Dr. Rainer Zitelmann wrote: ” A maximum of one million died in Auschwitz.”
written inn Rainer Zitelmann „Adolf Hitler – eine politische Biographie“ Muster Schmidt Verlag, Göttingen Zürich, 1998, 3. Auflage Seite 155
In einer von Zitelmann herausgebenen Schrift heisst es, die Juden hätten sich zuviel beschwert., dies führte zu seiner Entlassung beim Ullstein Verlag
His second most famous quote is “The jews complained too much in Auschwitz.” Therefore he was sacked by Axel Springer.
“Schon in 1997 warnte The New York Times: “…Zitelmann has more recently become a promoter of right-wing, ultranationalist positions that many people in Germany find quite scary…“ ” Siehe auch Journal of Foreign Affairs: “Let us take his favorite in the rogues’ gallery of the German neo-right, a certain Herr Rainer Zitelmann. “The German new right,” Heilbrunn writes, “does not have a politician like [the rightist Austrian populist] Jîrg Haider. What it has are intellectuals like Rainer Zitelmann of Die Welt, founded by newspaper magnate Axel Springer. Zitelmann is the impresario of the new right.”
What Heilbrunn either does not know or fails to tell us is that Mr. Big, which he never was, is strictly yesterday. In 1993, when Heilbrunn apparently conducted, and concluded, much of his research — you never quite know when the conversations he quotes took place — Zitelmann might have looked like an “impresario.” He was head of Die Welt’s weekend culture section, which he purposely and insistently used as a platform for neo-rightist lore — his own stuff and that of his comrades in the Fatherland-saving business. Too bad for the American reader that Heilbrunn does not bring the story up to date. For, alas, Zitelmann, the master intellectual, proved too much even for the editorial staff of the right-of-center daily. After 50 editors signed a petition against the paper’s “slide to the right” under Zitelmann, the “impresario” was dismissed from his editorial position.
In due time, Manfred Geist, the editor in chief who had brought Zitelmann to Die Welt, was also relieved and replaced by a centrist, Thomas Lîffelholz. Heilbrunn’s “impresario” of the new right was not fired outright, which is very hard to do under German labor law, but shunted into a staff position; when last heard from, he was apparently selling insurance on the side. So much for the multiplying tentacles of the new right.Nor does the story end here. Like a metastasizing cancer, Heilbrunn wants us to believe, Zitelmann allegedly used his position in the media business to implant the right authors and their books into Germany’s collective consciousness. Before his disastrous move to Die Welt, Zitelmann was an editor at Ullstein Verlag, a sterling name that goes back to the Jewish publishing family of the Weimar Republic. But in another misreading, Heilbrunn calls Ullstein Publishing at the time “mainstream” — which is correct, if you are willing to call The Washington Times mainstream, too.
What Heilbrunn again either does not know or does not tell, lest it ruin his indictment, is that Ullstein was then co-owned by Herbert Fleissner, a rightist-conservative Sudeten German publisher who, in 1985, had fused his Langen-Muller with Springer’s Ullstein in a joint holding called Ullstein-Langen-Muller Verlag. Deliberately testing the waters after reunification in 1990, Fleissner had allowed Zitelmann and his henchmen to publish a series of neo-nationalist, revisionist, and anti-left books — as Fleissner had in 1981 published the glorification of the Waffen SS by memoir-writing “paleo-rightist” Franz Schonhuber, who would later become mini-fuhrer of the tiny right-wing Republikaner party. Here, in the middle of this budding trahison de clercs, we also find Karlheinz Weissmann, another central figure in Heilbrunn’s panopticon of would-be Alfred Rosenbergs and Joseph Goebbelses, “young German historians” producing “a seemingly endless stream of books . . . that make for eyebrow-raising reading.”
With Zitelmann’s active connivance, Weissmann was indeed invited to write a book on the Nazi period for the distinguished PropylÑen German History series (PropylÑen, please note, had also been acquired by Fleissner in the Ullstein deal). The main thrust of the book is, as Heilbrunn correctly points out, that “in neither its intentions nor its actions did Nazi Germany differ from its enemies.” Moreover, Weissmann declared that it was high time to “demystify Nazism” and to reach a “normalization” of historical understanding — a German code word for finally burying the Nazi past. Naturally, this raised a storm of indignation in the press and among historians, but that was not the main moral of the tale.
The real point, again, one that Heilbrunn ignores lest it ruin his case, was the German reaction to the “re-reeducation” shenanigans of Zitelmann, Weissmann, et al. If this was a cancer, the German body politic soon unleashed powerful antibodies. In this case, the soi-disant right-wing Axel Springer Verlag, undoubtedly irked by the nasty publicity, took back both Ullstein and PropylÑen from Fleissner, effective January 1, 1996, dissolving the joint holding. A few months later, the Weissmann volume, which, according to Heilbrunn, had become a “sacred text” to the author’s “new right followers,” was expelled from PropylÑen’s backlist.
STILL SELF-FLAGELLATING
So much for the attempt of the Zitelmanns to take over Germany.” aus Mr. Heilbrunn’s Planet: On Which the Germans Are Back Josef Joffe et al. From Foreign Affairs, March/ April 1997
