Talk:Martin Broszat/Archive 1

Archive 1

Friedländer debate

I simply corrected a mischaracterization of John Lukacs' position re Broszat's "plea." Lukacs did not call it "long overdue" or "most necessary." He did call it a desideratum--hence desirable--and supported Broszat's overall argument, but he certainly didn't call it long overdue. To the contrary, he said it had been obvious for quite some time and that it had been ongoing for thirty years before Broszat wrote his article. In other words, not so much long overdue as long after-the-fact. Biasedbulldog (talk) 06:47, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Application for Nazi Membership

Clearly this shouldn't detract from the man's whole career, but it does seem odd that it's not mentioned: "In 1944, Broszat had applied for membership to the Nazi Party, a fact that he subsequently hid his life long." -Helmut Walser Smith, 'The Continuities of History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century' (New York: Cambridge, 2008), 31. Biasedbulldog (talk) 04:51, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Ian Kershaw, an enormously respected historian who worked with Broszat, calls his "presumed party membership . . . a red herring." Broszat, he says, "never hid the fact that he had been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth. To have admitted his membership of the party itself would have not damaged him in the Institut [für Zeitgeschichte]." -Ian Kershaw, “Beware the moral high ground,” Times Literary Supplement 10 October 2003, reprinted with permission in H-Soz-u-Kult, 24 February 2004, <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/id=418&type=diskussionen>.Biasedbulldog (talk) 06:43, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Done. Perhaps something from Berg's critique should be added to this article, but at present, all I have is the link to the article by Kershaw above, and that is probably not the best source, given that Kershaw is defending Broszat.--A.S. Brown (talk) 17:52, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Neutrality problems

There have been recently quite lot of deletions of properly sourced content. In opposition to this, the following needs to be considered:

1) Using Broszat's own writings to summarize his views is perfectly acceptable. We do that all the time with the politicians and celebrities when we cite what they say in speeches and interviews. The same goes with intellectuals. The standard for views is different for the standard with actions. It is a bit problematic when using memoirs as a source for somebody's actions and views-for example, the article on Admiral Horthy cites his memoirs to prove that was opposed to war with Czechoslovakia as he only wanted to revise the Treaty of Trianon peacefully. Admiral Horthy's memoirs are not a reliable source as has been established that he lied about quite a few things, and his reasons for opposing Czechoslovakia in 1938 were more due to Hungary's backwardness than anything else. The fact that he ordered the invasion of Ruthenia in 1939 are scarcely the actions of a man opposed to war. Getting back to Broszat, if we were to use Broszat's own memoirs, had he written them, as a source may pose problems with statements of fact, such as about controversy over the fact that he had joined the NSDAP in 1944 and then lied about it. But when it came to citing his own writings on views on a subject there is nothing with it. The rule about reliable third party sources for a historian's views does not apply to his or her own writings. This argument that that this article is not neutral just because it uses Broszat's own writings to summarize his views is wrong.

