Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYmeta-biological extermination” of peoples and races by the NationalSocialists.Nevertheless a storm of polemics and personal denigration broke outafter the publication of my article, which produced more than 1,000articles and three dozen books within the first years. That my interpretationhad been explained and substantiated much more thoroughly in1987 in the voluminous book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945[The European Civil War 1917-1945] in contrast to my brief article of1986, did not {p. 7} change the negative verdict of those who, withoutbeing aware of it, orient themselves by the apparent unambiguity of the[book] Faschismus in seiner Epoche. When I pleaded for a scientificdispute with the revisionists in 1993 in my book Streitpunkte. Heutigeund künftige Kontroversen um den Nationalsozialismus [Points of Contention.Current and Future Controversies about National Socialism],almost the entire published opinion considered it to be clear that I didnot only advocate a “relativization of National Socialist Crimes,” butthat I had even gotten alarmingly close to the “Holocaust deniers.” Tome, in turn, it became clear that for the new orthodox it was not primarilyabout the factuality and singularity of the final solution, but thatan “absolute” character should be ascribed to it, which tries to ban evena differentiating comparison. 8 Hence I cannot deny that I also harbor agrave pre-judgment and insofar a strong prejudice against these “anti-Revisionists.” For I consider their kind of polemics as unscientific, nay,even as anti-scientific.{p. 8} Scientific attitudes and scientific methods in the historicalsciences can only be characterized in a series of steps.The first step involves “eliciting.” All facts relevant to the correspondingissue have to be brought to light as completely as possible,and with a methodical approach which is conscious of the goal. He whorefuses to acknowledge certain matters of fact or even merely pretendedor apparent facts, because they are unsympathetic to him or do not “fitinto the picture,” violates the ethos of this step of science. But here sciencecan very well be the matter of the individual. When HeinrichSchliemann searched for the remnants of Troy, he followed his intuitionsand was not integrated into a “school of thought” or a collective.As every scientist, he merely had to rely on the pre-scientific level oforal memory and on unmethodical, sometimes even mythological witnessaccounts, from which he had to pick his choice.266