ABSTRACT
Academic in-fighting is a hallmark of historical controversies in Germany. In spite of a professional distrust in mono-causal explanations, the historian's mindset is not unlike that of a theologian. The term 'totalitarian' had been intellectually out of favour as a discredited Cold War argument unsuitable for the new period of detente. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was the illegitimate child of the Cold War. The collapse of the GDR and German unification happened so fast that they left historians and political scientists flabbergasted. The shadow of the Nazi past was much darker than that of the GDR so that public nostalgia for the Third Reich was out of the question. Members of the Bundestag Commission felt strongly that the anti-Fascist myth could best be exposed by drawing attention to Nazi concentration camps being transformed into Soviet special camps, a fact systematically suppressed by the Socialist Unity Party (SED).
