THE RUDOLF REPORT

11. HUNTING GERMAR RUDOLFGerman attempts to come to terms with their past—originally a purelymoral impetus—had become a weapon in day-to-day political discussionand intrigues.That ‘coming to terms with the past’ could lend itself to misuse fordirty schemes is obvious. From my own experience, I can think ofthree notable cases, where prominent German figures were driven outof office and their reputation destroyed by political and media smearcampaigns. In such cases, the media and/or competing colleagues eitheruse (allegedly) ‘brown spots’ in the CV of the attacked individuals’WWII history, or they distort and/or instrumentalize ‘politicallyincorrect’ statements certain individuals made in public or privateabout Germany’s WWII past. 541 Whatever the CV or the statementsabout the past of the victims of these campaigns are; the treatmentwhich they receive by colleagues and the media must arouse the suspicionthat the German past is being used today as a weapon of politicalintrigue against undesirables in one’s own political party, in other parties,or in general against any unwelcome professional competitor.The question of how true the historical picture is that hides behindthe ‘coming to terms with the past’ Mohler handled only peripherallyin this early edition of his book. His new book, which I read in the fallof 1989, goes into this question very thoroughly and thereby naturallybrings up the question of the validity of historical revisionism—something which first became clear to me while reading the book.That I got hold of this book was due not so much to its contents,which I previously knew nothing about, but more to my interest in theanalyses of a Swiss political scientist, someone writing from what Iconsidered to be a neutral position.…and an apolitical American…This Swiss author also reported about a study on the alleged ‘gaschambers’ at the Auschwitz concentration camp. This study, so Mohler,had been prepared by an American expert for execution technologies,who had come to the conclusion that there had never been anygassings with poison gas in Auschwitz. One of his main argumentswas the absence of traces of the poison gas supposedly used in thewalls of those locations identified as homicidal ‘gas chambers’. Sincethis was a quite intriguing argument, I decided to order a copy of this541 The names of those persons are: Hans Filbinger, Philipp Jenninger, and Werner Höfer.309