called for in a 1985 essay by trying to understand what caused National Socialism, with a special focus on the fear of Communism. Historikerstreit, autumn 1986 "Hitler Should Not Be Repressed By Stalin and Pol Pot" The German historian Jürgen Kocka in an essay first published in Die Zeit on September 26, 1986, contended against Nolte that the Holocaust was indeed a “singular” event because it had been committed by an advanced Western nation, and argued that Nolte's comparisons of the Holocaust with similar mass killings in Pol Pot's Cambodia, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, and Idi Amin's Uganda were invalid because of the backward nature of those societies. Kocka dismissed Fest's claims that Habermas was a racist for rejecting comparisons with Cambodia, writing "it has to do with historical knowledge about the connection between economic development and the possibilities of sociopolitical organization, and also with taking seriously the European tradition, in consideration of which the Enlightenment, human rights and the constitutional state cannot be simply ignored". Kocka went to criticize Nolte's view of the Holocaust as "a not altogether incomprehensible reaction to the prior threat of annihilation, as whose potential or real victims Hitler and the National Socialists allegedly were justified in seeing themselves". Kocka wrote that: "The real causes of anti-Semitism in Germany are to be found neither in Russia nor the World Jewish Congress. And how can one, in light of the facts, interpret the National Socialist annihilation of the Jews as a somewhat logical, if premature, means of defense against the threats of annihilation coming from the Soviet Union, with which Germany had made a pact in 1939, and which it then subsequently attacked? Here the sober historical inquiry into real historical connections, into causes, and consequences, and about real motives and their conditions would suffice to protect the writer and the reader from abstruse speculative interpretations. Nolte fails to ask such questions. If a past "that is capable of being agreed on" can be gained by intellectual gymnastics of this sort, then we should renounce it." Kocka argued contra Stürmer that "Geography is not destiny". Kocka argued there other countries in "the middle" like Poland, Switzerland and Germany itself prior to 1871 did not evolve in the same way that Germany did after 1871, stating that Stürmer's argument that Bismark needed to impose an authoritarian government because of geography was simply wrong. "Questions We Have To