Ernst Nolte, a German revisionist historian who broke academic taboos by equating Nazism with Bolshevism and who was denounced as an apologist for Hitler and even the Holocaust, died on Thursday in Berlin. He was 93.
His family told the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that he had died in a hospital.
Professor Nolte, a respected scholar of fascism, provoked an ideological uproar in 1986 by suggesting in an essay that Nazisim had been a logical response in Germany to an “existential threat” posed by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He also argued that Hitler’s extermination of Jews and other minorities was comparable to the mass murders engineered by Stalin in the Soviet Union, where victims were singled out by economic and social class as enemies of the Communist state.
“Did the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ not exist before Auschwitz?” Professor Nolte wrote in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Was Bolshevik ‘class murder’ not the logical and factual predecessor to the Nazi ‘racial murder’?” he continued. “Did Auschwitz not, perhaps, originate in a past that would not pass away?”
…Professor Nolte’s reasoning in the 1986 essay, “The Past That Won’t Go Away,” was embraced by Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis. He maintained that by interning Jews, Hitler was responding to what he viewed as a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy and to a 1939 Zionist “declaration of war” urging all Jews to support Britain.
Professor Nolte had condemned Nazism and acknowledged that there had been “widespread liquidation” during the Holocaust, although he also referred to the “so-called” annihilation of the Jews and the bias of Jewish historians. In the essay, though, he argued that only “the technical process of gassing” was unique to the Nazis, that most Germans had been noncomplicit and that the moral line between the “social extermination” of the Soviet gulags and the “biological extermination” at Auschwitz was blurry…
In his book “Three Faces of Fascism,” published in English in 1965, Professor Nolte defined fascism as a backlash to modernity. After his 1986 essay was published, he told The Journal of Historical Review, widely considered an organ for Holocaust deniers, that to name Stalin and Hitler “in the same sentence was to break a taboo of the time.” He characterized it as “more a matter of courage, let us say, than of insight.”
In his 1991 book “Historical Thinking in the 20th Century,” he described Israel as one of three “extraordinary states” produced during the 20th century, along with Germany and the Soviet Union, but warned that it could become fascist and commit genocide against Palestinians. In 2006, he called Islamic fundamentalism a “third variant,” after communism and National Socialism, of “the resistance to transcendence” that characterizes fascism.
