Historikerstreit

The Historians' Quarrel (German: Historikerstreit) of 1986/87 was a German contemporary historical debate about the singularity of the Holocaust and the question of what role it should play in an identity-forming historical image of Germany.

The debate opened on June 6, 1986 when the philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte, which presented the Holocaust in the form of rhetorical questions as a reaction of the National Socialists to preceding mass crimes and the Gulag system in the Soviet Union. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas criticized these and other statements by three other West German historians as "revisionism" intended to renew a German national consciousness by shaking off a "demoralized past." Many German historians, journalists and other interested authors reacted to this with letters to the editor or newspaper articles, which were later collected and published as a book. This debate lasted about a year.

Background

The student movement of the 1960s had vigorously demanded and given impetus to a thorough coming to terms with the National Socialist past. German historical scholarship had intensified World War II research since about 1965, but had not produced its own comprehensive account of the Holocaust until 1986.

Beginning around 1973, a fundamental dispute arose among German historians about the methodology of historical scholarship, which also affected other periods of German history, for example in the form of the Fischer controversy. Older, until then leading historians on the Nazi period, such as Andreas Hillgruber and Klaus Hildebrand, traditionally focused on leading politicians, their ideas and scope of action, and defended this method. Younger historians such as Hans Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who later supported Habermas in the Historikerstreit, on the other hand, advocated a social-scientific approach oriented toward social structures and conflicting interests. Recognized by both sides, however, was the task of "historicizing" the National Socialist era, which Martin Broszat posed to the German historians' guild in a 1985 essay. He understood this to mean comprehensive research into the historical and social conditions for National Socialism and its placement in the overall history of Germany, while already distinguishing himself from attempts to conceptualize German war crimes motivated by historical politics.

Since about 1979, some scholars belonging to the left-liberal spectrum saw a conservative change of direction in scholarly and public discourse about the NS era. At that time, Jürgen Habermas described a "New Right" that was strategically planning a "recapture of powers of definition". Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen as well as Hans-Ulrich Wehler also saw such tendencies in NS research. The "intellectual-moral turn" that Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced in his government declaration in 1982, especially his dictum of the "grace of late birth" in Israel in 1984 and his visit to a military cemetery in Bitburg, where Waffen SS members are also buried, with U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1985, were seen by many as a sign and reinforcement of a trend to shut down the historical-political examination of the NS era in the sense of a widespread closing mentality. They therefore often rejected Kohl's initiative for a German Historical Museum in West Berlin and the appointment of the founding commission (including Michael Stürmer) as an attempt to politically impose a conservative, nationally compatible image of history.

In contrast, the Holocaust has been increasingly addressed in the mass media since the television series Holocaust (1978; aired in Germany January, 1979) and again with the documentary Shoah (1986). War crimes were remembered publicly on the 50th anniversary of the NS "take-over of power" (January 30, 1983) and on the 40th anniversary of Germany's overall surrender (May 8, 1985). Richard von Weizsäcker was the first German president to describe May 8, 1945, as the "day of liberation", no longer merely as the defeat of the Wehrmacht, and he acknowledged the primacy of commemorating the victims of National Socialism.

According to Klaus Große Kracht, the already existing polarization in the field of history, and the way the debate was carried out in the mass media were the main reasons for the formation of camps, polemical exaggerations, and the lack of further results in the later historians' dispute.

Debated texts

Ernst Nolte

In 1980, the historian Ernst Nolte gave the lecture Zwischen Geschichtslegende und Revisionismus ("Between Historical Legend and Revisionism") to the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper published in abridged form on July 24, 1980. The essay "Between Historical Legend and Revisionism" was also published in English in the 1985 book Aspects of the Third Reich by the Anglo-German historian H. W. Koch, where it was billed incorrectly as an essay written for Aspects of the Third Reich. It was the 1985 version that Habermas noticed and referred to in his essay "On Damage Control".