And note also that the previous version pointed out that he criticized Ernst Nolte in 1986 for pushing this patently anti-Semitic argument that the Jews declared war on Germany in 1939 because Chaim Weizmann wrote a letter to Neville Chamberlain promising the support of the World Zionist Organization to Great Britain, which gave Hitler the right to "intern" the Jews in the same way that the United States government interned Japanese-Americans. This is an outrageous argument on a number of levels. True, the U.S. government did intern the Japanese-Americans in 1942, but this is now widely felt to be unjust and the American government later on apologized, an aspect of the Japanese-American internment that Nolte had no interest in. And anyhow, Hitler did not just "intern" the Jews, butt sought to exterminate them, which is a completely thing from what happened to the Japanese-Americans, the vast majority of whom survived the interment. Nolte's suggestion that the Japanese-American interment and the Holocaust as both legitimate responses on the part of the state to potentially disloyal minorities is malicious, false and overwhelmingly rejected by historians. The clear implication of this line of argument is that the Jews brought the Holocaust down on themselves-a point that is further reinforced by the fact in Nolte's essay "Between Myth and Revisionism: the Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s", where he makes the argument, the general theme is the need for a "revisionist" view of Nazi Germany. History stays the same, but the memory of the past changes. Nolte used the example of how after the American Civil War, the "Lost Cause" interpretation which depicts the Confederate leaders as noble, honorable, but misguided American patriots became the dominant one. The popularity of films like The Birth of Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), which are probably the best cinematic representations of the "Lost Cause" viewpoint show just widely accepted it became. At the time he was wrote his essay in 1980, the "Lost Cause" interpretation was still the generally accepted American viewpoint, through it since come under attack by black Americans for glorifying slavery and white supremacy. The "Lost Cause" is no-where near as popular as it used to be, and this argument that displaying the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of "Southern heritage" has become a rather unpopular one, through it still has its defenders like Donald Trump. What is very disturbing is Nolte's argument that just the "Lost Cause" interpretation became the standard American way of remembering the Civil War, that something was needed for the memory of Nazi Germany, and that people should remember the Nazi leaders as honorable, but misguided German patriots. That's where Nolte brings up this argument about the Jews declaring war on Germany in 1939, where he very clearly implies that if the Jews suffered in the Holocaust, it is only because of the "war" that they themselves started against Germany, and Germans should not feel bad about that.

And as the article had previously noted, Broszat pointed out quite correctly that Weizmann's letter was not a declaration of war nor did Weizmann have the legal power to declare on anybody. Finally, Weizmann was not writing on behalf of the Jews of Europe nor did Nolte considered the fact that it was only natural that a British Jew like Weizmann might have reasons to support his country against Nazi Germany. This vile and disreputable argument about Weizmann declaring war on Germany goes back to a 1939 article in the Völkischer Beobachter, which described Weizmann's letter to Chamberlain as a Jewish "declaration of war" on the Reich. Now, all that is left is merely the statement that Broszat called Nolte an obnoxious crank without explaining why. One suspects that somebody is not entirely comfortable with the fact that anti-Semitic arguments about the Holocaust as a reasonable German response to the Jews "declaring war" on Germany were being made by mainstream German intellectuals as late as 1986. The previous version noted Broszat wrote that this argument about Weizmann's letter being a "Jewish declaration of war" would not surprising if came from a "right-wing radical publicist with a dubious educational background", but this is not acceptable at all if it is made by an university professor. What Broszat was talking about when he wrote if the German people were to have a better future, they needed to reject these "perversions of history" prompted by Nolte with the suggestion that the Nazis were honorable and noble men who were just a little misguided in their policies, and Germany needed an American style "Lost Cause" myth. Broszat was quite right in pointing this out, but somebody seems to feel that is a NPOV violation, which is most curious indeed. How is that a violation of neutrality? Do the majority of historians today believe that Weizmann's letter was a "Jewish declaration of war" and Hitler was right to "intern" the Jews as a result?

