a "picture of horror of raped and murdered women and children" at Nemmersdorf, but his way of "identifying" with the Wehrmacht meant the Holocaust went unmentioned. Habermas wrote in the second part of his essay, Hillgruber who previously insisted on a "bird's eye" view of the Eastern Front from the viewpoint of the ordinary German soldier now used the perspective of a historian to argue the Allies were always planning on destroying Germany and it was wrong for the Allies to impose the Oder-Neisse line as the new eastern frontier of Germany, which Habermas felt to be a double standard. Habermas wrote Hillgruber had failed as a historian, stating: "Hillgruber is most deeply appalled by the high proportion of university-trained men who participated [in the Holocaust]-as if there were not a completely plausible explanation for that. In short, the phenomenon that a civilized populace let these horrible things happen is one that Hillguber removes from the technical competence of the overburdened historian and blithely pushes off into the dimension of the generally human". Habermas called Nolte the "officious-conservative narrator" who presented a version of history in which the "annihilation of the Jews appears as a regrettable, but perfectly understandable result". Habermas criticized Nolte for claiming that Chaim Weizmann declared war on Germany in 1939 which "was supposed to justify Hitler in treating German Jews as prisoners of war-and then in deporting them". Habermas wrote: “The culture section of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986 included a militant article by Ernst Nolte. It was published, by the way, under a hypocritical pretext with the heading “the talk that could not be delivered”. (I say this with knowledge of the exchange of letters between the presumably disinvited Nolte and the organizers of the conference). When the Nolte article was published Stürmer also expressed solidarity. In it Nolte reduces the singularity of the annihilation of the Jews to “the technical process of gassing”. He supports his thesis about the Gulag Archipelago is “primary” to Auschwitz with the rather abstruse example of the Russian Civil War. The author gets little more from the film Shoah by Lanzmann than the idea that “the SS troops in the concentration camps might themselves have been victims of a sort and that among the Polish victims of National Socialism there was virulent anti-Semitism”. These unsavoury samples show that Nolte puts someone like Fassbinder in the shade by a