so that Soviet atrocities could not possibly have influenced the Germans as Nolte claimed. Löwenthal argued in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 29 November 1986 for the "fundamental difference" in mass murder in Germany and the Soviet Union, and against the "balancing" out of various crimes in the 20th century. Löwenthal contended that comparisons between Hitler and Stalin were appropriate, but comparisons between Hitler and Lenin were not. For Löwenthal, the decisive factor that governed Lenin's conduct was that right from the onset when he took power, he was involved in civil wars within Russia Löwenthal argued that “Lenin's battle to hold on to power” did not comprise “one-sided mass annihilation of defenceless people” Speaking of the Russian Civil War, Löwenthal argued that “In all these battles there were heavy losses on both sides and horrible torture and murders of prisoners” Speaking of the differences between Lenin and Stalin, Löwenthal argued that “What Stalin did from 1929 on was something entirely different” Löwenthal argued that with dekulakization, the so-called “kulaks” were to destroyed by the Soviet state as:a hindrance to forced collectivization. They were not organized. They had not fought. They were shipped to far-away concentration camps and in general were not killed right away, but were forced to suffer conditions that led in the course of time to a miserable death Löwenthal wrote that: What Stalin did from 1929 both against peasants and against various other victims, including leading Communists... and returned soldiers, was in fact historically new in its systematic inhumanity, and to this extent comparable with the deeds of Hitler. Certainly, Hitler, like all his contemporaries, had a preconception of the civil wars of Lenin's time. Just as certainly his own ideas about the total annihilation of the Jews, the Gypsies, the “unworthy of life”, and so on, were independent of Stalin's example. At any rate the idea of total annihilation of the Jews had already been developed in the last work of Hitler's mentor, Dietrich Eckart, who died in 1924. For the reference to this source, which leaves no room for “balancing”, I am grateful to Ernst Nolte's first large book, which appeared in 1963, Faschismus in seiner Epoche [Fascism in Its Epoch] Historkerstreit in the winter of 1986–87 "Neither Denial Nor Forgetfulness Will Free Us" Hans Mommsen's twin brother, Wolfgang Mommsen, in an essay entitled "Neither Denial nor Forgetfulness