According to Nolte in “Between Historical Legend and Revisionism”, during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the shock of the replacement of the old craft economy by an industrialized, mechanized economy led to various radicals starting to advocate what Nolte calls “annihilation therapy” as the solution to social problems. In Nolte's views, the roots of communism can be traced back to 18th and 19th century radicals like Thomas Spence, John Gray, William Benbow, Bronterre O'Brien , and François-Noël Babeuf. Nolte has argued that the French Revolution began the practice of “group annihilation” as state policy, but not until the Russian Revolution did the theory of “annihilation therapy” reach its logical conclusion and culmination. He asserts that much of the European Left saw social problems as being caused by “diseased” social groups, and sought “annihilation therapy” as the solution, thus leading naturally to the Red Terror and the Yezhovshchina in the Soviet Union. Nolte suggests that the Right mirrored the Left, with “annihilation therapy” advocated by such figures as John Robison, Augustin Barruel, and Joseph de Maistre; Malthusianism and the Prussian strategy of utter destruction of one's enemies during the Napoleonic Wars also suggest sources and influences for National Socialism. Ultimately, in Nolte's view, the Holocaust was just a “copy” of Communist “annihilation therapy”, albeit one that was more terrible and sickening than the “original”.

Nolte stated persistently a negative image of the Third Reich, its reactionary ideology (blood and soil, racism), and its singular acts of violence against Jews, Slavs, the mentally ill, and Gypsies, especially the gas chambers of the extermination camps. This had led to the fact "that in retrospect only the voice of the victims was audible". This posed the danger for science of perceiving and recording history only from the point of view of the victors. This view would have required a revision due to new circumstances of the time, which, however, should not replace accusation with apology.

Nolte then referred to three books as "revisionist approaches" current at the time, most recently the book Hitler's War (1977) by David Irving. He first rejected Irving's theses that Adolf Hitler had not known about the "Final Solution" and could have won the war if his strategic plans had been better implemented. Then he took up some of Irving's assertions: Hitler had had "good reasons" to be "convinced of his opponents' will to extermination much earlier than at the time when the first news of the events at Auschwitz had come to the knowledge of the world." For the president of the Jewish Agency for Israel Chaim Weizmann had expressed in early September 1939 that "the Jews all over the world would fight on the side of England in this war." This, he said, could be used to justify the thesis "that Hitler was allowed to treat the German Jews as prisoners of war, i.e., to intern them."

In April 1986, Nolte added to "prisoners of war" a footnote: "— or more precisely, as civilian internees along the lines of the Germans in England from September 1939 or the American citizens of Japanese origin in the USA 1941–1945." The air raid on Hamburg in 1943 also showed a "will to exterminate the German civilian population" on the part of the Allies, which could not have been caused by their knowledge of the Holocaust.

On June 6, 1986, Nolte published in the FAZ the lecture Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht mehr gehalten werden konnte ("The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered"), which he had planned for the Frankfurt Römerberg Conversations (an annual gathering of intellectuals). Nolte offered a new way of understanding German history which sought to break free of the "past that will not pass", by contending that Nazi crimes were only the consequence of a defensive reaction against Soviet crimes.

In Nolte's view, National Socialism had only arisen in response to the "class genocide" and "Asiatic barbarism" of the Bolsheviks. Nolte cited as example the early Nazi Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who during World War I had been the German consul in Erzerum, Turkey, where he was appalled by the genocide of the Armenians. In Nolte's view, the fact that Scheubner-Richter later became a Nazi shows that something must have changed his values, and in Nolte's opinion it was the Russian Revolution and such alleged Bolshevik practices as the "rat cage" torture (said by Russian émigré authors to be a favorite torture by Chinese serving in the Cheka during the Russian Civil War) that led to the change. Nolte used the example of the "rat cage" torture in George Orwell's 1948 novel 1984 to argue that the knowledge of the "rat cage" torture was widespread throughout the world. Nolte wrote about the horrors perpetuated by the "Chinese Cheka" as showing the "Asiatic" nature of the Bolsheviks. Furthermore, Nolte argues that the "rat cage" torture was an ancient torture long practiced in China, which in his opinion further establishes the "Asiatic barbarism" of the Bolsheviks. Nolte cited a statement by Hitler after the Battle of Stalingrad that Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would be soon sent to the “rat cage” in the Lubyanka as proof that Hitler had an especially vivid fear of the “rat cage” torture.

