 Friedländer maintained the comparison of Nazi Germany with Fascist Italy as modernizing dictatorships did not work because Fascist Italy did not commit genocide, and he argued that it was genocide that made the Third Reich unique.Friedländer felt that Broszat's "longue durée" view of German history with stress on the continuities-many of them positive-between different eras would diminish the Holocaust down as an object of study.The first problem for Friedländer was that the Nazi era was too recent and fresh in the popular memory for historians to deal with it as a "normal" period as for example 16th century France.