Hitler should not be repressed by Stalin and Pol Pot: on the attempts of German historians to relativize the enormity of the Nazi crimes

The search for a consensual past and the cultivation of an identity-promoting memory are taking different forms. Neither by relativizing the Nationalist-Socialist period and other dark points of German history should historians react to the challenge. Their task is to describe, explain, and present past reality with scholarly means, and then help set the present in as enlightened a relationship as possible to the past