of Holocaust deniers are "often honorable", and that some of their claims are "not obviously without foundation". Kershaw has argued that Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust denial with his implied claim that the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of Holocaust scholarship by Jewish historians, and his statements that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, whom Nolte insists are not exclusively Germans or fascists. In Kershaw's opinion, Nolte is attempting to imply that perhaps Holocaust deniers are on to something. In Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, Nolte made five different arguments as a way of criticizing the uniqueness of the Shoah thesis. There were: There were other equally horrible acts of violence in the 20th century. Some of the examples Nolte cited were the Armenian genocide, Soviet deportation of the so-called “traitor nations” like the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans, Allied “area bombing” in World War II, and American war crimes in the Vietnam War. Nazi genocide was only a copy of Soviet genocide, and thus can in no way can be considered unique. In support of this, Nolte claimed that Lenin had “exterminated” the Russian intelligentsia, and used Hitler's remark at press conference of November 10, 1938 where he commented he might have to “exterminate” the German intelligentsia as an example how he feels that Hitler had merely copied Lenin. Nolte argued that the vast majority of Germans had no knowledge of the Shoah while it was going on Nolte claimed that the genocide of the Jews was Hitler's personal pet project, and the Holocaust was the work of only a few Germans entirely unrepresentative of German society Against the American historian Raul Hilberg, who claimed that hundreds of thousands of Germans were complicit in the Shoah from high-ranking bureaucrats to railway clerks and locomotive conductors, Nolte argued that the functional division of labour in a modern society meant that most people in Germany had no idea of how they were assisting in genocide. In support of this, Nolte cited the voluminous memoirs of German generals and Nazi leaders like Albert Speer who claimed to have no idea that their country was engaging in genocide during World War II. Nolte maintained that to a certain degree, Nazi anti-Semitic policies were justified responses to Jewish actions against Germany such as Weizmann's alleged 1939 “declaration of war” on Germany.