FAZ, 6 September 1986 In a letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on September 6, 1986, Karl Dietrich Bracher that nothing new was being presented by either side. Bracher wrote that he approved of Joachim Fest's essay “Encumbered Remembrance“ about the moral equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes, though he remained pointedly silent about Fest's support for the theory of Ernst Nolte of a “casual nexus” with German National Socialism as an extreme, but understandable response to Soviet Communism. Bracher argued that "...the "totalitarian" force of these two ideologies [Communism and National Socialism] seized the whole human and seduced and enslaved him". Bracher accused both Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Nolte of both "...tabooing the concept of totalitarianism and inflating the formula of fascism". Bracher complained about the "politically polarized" dispute that was blinding historians to the "comparability" of Communism and National Socialism Bracher ended his letter by writing that neither National Socialism nor Communism lost none of "...their respective "singular" inhumanity by comparisons. Neither a national nor a socialist apologetic can be supported on that basis". "The Impoverished Practice of Insinuation" The historian Eberhard Jäckel in an essay first published in the Die Zeit newspaper on September 12, 1986, argued that Nolte's theory was ahistorical on the grounds that Hitler held the Soviet Union in contempt, and could not have felt threatened as Nolte claimed. Jäckel wrote, in an essay entitled "The Impoverished Practice of Insinuation: The Singular Aspect of National-Socialist Crimes Cannot Be Denied", "Hitler often said why he wished to remove and kill the Jews. His explanation is a complicated and structurally logical construct that can be reproduced in great detail. A rat cage, the murders committed by the Bolsheviks, or a special fear of these are not mentioned. On the contrary, Hitler was always convinced that Soviet Russia, precisely because it was ruled by Jews, was a defenseless colossus standing on clay feet. Aryans had no fear of Slavic or Jewish subhumans. The Jew, Hitler wrote in 1926 in Mein Kampf, "is not an element of an organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The gigantic empire in the East is ripe for collapse". Hitler still believed this in 1941 when he had his soldiers invade Russia without winter equipment." Jäckel attacked Nolte's statement that Hitler had an especially intense fear of the Soviet "rat cage" torture by arguing that Hitler's statement of February 1,