May Day 2017
The Growth of German Militarism and the Rewriting of History
By
Sven Wurm
4 May 2017
This speech was delivered by Sven Wurm, Spokesman for the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Humboldt University), to the 2017 International May Day Online Rally, held on April 30.
In order to wage new imperialist wars and commit fresh crimes, history must be rewritten, and the criminal role of German imperialism minimised and denied. A few days ago, the journal of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers published an interview with an historian, who drew the following comparison between Stalin and Hitler:
“I’ve compared Hitler to Stalin. Stalin was a psychopath, Hitler was not. Stalin enjoyed violence, Hitler did not. Hitler knew what he was doing. He was a pencil pusher who did not want to know about the bloody consequences of his deeds.”
Already in 2014, the same person had told Germany’s most widely read weekly magazine, Der Spiegel: “Hitler was not a psychopath, he was not vicious. He did not want to talk about the extermination of Jews at his table.”
The author in both cases is Jörg Baberowski, who holds the chair of Eastern European history at Humboldt University in Berlin.
May Day 2017 Sven Wurm
For anyone hearing this, the purpose of these remarks is perfectly clear: it is an attempt to play down the crimes of the Nazis and rehabilitate Hitler. Everyone knows of the abominable crimes committed by the Nazis, and is well aware that Hitler “enjoyed violence.”
For almost seventy years, many in Germany and internationally believed it was impossible to rehabilitate the Nazis. The wounds left by the dreadful memory of World War II, the attack on Poland, the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, and the…