Wehler is a leading critic of what he sees as efforts on the part of conservative historians to whitewash the German past. He played an important part in the
Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the 1980s. The debate began after the publishing of an article by the philosopher Ernst Nolte in the German newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6 of 1986. In his article, Nolte claims that there was a connection by cause between the Gulag and the Nazi extermination camps, the previous supposedly having effected the latter, which he called an
überschießende Reaktion ("overshooting reaction"). This infuriated many (and mainly left wing) intellectuals, among them Wehler and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. They strongly rejected Nolte's thesis and presented a case for seeing the crimes of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil (something which in the view of Nolte's defenders, Nolte never disputed in the first place). Wehler was ferocious in his criticism of Nolte and wrote several articles and books that by Wehler’s own admission were polemical attacks on Nolte. In his 1988 book about the
Historikerstreit entitled
Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit?: ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" (
Exoneration of the German Past?: A Polemical Essay about the 'Historikerstreit'), in which Wehler criticized every aspect of Nolte's views, and in which Wehler called the
Historikerstreit a "political struggle" for the historical understanding of the German past between "a cartel devoted to repressing and excusing" the memory of the Nazi years, of which Nolte was the chief member, against "the representatives of a liberal-democratic politics, of an enlightened, self-critical position, of a rationality which is critical of ideology". Besides for Nolte, Wehler also attacked the work of Michael Stürmer as “a strident declaration of war against a key element of the consensus upon which the socio-political life of this second republic has rested heretofore" During the
Historikerstreit, Wehler was one of the few historians who endorsed Jürgen Habermas method of attacking Andreas Hillgruber by creating a sentence about “tested senior officials in Nazi Party in the East” out of a long sentence in which Hillgruber had said no such thing under the grounds that right-wing historians like Hillgruber deserved any and all forms of abuse. The British historian Richard J. Evans, who was normally a fierce critic of Hillgruber felt that Habermas and Wehler went too far in attacking Hillgruber with the line about "tested senior officials".
In another essay during the
Historikerstreit, Wehler wrote of Nolte and Hillgruber's that:
"Hitler supposedly believed in the reality of this danger [of Communism threatening Germany]. Moreover, his dread of being overwhelmed by the "Asiatic" Bolsheviks was allegedly the prime motivating force behind his policies and personality. Nolte restated his axiom-one which perhaps reflects the naiveté of an historian who has devoted his life's work to the power of ideologies-in a blunter, more pointed form than ever before in the fall of 1987: "To view Hitler as a German politician rather the anti-Lenin", he reproved hundreds of knowledgeable historians, "strikes me as a proof of a regrettable myopia and narrowness". Starting from his premise, and falling under the sway of the very fears and phobias he himself has played up, Nolte once again defiantly insisted: "If Hitler was a person fundamentally driven by fears-by among others a fear of the "rat cage"-and if this renders "his motivations more understandable", then the war against the Soviet Union was not only "the greatest war ever of destruction and enslavement", but also "in spite of this, objectively speaking [!], a preemptive war.While Nolte may like to describe his motive as the purely scientific interest of (as he likes to put it) a solitary thinker in search of a supposedly more complex, more accurate understanding of the years between 1917 and 1945, a number of political implications are clearly present. The basic tendency of Nolte's reinterpretation is to unburden German history by relativizing the Holocaust. Nolte claims the Nazi mass murder was modeled on and instigated by the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist regime and the Gulag; that it countered this "Asiatic" danger by imitating and surpassing it. This new localization of "absolute evil" in Nolte's political theology leads away from Hitler, National Socialism and German history. It shifts the real origins of fascist barbarism onto the Marxist postulate-and the Bolshevik practice-of extermination. Once again the classic mechanism of locating the source of evil outside one's own history is at work. The German war of destruction certainly remains inhuman. But because its roots supposedly lie in the Marxist theory and Bolshevik class warfare, the German perpetrator is now seen to be reacting in defensive, understandable panic to the "original" inhumanity of the East. From there, it is only one more step to the astounding conclusion that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the war of conquest and extermination that followed were "objectively speaking"-one can hardly believe one's eyes-"a preemptive war...An even closer connection between academic and political interests is apparent in Andreas Hillgruber's Zweierlei Untergang, where the plight of the German Army on the Eastern Front and the civilian population of eastern Germany is treated without any countervailing consideration for the fate of the Jewish and Slavic "subhumans", the members of the German opposition, and incarcerated groups, or indeed for the Europeans subject to German occupation, and the German people themselves, all caught up in a senselessly prolonged "total war". Such a position unavoidably carries immensely oppressive political implications. His laments over the destruction of the "European center", Germany's intermediary position between East and West, and her loss of great power status is shot through with countless political value judgments. His guiding position (later admitted openly), according to which the loss of the eastern provinces and the expulsion of the German population westward represented "probably the most burdensome consequence of the war", is in itself a matter for political discussion.Such political implications can only lead us down the wrong path-not to mention a scientific dead-end. In all likelihood it was Hillgruber's aversion to methodological and theoretical reflection that was largely responsible for this wrong turn. Be that as it may, the political effect of Zweierlei Untergang has been downright fatal. It has led to the return of an unreflecting nationalism, in which sympathetic identification with the German Army on the Eastern Front and with the German civilian population has become dogma. Such a worldview has led an otherwise extremely knowledgeable historian to extrude and exclude the victims of National Socialism from his narrative, an omission that would once have been unimaginable but that we now see in black and white. The consequences of a naive attempt to identify with the subjects of historical writing could hardly be demonstrated more drastically"
In
Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit?, Wehler writing not only of the work of Nolte, but also of the work and intentionist theories about the Holocaust of Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, Joachim Fest and Michael Stürmer, declared:
"This survey is directed-among other matters-against the apologetic effect of the tendency of interpretations that once more blame Hitler alone for the 'Holocaust'-thereby exonerating the older power elites and the Army, the executive bureaucracy, and the judiciary ...and the silent majority who knew".
The American historian John Lukacs writing of
Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? in his 1997 book
The Hitler of History noted that he was impressed by many of Wehler's points, but felt that he made them with an unnecessarily aggressive and polemical style.
Speaking of the political importance of the
Historikerstreit, Wehler described the debate as "The
Historikerstreit is, in sum, more than a strictly scholarly controversy within scholarly limits". In a 1989 essay, the American historian Jerry Muller criticized Wehler as a "leading Left-Liberal historian" who used the
Historikerstreit to unjustly smear neo-conservatives with the Nazi tag Muller went on to write of the "interesting peculiarity of the political culture of German Left-liberal intellectuals" such as Wehler, in that Wehler referred to repression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union as "the excesses of the Russian Civil War", and argued that there was no comparison between Soviet and German history. Instead Wehler suggested that the only valid comparisons were between German history and those of other Western nations. Muller criticized Wehler for his lack of interest in Soviet history, and unwillingness to engage in a comparative history between Eastern and Western nations, instead of just Western nations.
Along somewhat similar lines to the stance he took during the
Historikerstreit, in September 1990 Wehler strongly condemned a newspaper opinion piece by Harold James which suggested national legends and myths were needed to sustain national identity.
