an assorted collection of this kind serve as a basis for serious scholarly analysis, the starting point for the claim that poor Hitler was so frightened by the “Asiatic deeds” of the Bolsheviks that he started to exterminate Jewish children? All this without taking into account the historical development of the relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union, the military co-operation during the twenties which as well known to the German General Staff and to Hitler, Tukhachevsky's speech in 1935 was applauded at a meeting of the General Staff of Germany for its anti-Western remarks. Then there are the negotiations between Stalin and Hitler from ’36 and ’37 onwards which brought a rapprochement and led to the dismissal of Jewish diplomats and other public officials until the division of Poland in 1939”. The Anglo-American historian of Stalin's terror, Robert Conquest was quoted as saying about Nolte's theories:“I think we all accept the proposition that Nazi crimes were unique and uniquely horrible, that they were a reaction against the Communist terrors seems untenable. It is conceivable that support for the National Socialists may largely have come as a reaction to Lenin's international civil war launched in 1918, but the actual crimes of the Holocaust are of a totally different nature from Stalin's crimes and I see no connection whatever. But although there is no causative connection, comparisons can still be made”. Lord Annan was quoted as saying "Nolte's article may have been sinister, even malevolent, but we have had a great example of an informed debate, of great heart-searching and of a profound examination of the nature of Germany's past and present"”. The German historian Julius Schoeps stated:"I would like stress a seminal factor in the Historikerstreit: The historians who caused this dispute are men in their sixties, that is, men who were old enough to be in the Hitler Youth, Hitlerjugend; men who were perhaps soldiers in the war; men for whom the collapse of the Third Reich turned into a trauma which is inextricably linked to the key terms Holocaust and Auschwitz. Nolte's reaction is, I think, typical of this generation of scholars. Contrary to some historians who assert that Germans should not ask such questions at all, I believe that Germans must ask them. But there is no need for slanted questions and ambiguous statements which whitewash German history. Unfortunately, questions of this kind were posed in the