Holocaust apologist wins German literary prize

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/062100nolte-prize.html

BERLIN, June 20 -- The award of one of Germany's most prestigious 
literary prizes to a historian who has sought to justify the 
Holocaust has ignited a fierce dispute here at a time of conservative 
and reactionary intellectual stirrings in Europe.

The historian, Ernst Nolte, has argued that Hitler's anti-Semitism 
had a "rational core" and that Nazism was in essence a riposte to 
Bolshevism. He received the Konrad Adenauer Prize for literature this 
month, causing an uproar that has filled newspapers with invective 
and divided one of the country's leading historical institutes.

[...]

Accepting the prize, Mr. Nolte said, "We should leave behind the view 
that the opposite of National Socialist goals is always good and 
right." He added that because Nazism was the "strongest of all 
counter forces" to Bolshevism, a movement with wide Jewish support, 
Hitler may have had "rational" reasons for attacking the Jews.

[...]

"The award of the prize to Nolte was a clear political statement 
intended to promote the view that there is no particular stigma to 
Nazism in the light of what some Germans now call the 'Red Holocaust' 
in the Soviet Union," said Charles Maier, a Harvard historian. "It's 
exculpatory in the German context. It's also really scandalous."

[...]

With Haiderism thriving in neighboring Austria, the ground has become 
fertile in Germany for a nationalist and right-wing intellectual 
awakening. It is fed by weariness, even anger, at what is seen as 
Germany's eternal victimization for the Holocaust, and irritation at 
the multicultural message from a Red-Green government.  Mr. Nolte 
took up these themes in his speech. He attacked those who argue for 
"an unstoppable transition toward world civilization." He bitterly 
denounced the "collective accusation" continuously leveled at Germany 
since 1945.

[...]

The historian, the author of books including "Three Faces of Fascism" 
and "The European Civil War," has been well known for his argument 
about Hitler and Stalin since the 1980's.  But never before has a 
center-right institution like the Deutschland Foundation moved to 
embrace him in such a formal way, intimating that at least the right 
of the Christian Democratic Party may be ready to countenance the 
view that the crimes of the Nazis were not unique and have been 
unfairly singled out.

Mr. Haider has made a lot of headway in Austria precisely by 
questioning the "intellectual tyranny" of the left.