Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYnever had {p. 5} an understanding for the talk of the “Auschwitz Lie” inits original and revisionist meaning, which is almost completely anti-Jewish in its tendency; at worst it could be a lie by Höss and other SSofficers like Höttl and Wisliceny.Hence, if I were required to characterize my current position by usingthe common terms, then I would say: I still call myself an orthodoxand an intentionalist. This means in other words: that I have a gravepre-judgment or an obvious prejudice against the revisionists.My 1963 book is insufficiently characterized, though, if it is understoodas a mere articulation of a “theory on fascism.” Fascism in itsthree main manifestations is right from the start defined as a peculiarkind of “anti-Marxism,” and this entails that the inner and outer relationwith the most important and active emanation of Marxism during the20th century, namely Soviet and international Communism, may neverbe lost out of sight, although the French Action française, the ItalianFascism and the German National Socialism are in the foreground ofthe interest due to the issue at hand. In so far Fascism and subsequentlyalso National Socialism had at once been “relativized,” although not inthe sense of challenging moral verdicts, but in the sense of setting historicalrelations. A new situation nevertheless arose only in 1986, ascarce year after the afore-mentioned study of that Israeli historian,namely in the context of the so-called historians’ dispute {p. 6}, whichfound its most emotional intensity due to my thesis expressed in anewspaper article that there is an inextricable connection between “Gulag”and “Auschwitz.” 7 In the matter itself this was nothing else but abrief formulation of my interpretation of the 20th century – certainly ina catchphrase style: that two totalitarian cleansing ideologies developedtheir specific realities of mass extermination each, and that they thusdetermined the face of the first half of the century, but indirectly alsothe further course [of history] up to the [19]90s. The characteristic differencebetween my “historical-genetic” version of the theory on totalitarianismand the “classic” concept by Hannah Arendt and Carl J. Friedrichconsisted of the fact that the talk was no longer merely about parallelsbut about causality and interdependency. That the factuality of thefinal solution was not put to doubt by this does not require any proof,but the same is true for its singularity, because I did not at all undertakean equalization, but instead distinguished exactly between the “social”extermination of classes by the Bolsheviks and the “biological, in fact265