{"id":104320,"date":"2016-08-26T14:34:10","date_gmt":"2016-08-26T22:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=104320"},"modified":"2023-09-01T03:45:36","modified_gmt":"2023-09-01T11:45:36","slug":"ernst-nolte-historian-whose-views-on-hitler-caused-an-uproar-dies-at-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=104320","title":{"rendered":"Ernst Nolte, Historian Whose Views on Hitler Caused an Uproar, Dies at 93"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

His family told the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that he had died in a hospital.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cexistential threat\u201d posed by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He also argued that Hitler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid the \u2018Gulag Archipelago\u2019 not exist before Auschwitz?\u201d Professor Nolte wrote in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. \u201cWas Bolshevik \u2018class murder\u2019 not the logical and factual predecessor to the Nazi \u2018racial murder\u2019?\u201d he continued. \u201cDid Auschwitz not, perhaps, originate in a past that would not pass away?\u201d<\/p>\n

…Professor Nolte\u2019s reasoning in the 1986 essay, \u201cThe Past That Won\u2019t Go Away,\u201d 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 \u201cdeclaration of war\u201d urging all Jews to support Britain.<\/p>\n

Professor Nolte had condemned Nazism and acknowledged that there had been \u201cwidespread liquidation\u201d during the Holocaust, although he also referred to the \u201cso-called\u201d annihilation of the Jews and the bias of Jewish historians. In the essay, though, he argued that only \u201cthe technical process of gassing\u201d was unique to the Nazis, that most Germans had been noncomplicit and that the moral line between the \u201csocial extermination\u201d of the Soviet gulags and the \u201cbiological extermination\u201d at Auschwitz was blurry…<\/p>\n

In his book \u201cThree Faces of Fascism,\u201d 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 \u201cin the same sentence was to break a taboo of the time.\u201d He characterized it as \u201cmore a matter of courage, let us say, than of insight.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his 1991 book \u201cHistorical Thinking in the 20th Century,\u201d he described Israel as one of three \u201cextraordinary states\u201d 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 \u201cthird variant,\u201d after communism and National Socialism, of \u201cthe resistance to transcendence\u201d that characterizes fascism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Times: 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29693,13633,196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adolf-hitler","category-germany","category-holocaust"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t