Broszat was a Nazi in his youth, and that is not to his credit. By his own admission, he was a pretty enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth and he did join the NSDAP in 1944. And as even his disciple Ian Kershaw has noted, in his letters to Joseph Wulf defending Dr. Wilhelm Hagen, he does not come across very well. One suspects that Broszat was acting under the influence of Hans Rothels who in charge of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institution of Contemporary History) in Munich at the time-it is noteworthy that once Broszat finally got away from Rothels's influence, how his writings about the Nazi period become much more critical than what they were before. There has been a lot of nonsense written about Rothfels, so let's take a moment to examine him. Yes, Rothels was born Jewish, but he converted to Lutheranism to make himself a German. Yes, there is no reason why Deutschtum and Judaism should be in conflict, but in the Imperial and Weimar periods, there was a general feeling that one could not have a dual identity. Almost all German liberals at the time took it for granted that the best thing German Jews could do was convert to Christianity and erase their Jewish identity completely in order to be German (German conservatives sometimes were willing to accept converted Jews and sometimes were not-it was matter of how prejudiced the conservative was in question). Even retaining vestigial Jewish identity meant that a German Jew was not considered to be completely German as having a dual identity in being both German and Jewish was socially unacceptable. German universities in early 20th century were not willing to have German Jews as professors because they were not felt to be proper Germans, and it was de rigueur that a Jew would have to convert to Christianity first to be even considered for a professorship. Even then, most German universities were not willing to accept converted Jews. Victor Klemperer converted to Lutheranism in 1912, the same year that Rothfels did, but despite being one of the world's leading authorities on 18th century French literature ended up as a professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden, a second-rate university because none of the first-rate German universities wanted somebody like Klemperer on their faculties. Rothfels was more lucky in getting a position at the University of Königsberg, but unlike Klemperer, Rothfel's writings on Ostforschung ("eastern research"), where he argued the Treaty of Versailles was wrong because the Poles were too stupid to run their own state were politically useful in the 1920s.

The same sort of intolerance for any sort of dual identity in Imperial Germany also explains the Germanisation campaign against the Polish minority because it was felt that one could not be Polish and German at the same time-one could be either one or the other with no compromise possible (even liberals like Max Weber supported the Germanisation campaign for precisely that reason). It was only recently in the last 30 years or so that having a dual or plural identity in Germany has become socially acceptable, and even now there are people who argue against granting German citizenship to Turkish "guest workers" under the grounds that a dual German-Turkish identity is impossible and dangerous. Significantly, the argument against citizenship for the Turkish "guest workers" is that the Turkish immigrants will never assimilate and completely erase their Turkish identities, and one should not have a plural German-Turkish identity. Rothels was one of those German Jews who wanted be fully German by erasing any sort of Jewish identity that he might have. Indeed, he was so enthusiastic about being fully German that he displayed chauvinistic and ultra-nationalist views, fully supporting the Germanisation campaign against the Polish minority and later on tried to prove that Germany needed to control Poland for its own good, the classic excuse for imperialism. One cannot not help but suspect that Rothfels's uber deutsch mentality was an attempt to fit in, to prove that he had really erased his Jewish identity by being être plus royaliste que le roi. In a 1932 letter to a friend, Rothfels said he was voting for Hitler in the presidential election and urged his friend to do likewise. Finally,in 1933-34 Rothfels tried very hard to join the NSDAP and have himself classified as a "honorary Aryan" under the grounds that his scholarly writings showed his commitment to the "national" cause with regard to Eastern Europe. The fact that Rothfels was born and at least nominally grew up Jewish meant the Nazis wanted nothing to do with him, but the point is that he wanted to be a Nazi. He didn't have a problem with the Nazis; the Nazis had a problem with him. So this whole argument about Rothfels being a "Jewish" historian whose ultra-nationalist writings about German history (to say nothing of his wildly anti-Polish accounts of Polish history) shows his "objectiveness" is bogus.

