civilians from the Red Army should have been the overriding concern of all Wehrmacht officers, which required remaining loyal to Hitler. Historikerstreit begins, June 1986 "The Past That Will Not Pass" Nolte launched the Historikerstreit ("Historians' Dispute") on 6 June 1986 with an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht mehr gehalten werden konnte ("The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered") . His feuilleton was a distillation of ideas he had first introduced in lectures delivered in 1976 and in 1980. Earlier in 1986, Nolte had planned to deliver a speech before the Frankfurt Römerberg Conversations (an annual gathering of intellectuals), but he had claimed that the organizers of the event withdrew their invitation. In response, an editor and co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Joachim Fest, allowed Nolte to have his speech printed as a feuilleton in his newspaper. One of Nolte's leading critics, British historian Richard J. Evans, claims that the organizers of the Römerberg Conversations had not withdrawn their invitation, and that Nolte had just refused to attend. Nolte began his feuilleton by remarking that it was necessary in his opinion to draw a "line under the German past". Nolte argued that the memory of the Nazi era was "a bugaboo, as a past that in the process of establishing itself in the present or that is suspended above the present like an executioner's sword". Nolte used as an example of the problem of the "Past That Will Not Go Away" that in Nazi Germany, the "mania of masculinity" was "full of provocative self-confidence", but now German men were afraid to be manly because German feminists had made National Socialism the "present enemy". In the same way, Nolte charged that Germans were being forced to live under the fear of being labelled anti-semitic; Nolte wrote based on his viewing of the film Shoah it was clear that the SS guards of the death camps were "victims of a sort and that among the Polish victims of National Socialism there was virulent anti-Semitism". Nolte complained that excessive present-day interest in the Nazi period had the effect of drawing "attention away from the pressing questions of the present-for example, the question of "unborn life" or the presence of genocide yesterday in Vietnam and today in Afghanistan". Nolte argued that the furor