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Nazis, the more so since a connection with the crimes of the Soviets
is probable. He draws attention to Hitler's awareness of "Asiatic"
policies of mass murder and, in particular, to Hitler's knowledge of
the Soviet use of a "rat cage," which Nolte claims is the same as the
device that waited for Winston Smith in Room 101 at the end of
George Orwell's
1984.
Nolte probably pursued this weak connection
in an attempt to associate Hitler with the anticommunism of George
Orwell .
Nolte goes on to pose a series of hypothetical questions. He
asks, " ... the following questions must appear as allowable, even
unavoidable: did the Nazis, did Hitler perform an 'Asiatic' deed
perhaps only to that end, because they regarded themselves and
their kind as potential or actual victims of an 'Asiatic' deed? Was
not the 'Archipel Gulag' prior
(ursprunglicher)
to Auschwitz? Was not
the 'class murder' of the Bolsheviki the logical and effective prece–
dent of the 'race murder' of the national socialists? Are Hitler's most
secret actions not, thereby, to be explained in that he had
not
forgot–
ten the 'rat cage'?" Nolte drops any hypothetical questions or semi–
qualifications to state that the destruction of Jews during the Third
Reich "was a reaction or a distorted copy, but not a first action or an
original." Nolte finds the sole innovation of the Nazis to be their use
of poison gas to kill large numbers of people.
In July, J urgen Habermas published the first of two articles on
this theme. Habermas, the most prominent contemporary German
philosopher, took to task not only Nolte, but what he saw as a
general apologetic tendency on the part of a number of historians in
West Germany. The historian Andreas Hillgruber's discussion of
the Allied battle for Germany, for example, shows a conscious iden–
tification with the Wehrmacht troops fighting on the Eastern front
and makes no mention that their resistance allowed the death camps
to remain in operation. Habermas considers these historians to have
opted for "endowment of meaning"
(Sinnstiftung)
at the cost of their
science: "The ideology planners want to provide a revival of the na–
tional consciousness; at the same time, they must also banish the
picture of the traditional archenemy of the nation from the domain
of NATO." Nolte's theory serves this purpose-the crimes of the
Nazis lose their singularity in being made understandable as an
answer to the Bolshevik menace. Auschwitz and the other death
camps are reduced to a technical development-their use of gas
chambers - and they can be explained by a foe who is still present.
Although critical of the work of the apologetic historians,
