A West German scholar in charge of editing a government-sponsored scientific edition of the letters and diaries of Theodore Herzl has been dismissed because of his recently published thesis that Hitler “created the State of Israel.”
Two Israeli co-editors on the project said they could no longer work with Prof. Ernst Nolte of the Free University of West Berlin because of his attempts to rewrite history.
Nolte maintained that the Jews would eventually come to appreciate Hitler as the individual who contributed more than anyone else to the creation of the State of Israel. He also wrote that Americans would appreciate Hitler as the man who brought their country to the status of a superpower.
The Deutsche Forschungemeinschaft (DFG), the government-backed institution managing the project, has engaged another scholar to complete it.
Meanwhile, Frans Josef Strauss, leader of the conservative Christian Social Union Party in Bavaria, told the Catholic Students Association in Munich this week that the time has come for Germans to “lay to rest the ghosts of the past.” A people cannot live with what he called “a criminalized history.” The Germans, he said, have “the same right to normality as other people.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
