The True Meaning of Auschwitz

An interesting debate broke out in Germany this summer when the historian Ernst Nolte, in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, tried to take a fresh look at the horrors of National Socialism in a worldwide perspective. He emphasized that they were not unique and that they had predecessors as well as successors. He even raised the question whether Stalin’s horrors did not have a psychological effect on Hitler and his minions—although he emphasized strongly that one crime does not justify another.

A reply came in due course from the well-known, decidedly leftist philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who sensed in Nolte’s study a tendency to belittle National Socialist misdeeds by drawing comparisons. Habermas saw “neoconservative revisionism” at work, not only in Nolte but in three other university professors as well: Michael Stürmer of Erlangen, Klaus Hildebrand of Bonn, and Andreas Hillgruber of Cologne. (Hillgruber had published a book in which he compared the destruction of the old Germany, through the annihilation of its easternmost part and the partition of the remainder, with the terrible fate meted out to the Jews.) Habermas also tried to connect this “new revisionism” with a “NATO philosophy tainted by German nationalism.”

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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An interesting debate broke out in Germany this summer when the historian Ernst Nolte, in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, tried to take a fresh look at the horrors of National Socialism in a worldwide perspective. He emphasized that they were not unique and that they had predecessors as well as successors. He even raised the question whether Stalin’s horrors did not have a psychological effect on Hitler and his minions—although he emphasized strongly that one crime does not justify another.

A reply came in due course from the well-known, decidedly leftist philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who sensed in Nolte’s study a tendency to belittle National Socialist misdeeds by drawing comparisons. Habermas saw “neoconservative revisionism” at work, not only in Nolte but in three other university professors as well: Michael Stürmer of Erlangen, Klaus Hildebrand of Bonn, and Andreas Hillgruber of Cologne. (Hillgruber had published a book in which he compared the destruction of the old Germany, through the annihilation of its easternmost part and the partition of the remainder, with the terrible fate meted out to the Jews.) Habermas also tried to connect this “new revisionism” with a “NATO philosophy tainted by German nationalism.”