The Historikersteit (historian's dispute) was an intellectual and political controversy in West Germany about the way the Holocaust should be treated in history. It took place during the 1980s, and pitted left-wing intellectuals against right-wing intellectuals.

The views of Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas were at the center of the debate, which was conducted almost exclusively through articles and letters to the editor in the newspapers Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

The debate opened on June 6, 1986 when Nolte wrote an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will ("The Past That Will Not Go Away"). Nolte argued that the "race murder" of the Nazi death camps were a "defensive reaction" to the "class murder" of the Stalinist system of gulags. In his view, the gulags were the original and greater horror. In the face of the threat of Bolshevism, it was logical that the German people would turn to Nazi fascism.

Habermas rejected this position but argued that such a debate could be "a kind of settlement of damages" for the Holocaust. His "Eine Art Schadensabwicklung" appeared in the July 11, 1986, issue of Die Zeit.

The debate centered around four main questions:

• Were the crimes of Nazi Germany uniquely evil in history, or were the crimes of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union just as evil, if not more so?
• Did German history follow a Sonderweg or "special path" leading inevitably to Nazism? If so, then most or all of pre-1945 German history bore the taint of the Nazism to come. Furthermore, the existence of a Sonderweg would undermine Nolte's arguement that the Holocaust was a defensive reaction to Soviet crimes, and would instead suggest that the orgins of Nazism go back to before World War One. The West German historians Klaus Hildebrand, Gerhard Ritter, and Andreas Hillgruber rejected the Sonderweg view, while the British historian A. J. P. Taylor and the West German historians Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang Mommsen, Hans Mommsen and Fritz Fischer supported it.
• Were other genocides, including the Armenian genocide and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, comparable to the Holocaust? Many felt that these comparisons tended to trivialize the Holocaust, but others maintained that via these comparisions could the Holocaust be understood properly in the context of the 20th century.
• Were the crimes of the Nazis a reaction to Soviet crimes under Stalin, as Nolte contended? Should the German people bear a special burden of guilt for Nazi crimes, or could new generations of Germans find sources of pride in their history?

Habermas' position was more widely accepted among the German people; Nolte is seen as an apologist for fascism.

External Links

• Nolte's point of view (in German):
• Throwing Off Germany's Imposed History - The Third Reich's Place in History: A Conversation with Professor Ernst Nolte from the Institute for Historical Review.