Historian who confronted Germany with a new and challenging interpretation of its Nazi past
The historian Hans Mommsen, who has died aged 85, persuaded Germans to rethink the catastrophe of nazism. He forcefully rejected what he saw as not just simplistic but inherently apologetic attempts to reduce responsibility for Germany’s disaster to the ideology, intentions and actions of Hitler and his immediate underlings.
He never wavered in his vehement opposition to what he saw as Hitler-centric approaches to the Nazi past. Down to the end of the 1970s, these – which collectively came to be known as the “intentionalist” school – had amounted to orthodoxy among leading German experts on the Third Reich. Mommsen’s interpretation – labelled the “functionalist” approach – instead turned the focus on to the actual practice of the regime.
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