Historikerstreit

The Historikerstreit (German: [hɪsˈtoːʁɪkɐˌʃtʁaɪt], historians' quarrel) was an intellectual and political controversy in the late 1980s in West Germany about how best to remember Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

The Historikerstreit spanned the years 1986–89, and pitted right-wing against left-wing intellectuals. The positions taken by the right-wing intellectuals, led by Ernst Nolte, was that the Holocaust was not unique and therefore the Germans should not bear any special burden of guilt for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". In his article "The Past That Will Not Go Away", Nolte argued that what was needed for Germans to have a positive sense of national identity was for them to make the "past that will not go away" finally "go away". Nolte argued that because there was no moral difference between the crimes of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany—and, even more controversially, that because the Holocaust was something that the Germans were allegedly forced to do out of a fear of what the Soviet Union might to them—that Germans should not feel any guilt over the Holocaust and should essentially forget about it. Likewise, the conservative historian Andreas Hillgruber argued in his book Zweierlei Untergang that Germans should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front, and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944–45 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers. It flared up again briefly in 2000 when one of its leading figures, Ernst Nolte, was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize for science.

Immediately after World War II, intense debates arose in intellectual circles about how to interpret Nazi Germany, a contested discussion that continues today. Two of the more hotly debated questions were whether Nazism was in some way part of the "German national character" and how much responsibility, if any, the German people bore for the crimes of Nazism. Various non-German historians in the immediate post-war era, such as A. J. P. Taylor and Sir Lewis Namier, argued that Nazism was the culmination of German history and that the vast majority of Germans were responsible for Nazi crimes. Different assessments of Nazism were common among Marxists, who insisted on the economic aspects of Nazism and conceived of it as the culmination of a capitalist crisis, and liberals, who emphasized Hitler's personal role and responsibility and bypassed the larger problem of the relation of ordinary German people to the regime. Within West Germany, then, most historians were strongly defensive (of what?). In the assessment of Gerhard Ritter and others, Nazism was a totalitarian movement that represented only the work of a small criminal clique; Germans were victims of Nazism, and the Nazi era represented a total break in German history.

...
Wikipedia