The fruit of this unscholarly and anti-democratic spirit was the Historikerstreit ("dispute among historians") of the 1980s, which destroyed the careers of Germany's best remaining historians--including Andreas Hillgruber,
Ernst Nolte and Immanuel Geiss.
En este sentido, resulta paradigmatico el caso de la critica del historiador aleman
Ernst Nolte a la supuesta singularidad del Holocausto nazi, desarrollada en su ensayo "El pasado que no pasa" (20), publicado en 1986.
[German historian]
Ernst Nolte was probably right that fascism belonged to a specific temporal-spatial context and therefore should not be applied to developmental dictatorships all over the globe.
Gottfried believes that the term "fascism" has undergone unwarranted manipulation since the German historian
Ernst Nolte conflated fascism and Nazism in a manner that enabled less astute critics on "the multicultural Left" to justify "their attack on their opponents as Nazis and not simply generic fascists."
The West German "historians' quarrel" erupted over conservative historian
Ernst Nolte's 1986 proposal to derive Nazi genocide from German reactions to Bolshevik violence, a thesis massively rejected by liberal-minded scholars.
We must decide what is important enough to be recorded." Unlike Roger Griffin,
Ernst Nolte, Roger Eatwell and other theorists, Gregor offers no formal definition of fascism.
Roderick Stackelberg shows that the historian
Ernst Nolte did not have to distort Nietzsche all that much to make him appear a precursor of Nazism.
Ernst Nolte's "The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) ignites the "Historikerstreit" in Germany.
It began when
Ernst Nolte published an article in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" in which he argued that the Holocaust should be placed alongside all the other genocides of the twentieth century.
Well-known historians, such as Martin Broszat,
Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, and others, waded into the debate, to rationalize, categorize, and, in some cases, minimize the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.
Traverso strongly attacks the revisionists around
Ernst Nolte, and convincingly reiterates the arguments why the annihilation of European Jewry at the hands of Nazi Germany should never be relativized or historicized; he fears, however, that political expediency has favoured an undifferentiated concept of totalitarianism, in which the NSDAP and SED regimes are mostly mentioned in the same breath and their similarities unduly stressed, which in turn served slowly to erode the public consciousness of the uniqueness of Auschwitz