After the war, Rothfels did have some interest in confronting the Nazi past, which is how he got involved in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, but there were limits to the questions he was willing to ask. During his American exile, Rothfels was very closely associated with Henry Regnery, and that his American books were published by Regnery Publishing gives one a pretty good idea of his ultra-conservative politics. The general theme of the books about German history published by the Regnery Publishing in the 1940s-50s was that Germany was a nation unfairly victimized by the Allies, and the Rothfels's Regnery books fitted right in with that message. Some of the Regenry "classics" on the subject were The High Cost of Vengeance by Freda Utley, where she argued the Allied powers were conducting genocide against the Germans and Politics, Trials and Errors by Maurice Hankey, where he argued that the Allies had no right to try German and Japanese war criminals. The fact that Rothfels felt comfortable with hanging around with Regenry, whose politics can be easily guessed by the books he was publishing, says a lot. It is noteworthy how Broszat, after Rothfels retired, got more willing to ask difficult questions. One rather suspects that it was Rothfels who pulled the strings against Wulf, as it was not just Broszat, but several other historians from the Institute of Contemporary History who took up Dr. Hagen's cause. After all, if Dr. Hagen wanted the help of the Institute of Contemporary History to defend his reputation, who better to go to than its director? One cannot help, but suspect that this was a trade-off. Fritz Bauer, the crusading German Jewish prosecutor who brought some of the staff of the Auschwitz death camp to trial in 1964 wanted the help of the historians from the Institut für Zeitgeschichte as expert witnesses, a request that Rothfels was opposed. But in late 1962, Broszat together with Helmut Krausnick and Hans Buchheim from the Institute all agreed to serve as expert witnesses for the up-coming trial, over the opposition of Rothfels. There might have been a trade-off here, where the historians who agreed to help out Bauer at the trial agreed to assist Rothfels with his cause of helping Dr. Hagen.

Leaving aside the subject of Rothfels' bad influence on Broszat, there is considerable evidence that Broszat moved away from his Nazi past over time. The cited statement from Ian Kershaw that Broszat felt guilty about his past and that much of his interest in the Nazi period was to explain why he was a Nazi as a young man was deleted. But the uncited statements in this article that imply Broszat was anti-Semitic and a Nazi apologist were not deleted. It is seems odd that Broszat, who was controversial in Germany for his call for Germans to honestly fact the Nazi past (even if he did not always do himself) should be tagged in this manner-the implication being his line of argument is somehow anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. The beginning of the article at present declares about Broszat's membership of the Nazi Party: "This only came out after his death, but did not seem to trouble his academic supporters. The concealment raises serious questions which have yet to be fully resolved". The statement from Kershaw, who is one of the most respected historians writing about Nazi Germany today and who was a protegee of Broszat, which was deleted clearly proves that his Broszat's "academic supporters" are troubled by that. Likewise, note how Broszat's criticism of the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes was truncated and tones down his criticism of Barnes quite a bit. Broszat's statement from his review of David Irving's book Hitler's War about Hitler's "totally irresponsible, self-deceiving, destructive and evilly misanthropic egocentricity and his lunatic fanaticism", which clearly proves that he was not a Nazi apologist was deleted. Likewise, the way in which Broszat was extremely critical of Irving, who is in fact a Nazi apologist and a Holocaust denier, was truncated down to a mere sentence saying that he was critical of Irving's handling of sources. It does odd that somebody deletes all that, but in leaves in place the statement about the "serious questions" about Broszat's scholarship in place. By deleting most of the material from Broszat's very fierce review of Hitler's War together with his criticism of Nolte in the Historikerstreit, the article at present seems to be giving credence to this uncited argument about the "serious questions". There is very something very perverse about how a German historian who sought to ask difficult questions about the Nazi period should be presented here as a crypto-Nazi. It most curious that an editor concerned about trimming the article should delete all sorts of information sourced to RS, but leave the unsourced statements that make out Broszat was a sort of crypto-Nazi.

