Kershaw's opinion, Nolte is attempting to imply that Holocaust deniers are perhaps on to something. In Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, Nolte put forward five different arguments as a way of criticizing the uniqueness of the Shoah thesis. These were as follows: There were other equally horrible acts of violence in the 20th century. Some of the examples Nolte cited were the Armenian genocide; Soviet deportations of the so-called “traitor nations,” such as the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans; British “area bombing” in World War II; and American violence in the Vietnam War. Nazi genocide was only a copy of Soviet genocide, and thus can in no way be considered unique. Nolte argued that the vast majority of Germans had no knowledge of the 'Holocaust while it was happening Nolte claimed that the genocide of the Jews was Hitler's personal pet project, and that the Holocaust was the work of only a few Germans who were entirely unrepresentative of German society Contradicting the American historian Raul Hilberg, who claimed that hundreds of thousands of Germans were complicit in the Holocaust, from high-ranking bureaucrats to railway clerks and locomotive conductors, Nolte argued that the functional division of labour in modern society meant that most people in Germany had no idea of how they were assisting in genocide. In support of this, Nolte cited the voluminous memoirs of German generals and Nazi leaders, such as Albert Speer, who claimed to have no idea that their country was engaging in genocide during World War II. Nolte maintained that to a certain degree Nazi anti-Semitic policies were justifiable responses to Jewish actions against Germany, such as Weizmann's alleged 1939 “declaration of war” on Germany. Finally, Nolte hinted at the possibility that the Holocaust had never happened at all. Nolte claimed that the Wannsee Conference never took place, and argued that most Holocaust scholarship is flawed because most Holocaust historians are Jewish, and thus “biased” against Germany and in favour of the idea that there was a Holocaust. The British historian Richard J. Evans criticized Nolte, accusing him of taking too seriously the work of Holocaust deniers, whom Evans called cranks, not historians. Likewise, Evans charged that Nolte was guilty of making assertions unsupported by the evidence, such as claiming that SS massacres of Russian Jews were a form of counterinsurgency, or taking at face value the self-justifying claims of German generals who professed to be