PAUL SCHWARTZ
243
tone. Nolte had reduced the singularity of the concentration camps
to their technical innovation of the use of gas. Fest questioned the
idea that the concentration camps were singular either because of
their technical form or administrative nature. While the monstrous
figure of the bureaucratic executioner should disturb us, can one
really believe that "the genocide of Stalin was achieved in an essen–
tially other, less administrative manner"? We have seen the photos
of the small mountains of shoes, glasses, suitcases and other belong–
ings left by the victims of the Nazi camps. Fest continues, "Still
what justifies us to think that there was not the same in the death fac–
tories of the Stalin era?" Why has the world, and particularily the
Germans, forgotten the victims of the
Gul~g
and of Pol Pot?
Fest issues the usual disclaimer: "No foreign offense
diminishes one's own and no murder can ever exculpate itself by
reference to another." What he expects, rather, is that new reflec–
tions and insights will take "the talked-to-pieces, frequently still
wholly ritually debated issue" and lead to a new, moral accessibility.
His idea of new, moral accessibility is the insight that although
Hitler's will to destroy was not predominantly inspired by the
menace of destruction offered by the Russian Revolution, the
reports that reached Munich from Russia in the spring of 1919,
reports of deportation, murder and extermination of entire popula–
tion groups, gave a "real background" to Hitler's "extermination
complexes. ' ,
Whereas Nolte would make Hitler into an anticommunist reac–
ting to mass murder with mass murder, Fest believes that too much
attention is paid to the Nazis in comparison to other practictioners of
genocide and argues that Hitler's "extermination complexes" were
given support by the Bolshevik terror. Yet even if Fest's analysis
allows some psychological insight into the workings of Hitler's mind,
it is of less help in explaining why so many millions of people were
willing to make his will to destroy a reality. As for Fest's resentment
towards the exclusivity of the world's disdain for the Nazis, he seems
to be complaining that the Nazis have gotten an unduly bad press in
the hope that someone will provide a fairer rating for the mass
murderers of our century. Whether such a rating is at all necessary
bears asking.
Fest's point that there is, allegedly, no strong world con–
sciousness of all the various genocides of the century was picked up
by Christian Meier, the chairman of the "Association of Historians
of Germany. " Writing in the
Franlifurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
Meier felt