2) Much of the deletion gives one a bare-bones view of Broszat, which actually distorts his position. The previous version noted, using a third-party RS by the way, of his critique of the intentionist position about German foreign policy by noting he had pointed out with the Romanian coup attempt of 1941 that two different factions of the German government were supporting different sides. The SS had supported the Iron Guard's coup attempt while the Auswärtiges Amt and the Wehrmacht supported General Antonescu-something that proves Broszat's point about the Third Reich being a disorganized jumble of feuding bureaucracies. The present version just says that Broszat thought that Andreas Hillgruber was wrong in his famous book about German-Romanian relations only because Hillgruber used the archives of the Auswärtiges Amt as his main source. Broszat's point was the SS conducted its own foreign policy independent of and against the Auswärtiges Amt, which the reader would not know at present. The material that was deleted from the historian Rebecca Haynes summing up Broszat's account about the 1941 Romanian coup seems to have been done to weaken Broszat's case. Why is it that material based on Broszat's own writings gets deleted because that is not neutral, but a third party RS also gets deleted as well? At the same time, the uncited statements about the "serious questions" get left in place? This seems very much like POV-pushing. If the reader were to know one faction in the German government was supporting the coup in Bucharest while another faction in the German government was working to put down the same coup, then the reader might draw the conclusion that the Nazi government very was incredibly disorganized and inefficient, just what Broszat said it was. And Broszat's account also supports his conclusion that Hitler was not making all of the decisions in foreign policy because if he was, then this incredible situation where one faction in the government was trying to overthrow Antonescu while another faction was trying to save him should not had occurred.

And note also how Broszat's point that in the period 1933-38 that the Nazi regime carried out contradictory policies towards Poland was also deleted. Some of the Nazi leaders wanted to invade Poland while others wanted to have Poland as an ally against the Soviet Union. If Hitler had a master-plan, then this situation would not have occurred. In this regard, please note that the Wehrmacht, whom many people seem to think were the "good guys" of Nazi Germany were all for invading Poland while Hermann Göring wanted to enlist Poland as an ally. At least for a time in the 1930s, Göring was a good friend of the Polish Foreign Minister, Colonel Jozef Beck, whom he often went hunting with. Indeed, if Hitler really have a master-plan, it begs the question why Göring went out of his way to befriend Beck and tried to persuade him to ally himself with the Reich if Germany was always planning to invade Poland. It may have been a trick to fool Beck, but if it was a trick, it made Göring look bad, and he did not like to look bad. Anyhow, there is nothing from contemporary sources to support the view that Göring's bromance with Beck was just an elaborate trick. In 1935, Göring went on a hunting trip with Beck, and promised Hitler that he would try to get him to sign an alliance-nowhere in the transcript does Göring say anything about this being a trick. As it was, Beck declined the alliance offer and nothing came out of it. Beck did not want an alliance with Germany, and seems to have thought that having Göring as a friend was a good way to make a German invasion less likely. As Broszat pointed out, the contradictory views held by the Nazi leaders about Poland, at least before 1939 weakens the thesis that Hitler had everything planned out. Note also at the famous Hossbach conference in 1937, Hitler said he was going to invade Austria and Czechoslovakia, but left open the question about attacking Poland, talking in the terms that suggested that he had not made up his mind on that one. There is of course the objection to Broszat's claim that Hitler had no plans at all. Namely, Hitler wrote in the 1920s about his plans to invade the Soviet Union and colonized it with millions of Germans while expelling and killing some of the local people while enslaving the rest. Given that he was actually did try to do this with Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Broszat's claim that the idea of lebensaum ("living space") was just a "metaphor" is not generally accepted by historians. Hitler also did the same thing with Poland, but he did not say anything in the 1920s about Poland, through his reference to colonizing "Russia and her vassal states" may have been a reference to Poland. True, Poland was not a "vassal state" of the Soviet Union in 1925 when he wrote that in Mein Kampf, but Hitler was not well informed about Eastern Europe. But at the same time, the fact that Hitler did some plans is of course not the same thing as saying he had everything planned out far in advance-is that really possible for somebody to plan out everything that want to do twenty years in advance?

