ERNST NOLTE AND THE MEMORY OF THE SHOAH

Nolte's path is haphazard and contradictory in an effort to enjoy both worlds: to avoid being seen as a negationist of the Shoah while allowing himself to make a series of outrageous and preposterous points regarding the Shoah. His trajectory and tactics are revealed extensively as is the array of claims he makes. Nolte equates Zionism to Nazism and envisages a future recognition of Hitler as the originator of the State of Israel. He belittles the Nazi massacre of the Jews while condemning it as the most terrible mass annihilation in history. Moreover, he notes the relatively small sum given to Jews as reparation after the war while criticizing the very fact that any reparations were given at all. At the same time, he almost equates Jews to Bolsheviks and deems the Nazi "reaction" to this as comprehensible "yet excessive," while tracing Hitler's anti-Semitism to his anti-Bolshevism. In the process of making the victims culpable for their tragic fate, Nolte stresses the idea that the Jews themselves declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, blatantly blurring the fact that one could hardly imagine a non-country doing so. This last point serves Nolte in order to underline the rationality he sees in the Nazi perception of the Jews as an "enemy people." Nolte can be clearly seen as a revisionist historian making a thinly veiled effort to ex-onerate Hitler and the Nazis from the responsibility of having committed the worst crimes in the history of humanity.