news of the Soviet kulak expulsions and the Holodomor did not reach Germany until 1941, so that Soviet atrocities could not possibly have influenced the Germans as Nolte claimed. In a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 29, 1986, Löwenthal argued the case for a "fundamental difference" in mass murder between Germany and the Soviet Union, and against the "equalizing" of various crimes in the 20th century. The German historian Horst Möller, in an essay first published in late 1986 in the Beiträge zur Konfliktforschung magazine, argued that Nolte was not attempting to "excuse" Nazi crimes by comparing them with the crimes of others, but was instead trying to explain Nazi war-crimes. Möller argued that Nolte was only attempting to explain "irrational" events rationally, and that the Nazis really did believe that they were confronted with a world Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy Germany. In an essay entitled "The Nazi Reign – A Case of Normal Tyranny?", first published in Die neue Gesellschaft magazine in late 1986, the political scientist Walter Euchner wrote that Nolte was wrong when he wrote of Hitler's alleged terror of the Austrian Social Democratic Party parades before 1914, arguing that Social Democratic parties in both Germany and Austria were fundamentally humane and pacifistic, instead of the terrorist-revolutionary entities Nolte alleged them to be. Der europäische Bürgerkrieg Another area of controversy was Nolte's 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg (The European Civil War) and some accompanying statements, by which Nolte appeared to flirt with Holocaust denial as a serious historical argument. In a letter to Otto Dov Kulka of 8 December 1986 Nolte criticized the work of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson on the ground that the Holocaust did in fact occur, but he went on to argue that Faurisson's work had admirable motives in the form of sympathy for Palestinians and opposition to Israel. In Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, Nolte claimed that the intentions of Holocaust deniers are "often honorable", and that some of their claims are "not evidently without foundation". Kershaw has argued that Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust denial with his implied claim that the "negative myth" of Nazi Germany was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of Holocaust scholarship by Jewish historians, and his statements that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, who Nolte insists are not exclusively Germans or fascists. In