prius of the "racial murder" of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler's most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?" Nolte wrote the principal problem "for the coming generations...must be liberation from collectivist thinking", which Nolte claimed dominated scholarship on Nazi Germany. Nolte ended his essay with calling for a "more comprehensive debate" about the memory of Nazi Germany that would allow for "the past that will not go away" to finally go away "as is suitable for every past". Nolte subsequently presented a 1940 book by American author Theodore N. Kaufman entitled Germany Must Perish!. The text contends that all German men should be sterilized, evidencing, according to Nolte, the alleged "Jewish" desire to "annihilate" Germans prior to the Holocaust. An August 1941 appeal to the world by a group of Soviet Jews seeking support against Germany was also cited by Nolte as evidence of Jewish determination to thwart the Reich. Nolte argued that the Nazis felt forced to undertake the Holocaust by Hitler's conclusion that the entire Jewish population of the world had declared war on Germany. From Nolte's point of view, the Holocaust was an act of “Asiatic barbarism” forced on the Germans by the fear of what Joseph Stalin, whom Nolte believed to have significant Jewish support, might do to them. Nolte contends that the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack provides a parallel to the German "internment" of the Jewish population of Europe in concentration camps, in light of what Nolte alleges was the "Jewish" declaration of war on Germany in 1939 which Weizmann's letter allegedly constitutes. Subsequently, Nolte expanded upon these views in his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945 (The European Civil War, 1917–1945) in which he claimed that the entire 20th century was an age of genocide, totalitarianism, and tyranny, and that the Holocaust had been merely one chapter in the age of violence, terror and population displacement. Nolte claimed that this age had started with the genocide of the Armenians during World War I, and also included the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, Maoist terror in China as manifested in such events as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, compulsory population exchanges