The idea that Hitler did not have a master-plan upsets people because it weakens the "demon" view of Hitler and makes him seem more human, in the sense that he had doubts and confusion about what he wanted to do. Broszat did not share the David Irving view of Hitler as a really good guy, but he presented him as a more human figure. People like the "demoniacal" view of Hitler who had everything planned out long in advance because it makes it easier to blame everything that went wrong on one especially evil individual while more or less letting everybody else off the hook. Broszat's point about how the functionaries of the Nazi state spent a disproportionate amount of time in bureaucratic turf battles with each other, and that the Third Reich was an incredibly inefficient government with different branches of the German state pursuing contradictory policies in competition with one another at the same time is universally accepted by historians. Broszat's point about the 1941 Romanian coup attempt is just one of the many examples he was able to find that supports his wider conclusions. By deleting most of what was written about Broszat's conclusions about the 1941 coup the reader would never know how and why he reached that conclusion. At present, the article does tell the reader what Broszat's conclusions were, but it does not give examples that he used in support of them, which seems to have been done to have weaken his case. Note also how right after the sentence stating Broszat was a functionalist, the following which was cited to a RS was deleted: ""Broszat argued that the Nazis wanted to have "revolution in society" but because they needed the co-operation of the traditional elites in business, the military and the civil service, they turned their energy and hatred on those groups such as Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally ill that the traditional elites did not care about." It seems that somebody does not like the fact that the traditional elites in Germany by and large co-operated with the Nazi regime, perhaps it weakens the thesis that the Nazi period was a "freakish aberration".

The history of Paragraph 175 and together with Germany's treatment of gay survivors of the concentration camps does lent much support to Broszat's argument that historians need to stop treating Nazi Germany as an "island of abnormality" in German history, the "freakish aberration' with no connection to what happened or after. In 1871, Paragraph 175 of the German penal code declared homosexual sex illegal. In 1935, Paragraph 175 was amended to declare any "expression of homosexuality" illegal. So under the 1935 version of Paragraph 175, if somebody came out of the closet and said they were gay, then that was illegal. What is really interesting is that the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 stayed on the statute books in East Germany until 1957 and West Germany until 1969. Right up until the fall of 1969, West German homosexuals, in some cases survivors of the concentration camps, continued to be imprisoned under Hitler's law of 1935 as any "expression of homosexuality" was illegal. What is striking is the way that mainstream opinion in the 1950s-60s defended the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 as Chancellor Adenauer put it in 1962 as a "healthy law" that was worth keeping. The fact that Adenauer could tell journalists in 1962 that not anything Hitler did was evil, and at least in regards to homosexuals he was in the right without causing any controversy shows the continuity of views about homosexuality from the Nazi era to the 1960s. The end of Nazi Germany in 1945 did not mean the end of the attitudes that made the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 possible. Furthermore, West Germany never paid any compensation to gay survivors of the concentration camps. The 1953 laws on compensation say that people who suffered for "political, racial and religious" reasons were eligible for compensation. Sexual orientation is not mentioned, and those gay survivors who ask for compensation were all turned down under the grounds that were convicted of Paragraph 175 and therefore their persecution was legal. The general attitude in West Germany even after the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 was repealed in 1969 was that German homosexuals got what they deserved in the concentration camps and therefore did not deserve any compensation. By the time that German public opinion started to feel guilty about what was done to the homosexuals, all of the gay survivors of the concentration camps were dead. So in regards to LGBTQ history, the Nazi era was not an aberration, but merely expressed the continuity of German homophobia. So what Broszat was trying to get by calling historians to integrate the Nazi period into the wider sweep of German history, and it is little troubling that all this got deleted. Even more so, usually when I point out around here that the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 stayed in effect until 1969 and Germany never paid any compensation to gay survivors because most Germans felt that they got what they deserved, all of this gets deleted. There seems to be a number of editors around here uncomfortable with very well established facts. If one visits the ruins of concentration camps in Germany like Ravensbrück, Dachau, and Buchenwald, one will notice that the plaques honoring the memory of those who died and suffered at those camps were very revealingly put up in the 1960s. Most Germans did not feel guilty about what happened in those camps in the 1950s and hence no plaques. Changes in social attitudes tended to be generational. The guilt for Nazi crimes was mostly borne not by the Nazi generation, but rather by the "Hitler youth generation", of which Broszat was part of and even more so by the "68er" born after 1945. Generally speaking, the younger a German is, the more likely he or she does not feel proud of the Nazi past. Broszat as a member of the "Hitler Youth generation" born in the 1920s is a member of the transitional generation between the generation that embraced National Socialism and the post-war that generation that rejected it.

