dean's Office of the Faculty of Philosophy I at the Humboldt University stood behind Jörg Baberowski after the judgment in the first instance and again after the hearing at the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht).