Rainer Zitelmann
He completed his doctorate in 1986 under Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin with the grade of summa cum laude the subject being the goals of Hitler's social, economic and interior policies.
[3] Zitelmann has written and edited 29 books, which have been published in more than 30 languages, among others: English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu.
[12] In his doctoral thesis, Zitelmann strove to show that the modernising efforts of the Third Reich, which had been diagnosed by scholars like Ralf Dahrendorf, David Schoenbaum and Henry Ashby Turner, were intended as such.
[12] A review published in the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel dated 14 July 1988, suggests that "the most important finding of [Zitelmann's] work" is that "Hitler saw himself uncompromisingly as a revolutionary.
Zitelmann argues that far from seeking the agrarian fantasies of Heinrich Himmler or Richard Walther Darré, Hitler wished to see a highly-industrialised Germany that would be on the leading edge of modern technology.
[14] As part of his arguments, Zitelmann has maintained that "modernisation" should be regarded as a fundamentally "value-free" description, and that one should avoid the knee-jerk association of modernization with "progress" and humanitarianism.
[15] The Bonn-based historian Prof. Klaus Hildebrand reviewed the thesis for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung in its 29 September 1987, issue: "To view Hitler—just like Stalin and Mao Zedong—as representatives of a permanent revolution or a modernising dictatorship reopens an academic debate that has been ongoing since the years between the wars of the twentieth century.
To be welcomed in this context is that Zitelmann, critically controlling his sources and striving for objective balance, inquires with renewed vigour into Hitler’s motives while remaining fully aware of the fact that history fails to coincide with human intentions".
In the historiographic quarterly Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, the Polish historian Franciszek Ryszka agreed: "Without a doubt, Dr. Zitelmann’s merit is to have substantially amended, and possibly surpassed, all other Hitler biographies".
Zitelmann criticised specifically that Irving had deleted the word "extermination camp" from the new edition of his Hitler biography and that he now appeared to share the notions entertained by revisionist historians.
In 1991, Zitelmann edited with the Bielefeld-based historian Michael Prinz the anthology Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (National-Socialism and Modernisation; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft).
Zitelmann provoked a mixed reaction with his anthology Die Schatten der Vergangenheit (The Shadows of the Past), which he edited with Eckhard Jesse and Uwe Backes.
The intention is not to 'downplay' anything: only an emphatically sober historiography, free of moralising bias, can create the foundation for assessing the historical and political-moral dimensions of the mass crimes committed by National Socialism."
[12] In line with their program to treat the time between 1933 and 1945 as scientifically as any other epoch, the book gathered a wide spectrum of authors, from the conservative Ernst Nolte, who again commented on the so-called historians' dispute, to the liberal Imanuel Geiss, a disciple of Fritz Fischer.
The historian Brigitte Seebacher noted in the Rheinischer Merkur on 5 October 1990, “In short, this volume casts light on the national-socialist epoch, and inspires a renewed discussion of how to deal with it correctly".
Zitelmann points out analogies with Marxist theories on fascism, and suggests that it is impermissible to pinpoint 'anti-Bolshevism in a one-sided and generalising manner' as the central motive of 'the' National Socialists".
As the Social-Democratic politician Erhard Eppler wrote in the preface, "Zitelmann's study illustrates that Adenauer's opponents were no dreamers out of touch with reality but had solid arguments and concepts to present".
The Social Democratic politician Peter Glotz wrote in Die Welt on 24 April 1991 that Zitelmann's book showed "that Adenauer’s critics had valid arguments when accusing him of finding Europe more important than reunification".
The Social Democratic politician Egon Bahr wrote in Der Tagesspiegel of 28 July 1991, "What was later called the lived lie of the Federal Republic can be traced in its inception in Zitelmann's book".
