Quoting Michael Parent’s History as Mystery, pages 137–140:
After the German Federal Republic (West Germany) annexed the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1990 (misleadingly described as a “reunification”), GDR official records, libraries, and school texts were systematically purged of materials and ideas that conflicted with the orthodox procapitalist, anti‐Communist, West German perspective.
The prestigious Otto‐Suhr Institute in Berlin was closed and its 230,000‐volume library disbanded, including collections that had replaced the ones destroyed by Nazi book burnings of the 1930s. The institute’s materials on anti‐Semitism were dispersed through auctions, along with its 78,000‐volume collection of leftist history and politics, and the 31,000 volumes pertaining to the conservative connivance that preceded the [Fascist] takeover in Germany.
The willful destruction of any library is egregious. In the case of the Otto‐Suhr Institute, progressive scholars around the world who are studying the history of the Third Reich, Nazism, and anti‐Semitism have been deliberately deprived of a rich informational resource. The dissolution of the institute and its library “is part of a larger pattern, both in Germany and worldwide,” observes Patricia Brodsky.
Public and factory libraries in the former German Democratic Republic “have been burned or emptied of books pertaining to GDR history, Marxism‐Leninism, and the like.” Police raided and temporarily closed down the Central Party Archive at the Institute for the History of the Workers Movement in Berlin, another internationally significant research facility. Alternative bookstores in several German cities were raided, copies of a leftist newspaper seized, and bookstore personnel threatened with prosecution for distributing the “subversive” publication.
Federal Republic officials also launched a concerted campaign to distort or erase the historical record preserved in antifascist memorials and concentration camp museums. One whole wing of the museum at Buchenwald, dedicated to such topics as international solidarity in the camp, the war crimes tribunal, and “the well‐documented continuity between the Third Reich and the political and industrial leadership of the Federal Republic has been dismantled,” reports Brodsky.
In its place there is now a special memorial to postwar internees—who were for the most part [Axis] collaborators implicated in Holocaust crimes. Such assaults on historic materials that shed a critical light on fascism and reactionism are not random. “They illustrate the revival of the Cold War campaign to downplay, obscure, and, where possible, destroy all traces of antifascist culture.”
As might be expected, the struggle to define Germany’s history has extended into education and scholarship. For more than two decades after World War II, critical inquiry into the Third Reich was not encouraged in the Federal Republic. West German schools taught almost nothing about [Fascism] (while East German schools took a vigorously damning approach to the subject).
The erstwhile [Fascist] affiliations of leading figures in the Federal Republic’s economy went unmentioned. [German Fascism] was regarded as a passing aberration. Its horrific crimes were acknowledged but attributed mainly to the personal demonic genius of Adolf Hitler, as was [Germany’s] entire [Fascist] movement.
(Emphasis added.)
[Additional information]
By the 1970s, scholarly studies began to take a more critical tack, leaving no doubt about the enormities of [Fascism]. Yet the process was limited, and many [Axis] sympathizers remained in positions of authority.
Some leading West German historians still did not think too harshly of the Hitlerian past. Biographies were written of Hitler that emphasized his skills and performance, while saying little about the massive crimes he perpetrated against humanity.
Historians like Ernst Nolte seemed to blame [German Fascism] on Communism, arguing that the threat of Bolshevism caused the German bourgeoisie to rally around a militant reactionism. Hitler and his followers feared that the Soviet Communists would target Germany with their fell designs, so the [German Fascists] launched a campaign to save their nation. The war itself was an attempt by Hitler to build a unified West as a bulwark against the Red tide, argues Nolte.
In response, Richard Evans points out that through 1940 and well into 1941, Hitler committed nearly his entire force to subjugating Western Europe, offering not the slightest suggestion in his military conferences and discussions that he feared a Russian attack.
According to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, the [Third Reich’s] leadership believed (correctly) that the USSR would stay out of the conflict for as long as it could, preferring to let the warring capitalist powers exhaust each other.
There are those of us who have argued that the [Fascists] saw the Soviet Union as the ultimate target of their aggression. This differs from saying, as does Nolte, that Hitler was acting to defend the West from a Soviet Union readying for a war of conquest, or that Moscow so menaced the supposedly freedom‐loving politico‐economic élites in Germany as to justify their accepting and, in many cases, actively supporting a monstrous movement like [Fascism].
Nolte and others also downplay the scope and ferocity of [Axis] military brutality during the war, including the Holocaust. Facing the Red Menace, Germany supposedly had no choice but to act decisively and harshly in the East.
Andreas Hillgruber, Joachim Fest, and other well known, neoconservative West German historians share Nolte’s position in part or whole, having made little effort to explore the German Military Archives at Freiburg or captured [Axis] documents and other materials that offer a fuller picture of mass atrocities in the [Axis]‐occupied portions of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Their work, while not identical to outright Holocaust deniers, does have the same effect of blurring the line between fact and fiction, persecuted and persecutor.