It is surprisingly that Nolte called for a "Lost Cause" treatment of Nazi Germany, so there was already one. Anybody who has ever the book The Myth of the Eastern Front by Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies will be well aware of just how much similar the popular memory of the Eastern Front in Germany is to the "Lost Cause" treatment of the Confederacy-a comparison that Smelser and Davies make directly. Indeed, there are few lines of continuity between how Nazi propaganda portrayed the war in the East and how it was portrayed in West Germany, right down to using the same language like describing the Red Army as the "Asiatic horde" and calling Red Army soldiers "beasts in human form". This picture of the Wehrmacht as a group of heroic, honorable and noble men, the supreme "military professionals" who are admirable in every sense of the word and superior in every way to their opponents, and fought to protect "European civilization" from destroyed by the "Asiatic hordes" of the Red Army, essentially says that Hitler had it right, at least in regards to the Soviet Union. In this rendering, Operation Barbarossa, the "crusade against Bolshevism", is not longer a war of conquest and genocide, but instead just a noble fight to protect "European civilization" that sadly the Wehrmacht lost. Even then, no skill is credited to the Red Army, who just presented as a mindless "Asian" mass that the Wehrmacht outfought in every battle, and was only overwhelmed by superior numbers. This picture of the Eastern Front, which is drawn from Nazi propaganda with its emphasis on the Red Army as a brutal "Asian" force threatening "European civilization" with destruction, which was very popular in West Germany from 1945 onward as anyone who has ever read a memoir of a German veteran of the Eastern Front can arrest. The "myth of the Eastern Front" was challenged first in the late 1970s by a group of younger historian, who significantly born after 1945, but it didn't become mainstream until 1994 when a photo show about war crimes of the Wehrmacht was put on to immense controversy. It is the older generations of Germans who cling most firmly to the "myth of the Eastern Front", which is still very popular in certain quarters in Germany even today, and the younger generations who are mostly likely to reject it. Broszat as a member of the "Hitler Youth generation" was willing to challenge certain taboos about German history, but he never took on that one. Note the way that Broszat directed most of his fire in essay "Where the Roads Part" against Nolte, not Hillgruber.

It is true that most historians do not accept Broszat's "weak dictator" thesis, but even then, there is much evidence to support his claims of muddle and confusion. Note the way that Hitler gave orders to two of his gauleiters, Arthur Greiser and Albert Forster, to "Germanize" the part of north-west Poland annexed to Germany in 1939 with "no questions asked". Greiser, who had ferocious hatred of Poles, started to expel all of the Poles from his gau while Forster simply made the Poles in his gau sign a form saying they had "German blood" and only the ones who refused to sign. When Greiser, supported by Himmler, complained to Hitler that Forster was letting a great many Poles who probably did not have German blood stay in his gau, Hitler just shrugged his shoulders and said not to involve him. This particular example is from Kershaw, but it shows that even through Hitler gave orders, he was perfectly content to allow his followers carry them out in utterly contradictory ways. The degree of latitude that Hitler allowed his followers when carrying out policies does support Broszat's point that one cannot blame everything on Hitler because his followers had a great deal of freedom to work out for themselves what they wanted to do. For those who want to blame everything that went wrong in German history on one especially evil individual, the work of functionalist historians like Broszat and Kershaw makes for difficult reading.

