Historikerstreit

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Historikerstreit (Historians' dispute) was an intellectual and political controversy in West Germany about the way the Holocaust should be interpreted in history. It took place between 1986-1989, and pitted left-wing intellectuals against right-wing intellectuals. Its embers flared up again briefly in 2000 when one of the leading figures, Ernst Nolte, was awarded a literary prize. "Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will" proposed by Ernst Nolte, had to be rejected as inadequate due to their lack of sufficient empirical substance.

Historikerstreit Media

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  Nolte called the Auschwitz death camp and the other German death camps of World War II a "copy" of the Soviet Gulag camps.

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  Skulls of Khmer Rouge victims. Nolte's admirer Joachim Fest was to defend Nolte by arguing that Habermas was a racist for arguing that it was natural for Cambodians to practice genocide and unnatural for Germans.

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  Adolf Hitler. The German historian Heinrich August Winkler wrote: "No German historian has ever accorded Hitler such a sympathetic treatment” as did Nolte.

Other websites

• Cohen R. Hitler Apologist Wins German Honor, and a Storm Breaks Out

• Götz Aly. The logic of horror
• Nolte E. "Streitpunkte" Archived 2008-03-06 at the Wayback Machine
• Schmidt & Paetzel Fernsehfilme GmbH: deutsche Streitfall der Historiker Ernst Nolte Archived 2008-06-25 at the Wayback Machine
• Holocaust denial
• Gulag