long been current, and not only for Hitler and his satraps. Many of these found their way to the NSDAP from the Deutschvölkisch Schutz-und Trutzbund [German Racial Union for Protection and Defiance], which itself had been called into life by the Pan-German Union. Hitler's step from verbal anti-Semitism to practical implementation would then have happened without knowledge of and in reaction to the atrocities of the Stalinists. And thus one would have to overturn Nolte's construct, for which he cannot bring biographical evidence to bear. As a Hitler biographer, Fest distanced himself from this kind of one-sidedness by making reference to "the Austrian-German Hitler's earlier fears of and phantasies of being overwhelmed". It is not completely consistent that Fest admits that the reports of the terrorist methods of the Bolsheviks had given Hitler's "extermination complexes" a "real background". Basically, Nolte's proposal in its one-sidedness is not very helpful for explaining or evaluating what happened. The anti-Bolshevism garnished with anti-Semitism had the effect, in particular for the dominant elites, and certainly not just the National Socialists, that Hitler's program of racial annihilation met with no serious resistance. The leadership of the Wehrmacht rather willingly made themselves into accomplices in the policy of extermination. It did this by generating the “criminal orders” and implementing them. By no means did they merely passively support the implementation of their concept, although there was a certain reluctance for reasons of military discipline and a few isolated protests. To construct a “casual nexus” over all this amounts in fact to steering away from the decisive responsibility of the military leadership and the bureaucratic elites." Mommsen wrote it was no accident that Stürmer sat on the editorial board of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the same newspaper that run the essays by Nolte and Fest denying the "singularity" of the Holocaust given that Stürmer's self-proclaimed mission was to give Germans a history that would inspire national pride. Mommsen wrote: "What is taking place at present is no conspiracy. A better description would be that national sentiments, long dammed up and visible only in marginal literature, are coming together in an unholy alliance and seeking new shores". Mommsen wrote the question of the "singularity" of the Holocaust was legitimate, but the motives of Hildebrand and Stürmer were political rather than scholarly, to end the "German obsession with guilt". Mommsen wrote" "To accept with resignation the acts of screaming injustice