responsible for blocking him from attending the Römerberg Conversations. In the same letter, Nolte described himself as the unnamed historian whose views on the reasons for the Holocaust had caused Saul Friedländer to walk out in disgust from a dinner party hosted by Nolte in Berlin in February or March 1986 that Habermas had alluded to an earlier letter Responding to the essay "The Age of Tyrants: History and Politics" by Klaus Hildebrand that defended Nolte, Habermas wrote: "In his essay Ernst Nolte discusses the 'so-called' annihilation of the Jews (in H.W. Koch, ed. Aspects of the Third Reich, London, 1985). Chaim Weizmann's declaration in the beginning of September 1939 that the Jews of the world would fight on the side of Britain, 'justified'so opined NolteHitler to treat the Jews as prisoners of war and intern them. Other objections aside, I cannot distinguish between the insinuation that world Jewry is a subject of international law and the usual anti-Semitic projections. And if it had at least stopped with deportation. All this does not stop Klaus Hildebrand in the Historische Zeitschrift from commending Nolte's 'pioneering essay', because it 'attempts to project exactly the seemingly unique aspects of the history of the Third Reich onto the backdrop of the European and global development'. Hildebrand is pleased that Nolte denies the singularity of the Nazi atrocities." In an essay entitled "Encumbered Remembrance", first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on August 29, 1986, Fest claimed that Nolte's argument that Nazi crimes were not singular was correct. Fest accused Habermas of "academic dyslexia" and "character assassination" in his attacks on Nolte. In a letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on September 6, 1986 Karl Dietrich Bracher accused both Habermas and Nolte of both "...tabooing the concept of totalitarianism and inflating the formula of fascism". 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 later described Nolte's methods as a "game of confusion", comprising dressing hypotheses up as questions and then attacking critics demanding evidence for his assertions as seeking to block one from asking questions. The philosopher Helmut Fleischer, in an essay first published in the Nürnberger Zeitung newspaper on September 20, 1986, defended Nolte