him by Habermas and Jäckel under the grounds that their writings were no different from what could find in an East German newspaper. Nolte contended that criticism over his use of the phrase “rat cage” was unwarranted since he was only using the phrase “rat cage” as an embodiment of the “Asiatic” horror he alleges Hitler felt about the Bolsheviks. Nolte wrote he was not trying to reintroduce the Nazi concept of “Jewish Bolshevism” and that “…even for the uninformed reader, the reference to the Chinese Cheka…" should have made clear that he was writing about overblown fears in Germany of the Bolsheviks instead of an objective reality. In reply to the criticism of Habermas and Jäckel, Nolte wrote:“The Gulag Archipelago is primary to Auschwitz precisely because the Gulag was in the mind of the originator of Auschwitz; Auschwitz was not in the minds of the originators of the Gulag…If Jäckel proves his own definition for the singularity of the Final Solution, then I think that his concept simply elaborates what can be more briefly expressed with the term "racial murder". If, however, he wants to say that the German state, through the mouth of its Führer, unambiguously and publicly announced the decision that even Jewish women, children and infants were to be killed, then he has illustrated with one short phrase all that does not have to be demonstrated in the current intellectual climate, but can be "imputed". Hitler was certainly the most powerful man that has ever lived in Germany. But he was not powerful enough to ever publicly equate Bolshevism and Christianity, as he often did in his dinner conversations. He also not powerful enough to publicly demand or to justify, as Himmler often did in his circle of friends and associates, the murder of women and children. That, of course, is not proof of Hitler's "humanity", but rather of the remnants of the liberal system. The "extermination of the bourgeoisie" and the "liquidation of the kulaks" were, in contrast proclaimed quite publicly. And I am amazed at the coldheartedness with which Eberhard Jäckel says that not every single bourgeois was killed. Habermas's “expulsion of the kulaks” speaks for itself" Interview with Andreas Hillgruber, 31 October 1986 Hillgruber defended his call for the identification with the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front in an interview with the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on 31 October 1986, on the