What exactly is the problem with the quote from [Gavriel David Rosenfeld|Gavriel D. Rosenfeld]] wrote about Broszat's call for "historization" that:

In the 1980s, the German historian Martin Broszat famously argued that overtly moral analyses of the Third Reich suffered from their embrace of a "black-and-white" perspective that drew too rigid a dichotomy between perpetrators and victims, obscured the era's gray complexity, bracketed off the Third Reich from "normal" modes of historical analysis (such as an empathetic perspective towards the historical actors themselves) and prevented it from being integrated into the large sweep of German history... At the same time, an overly moralistic view runs the risk of mythologizing history and transforming it into a collection of moral ethical lessons that, over time, can easily become stale and cease to resonate within society at large. It was for this reason that German historian Martin Broszat in the 1980s called on German to "historicize" the Nazi era by abandoning their simplistic black-and-white image of the Third Reich as a story of demonic villains and virtuous heroes and replacing it with a grayer perspective that recognized the period's immense complexity.

The main issue here seems to be is that is favorable to Broszat, and somebody does not like that. Likewise, Broszat's statement that no self-respecting German historian should associate himself/herself with the attempt to "drive the shame out of the Germans" during the Historikerstreit was deleted as a supposed violation of NPOV rules. All that statement does is sum up where Broszat stood in the Historikerstreit-it does not say whatever he was right or not, just what his view was on a dispute that attracted much media attention in West Germany in 1986 and is hence notable.

Broszat's claim about Nazi disorganization and that not everything was the work of Hitler was very controversial when he first made it in the 1960s. By now, Broszat's conclusions are almost universally accepted by historians, through not by the wider public. The popular picture of the Third Reich is that of a perfect totalitarian regime with Hitler making all of the decisions, which Broszat himself often noted is apologistic. It does give the impression that in face of this alleged monolithic regime that there was nothing that ordinary people could do while also reducing the functionaries of the Nazi state down to automatons following Hitler's orders. The fact that Hitler really did not involve very much in decision-making, especially in regards to domestic policy, gave civil servants far more room to make policy than what many people believed that they had under Hitler. Broszat's point about Hitler being a weak dictator is generally not accepted by historians with most historians arguing that Hitler just a lazy dictator who did not like to make decisions very much, which is a very different thing from unable to impose one's will on the bureaucracy. But Broszat is considered to be a very important historian as he was one of the first to challenge the popular thesis of the monolithic totalitarian Nazi state, and to question the argument that ordinary Germans were just passive objects in the Nazi period, manipulated and controlled by the state. The previous version explained why that was so. Now at present, the reader would not know that, which actually seems to be very subtle form of POV-pushing. The conclusions of Broszat's work that one cannot blame everything that happened in Nazi Germany on Hitler alone is upsetting for those who favor the viewpoint that Nazi Germany was a "freakish aberration" from otherwise admirable history of Germany, and the article is at present edited in such a way to make the reader feel that Broszat was all wrong. Most people don't like the functionalist thesis about the Holocaust, not the least because most of them don't understand it, and it was helpful to have an article here that presented the work of a leading functionalist historian-now all we have is an article saying Broszat was a functionalist without saying why.

If no-one objects, I would like to restore this article to its better state. Best wishes and cheers!--A.S. Brown (talk) 05:31, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Citation style

The article contains a mix of several styles. I'm willing to do the clean-up, so if anyone has a style preference, including manual versus templates, please let that be known. SarahSV ^(talk) 04:12, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Dear Sarah, I would prefer Harvard if that is OK with you. --A.S. Brown (talk) 09:42, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi A.S., that could mean several things in this context. At the moment, the article uses long cites on first reference, then short cites (Smith 2019, 10). It doesn't separate the long cites by placing them in a "Works cited" section, which is a bit of extra work. It also for the most part doesn't use templates, although I used a few for archived articles. If you like, you could post a link to an article with the style you prefer. SarahSV ^(talk) 06:21, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

NPOV tag

Does anyone mind if I remove this? SarahSV ^(talk) 02:06, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Dear Sarah, I have no objections. Thank you for all your good work here. Cheers!--A.S. Brown (talk) 09:43, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm removed it. SarahSV ^(talk) 06:21, 23 December 2019 (UTC)