Revisionism and the Triumph of Ernst Nolte

Revisionism and the Triumph of Ernst Nolte

By

J. Otto Pohl

Now that the Soviet archives have been partially opened it is clear that several things are incontestable. First, the amount of state violence by the Soviet state against its own citizens from 1918 until 1939 was many orders of magnitude greater than any violence by the regimes of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany during these years. Even Yale establishment historians like Timothy Snyder admit this. Second, a significant number of Jews were involved in this terror especially as officers in the NKVD and especially the branch responsible for administering the GULag in the 1930s. Again establishment historians like Snyder and Yuri Slezkine at the University of California have admitted this fact despite its frequent denial in public discourse particularly by Zionists on the internet.  Three, many of the victims of the Soviet regime were ethnic Germans and starting in 1929 many of them were targeted specifically because they were German. This reached its pre-World War II peak during the “German Operation” in 1937-38 with the execution of some 29,000 ethnic Germans in the USSR. In total the NKVD shot some 46,000 ethnic Germans during these two years (Pohl, The Years of Great Silence, 2022, p. 71). Fourth, these facts were well known in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Refugees from the USSR particularly Black Sea Germans like Georg Leibbrandt and Karl Stumpp were instrumental in popularizing this knowledge. Finally, the first deportation of German Jews to the ghettos in Lodz, Riga, and Minsk in fall 1941 took place at the urging of Alfred Rosenberg as retaliation for the deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and  Kazakhstan. (https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/simon-wiesenthal-center-annual-volume-1/annual-1-chapter-6.html).

This brief rundown of five undisputed facts all strongly support Nolte’s position in the Historikerstreit against Habermass. The Soviet mass violence and terror preceded National Socialist atrocities on a similar scale by two decades. In chronological terms it was certainly more original than the Holocaust. It also involved Jewish communists specifically targeting and killing large numbers of ethnic German civilians. This was most apparent in Ukraine during 1937-1938 where NKVD chief Izrael Leplevski and his deputy Lev Raikhman supervised the mass execution of 18,005 people during the “German Operation” (Pohl, p. 70). Finally, the National Socialist did justify anti-Jewish actions as retaliation for Soviet anti-German actions. The deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan began on 3 September 1941 and Rosenberg urged Hitler to deport German Jews eastward in retaliation on 14 September 1941. Thus we see that the Holocaust was at least in part a reaction to Soviet crimes just as Nolte contended. All of the basic points of Nolte in the Historkerstreit have been conceded by mainstream historians. Nolteism has triumphed even if Nolte himself still remains a taboo scholar whose later work can not be cited positively by American or British historians. In this sense the extreme left as represented by Jacobin is correct in noting that popular histories of Stalinist repression like Applebaum’s Gulag and Red Famine and Snyder’s Bloodlands do in fact adopt without giving proper credit many of the arguments Nolte made in the late 1980s.

None of this should be controversial in 2022. Noting the large number of high ranking Jews involved in Soviet atrocities in the 1930s and the National Socialist reaction to this fact is not a justification or apology for the Holocaust. Nobody claims that pointing out National Socialist mass killings in 1941-1944 is somehow a justification for the mass expulsions, internment in concentration camps, and killings of ethnic Germans in 1945 and 1946. In neither of these cases is the establishment of the chronology of events and full range of motivations of the perpetrators in itself a whitewashing of the later crimes. But, it does provide an explanation for these actions beyond the official establishment line that the perpetrators were just completely irrational people consumed with hatred for no reason whatsoever. Obviously, mass retaliation against whole ethnic populations for the actions of a few is morally wrong. Yet, nobody would attempt to cover the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of World War II without noting the earlier National Socialist crimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Only in the case of the Holocaust are we expected to believe that the victimized ethnicity never had a single member guilty of any wrong doing.