Along the same lines, Nolte argued that the Holocaust, or "racial genocide" as Nolte prefers to call it, was a response on the part of Adolf Hitler to the Soviet threat and the "class genocide" with which the German middle class was said to be threatened. In Nolte's view, Soviet mass murders were Vorbild (the terrifying example that inspired the NS) and Schreckbild (the terrible model for the horrors perpetrated by the NS). Nolte labeled the Holocaust an "überschießende Reaktion" (overshooting reaction) to Bolshevik crimes, and to Jewish actions in support of Germany's enemies. In Nolte's opinion, the essence of National Socialism was anti-Communism, and anti-Semitism was only a subordinate element to anti-Bolshevism in Nazi ideology. Nolte argued that because "the mighty shadow of events in Russia fell most powerfully" on Germany, that the most extreme reaction to the Russian Revolution took place there, thus establishing the "causal nexus" between Communism and fascism. Nolte asserted that the core of National Socialism was

"neither in criminal tendencies nor in anti-Semitic obsessions as such. The essence of National Socialism [was to be found] in its relation to Marxism and especially to Communism in the form which this had taken on through the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Revolution".

In Nolte's view, NS anti-communism was "understandable and up to a certain point, justified". For Nolte, the "racial genocide" as he calls the Holocaust was a "punishment and preventive measure" on the part of the Germans for the "class genocide" of the Bolsheviks. American historian Peter Baldwin noted parallels between Nolte's views and those of American Marxist historian Arno J. Mayer. Both Nolte and Mayer perceive the interwar period as one of intense ideological conflict between the forces of the Right and Left, positing World War II as the culmination of this conflict, with the Holocaust a byproduct of the German-Soviet war. Baldwin distinguished Nolte from Mayer in that Nolte considered the Soviets aggressors who essentially got what they deserved in the form of Operation Barbarossa, whereas Mayer considered the Soviets to be victims of German aggression. Operation Barbarossa, in Nolte's thinking, was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler by an alleged impending Soviet attack. Nolte wrote that Hitler's view of the Russian people as barbarians was an "exaggeration of an insight which was basically right in its essence" and that Hitler "understood the invasion of the Soviet Union as a preventive war" as the Soviet desire to bring Communism to the entire world "must be seen as mental acts of war, and one may even ask whether a completely isolated and heavily armed country did not constitute a dangerous threat to its neighbors on these grounds alone".

The crux of Nolte's thesis was presented when he wrote:

"It is a notable shortcoming of the literature about National Socialism that it does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in a voluminous literature of the early 1920s: mass deportations and shootings, torture, death camps, extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be "enemies".

It is probable that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the “White Terror” also committed terrible deeds, even though its program contained no analogy to the “extermination of the bourgeoisie”. Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be the potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Wasn't the 'Gulag Archipelago' more original than Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the "racial murder" of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler's most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?"

Nolte wrote the principal problem "for the coming generations...must be liberation from collectivist thinking", which Nolte claimed dominated scholarship on Nazi Germany. Nolte ended his essay with calling for a "more comprehensive debate" about the memory of Nazi Germany that would allow for "the past that will not go away" to finally go away "as is suitable for every past".

Nolte subsequently presented a 1940 book by American author Theodore N. Kaufman entitled Germany Must Perish!. The text contends that all German men should be sterilized, evidencing, according to Nolte, the Jewish desire to "annihilate" Germans prior to the Holocaust.

Subsequently, Nolte expanded upon these views in his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945 (The European Civil War, 1917–1945) in which he claimed that the entire 20th century was an age of genocide, totalitarianism, and tyranny, and that the Holocaust had been merely one chapter in the age of violence, terror and population displacement. Nolte claimed that this age had started with the genocide of the Armenians during World War I, and also included the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, Maoist terror in China as manifested in such events as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, compulsory population exchanges between Greece and Turkey from 1922 to 1923, American war crimes in the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In particular, Nolte argued that the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945–46 was "to be categorized... under the concept of genocide". As part of this argument, Nolte cited the 1979 book of the American historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Die Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle, which argues that the Allies were just as guilty of war crimes as the Germans as the "happy evidence of the will to objectivity on the part of a foreigner" In Nolte's opinion, Hitler was a "European citizen" who fought in defence of the values of the West against "Asiatic" Bolshevism, but due to his "total egocentrism" waged this struggle with unnecessary violence and brutality Since in Nolte's view, the Holocaust was not a unique crime, there is no reason to single out Germans for special criticism.