Germany’s intensive rewriting of its past from a politico-historical perspective continued in earnest in the mid-1980s, when Chancellor Kohl, initiating what would become the Bitburg debacle, invited President Reagan to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at a German military cemetery, in a “spirit of reconciliation.” Reagan agreed and, with a remark that can be described as thoughtless at best, informed the press that he would not go to a concentration camp because the Germans “have a guilt feeling that’s been imposed on them and I just think it’s unnecessary.” In many ways Reagan was an innocent pawn in a debate whose nuances he may not fully have grasped.{3} Kohl’s invitation to the American president, issued in the wake of Germany’s exclusion from the fortieth anniversary commemoration of the Allied landing at Normandy, was designed to blur Germany’s historical image as the aggressor. Conservative politicians and journalists had already begun to urge Germans, in the words of Bavarian Minister-President Franz Josef Strauss, to get off their knees and once again learn to “walk tall.”{4} (The juxtaposition of this image with that of the late former Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto monument is telling.)
Kohl, Strauss, and other politicians on the right were joined in this struggle by a group of historians. In 1986 Andreas Hillgruber, an internationally respected specialist in German diplomatic, military, and political history, published Two Kinds of Downfalclass="underline" The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry. It consisted of two essays, one on the postwar Soviet expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, and the other on the genocide of the Jews.{5} According to Hillgruber these two catastrophes “belong[ed] together.” He argued that the Allies, who had long intended to cripple Germany so that it could never again subjugate Europe, emasculated Germany by usurping its territories for Poland and installing the Russian army as an occupying force. By claiming that they emanated from the same policies of population transfer and extermination, Hillgruber essentially equated Allied treatment of Germany and the Nazi genocide.{6} He responded to historians who had criticized the Wehrmacht’s decisions to continue fighting the Soviets well after their colleagues in Berlin had attempted to end the war by assassinating Hitler. This, Hillgruber asserted, was an honorable decision even though it greatly prolonged the horrors of the death camps.{7} It was basically an act of self-defense, preventing the Russian forces from laying waste Germany and its people. Other historians in this struggle would take a far more extreme stand than Hillgruber, but his insistence that the reader see the latter stages of the war from the perspective of the German soldier, and his grouping together of these two different “downfalls,” opened the door to much of the apologia and distortion that followed.{8}
The conservative historian Michael Stürmer, Chancellor Kohl’s historical adviser, believed that the Germans’ “obsession with their guilt” had deleteriously affected their national pride.{9} Contending that too much emphasis had been placed on the Third Reich, Stärmer, who advised Kohl on the Bitburg affair, called for a rewriting of history that would help Germans develop a greater sense of nationalism.
The most prominent member of this effort was Ernst Nolte, the German historian renowned for his study of fascism.{10} Along with Hillgruber and other conservative historians, he compared the Holocaust to a variety of twentieth-century outrages, including the Armenian massacres that began in 1915, Stalin’s gulags, U.S. policies in Vietnam, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Pol Pot atrocities in the former Kampuchea. According to them the Holocaust was simply one among many evils. Therefore it was historically and morally incorrect to single out the Germans for doing precisely what had been done by an array of other nations. Joachim Fest, the editor in chief of the prestigious Germany daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published a detailed defense of Nolte, illustrated with a photo of a mound of skulls of Pol Pot’s victims.{11} As Oxford historian Peter Pulzer observed, the message was clear: Germans may have sinned but they did so “in good company.”{12} Fest had already engaged in his own form of revisionism when he directed a documentary film, Hitler: A Career. Intended to show the fascination that Hitler had aroused among most Germans, the film relied on clips from Nazi propaganda films, synchronizing them with such stereo sound effects as clicking bootheels and exploding bombs. The commentator argued from Hitler’s perspective. Nazi suppression of human rights, oppression, and war crimes were ignored. (Since these had not been filmed by the Nazis, the filmmakers treated them as nonexistent.) The film presents Nazi-produced propaganda as an authentic documentation of the period, showing Hitler as he wanted to be seen.{13}
The historians’ attempt to create such immoral equivalencies ignored the dramatic differences between these events and the Holocaust. The brutal Armenian tragedy, which the perpetrators still refuse to acknowledge adequately, was conducted within the context of a ruthless Turkish policy of expulsion and resettlement. It was terrible and caused horrendous suffering but it was not part of a process of total annihilation of an entire people. The Khmer Rouge’s massacre of a million of their fellow Cambodians, to which the Western world turned a blind eye, was carried out, as Richard Evans observes, as a means of subduing and eliminating those whom Pol Pot imagined had collaborated with the Americans during the previous hostilities. The ruthless policy was conducted as part of a brutalizing war that had destroyed much of Cambodia’s moral, social, and physical infrastructure. This is not intended in any way as a justification of what happened in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge’s treatment of their countrymen was barbaric. But what they did was quite different from the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews, which was “a gratuitous act carried out by a prosperous, advanced, industrial nation at the height of its power.”{14}
These historians also seem intent on obscuring the crucial contrasts between Stalinism and Nazism.{15} Whereas Stalin’s terror was arbitrary, Hitler’s was targeted at a particular group. As the German historian Eberhard Jäackel observed in an attack on Nolte and his compatriots, never before in history was a particular human group—its men, women, children, old, young, healthy, and infirm—singled out to be killed as rapidly as possible using “every possible means of state power” to do so.{16} The fate of every Jew who came under German rule was essentially sealed. In contrast, no citizen of the Soviet Union assumed that deportation and death were inevitable consequences of his or her ethnic origins.{17} People in the USSR did not know who might be next on Stalin’s list. This uncertainty terrorized them. By contrast, during the Nazi assault on the Jews “every single one of millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total.”{18} The Nazis did not borrow these methods from the Soviets. They were sui generis, and the refusal of these historians to acknowledge that fact reflects the same triumph of ideology over truth that we have seen throughout this study.