Wolfgang Benz is one of Germany’s best known historians of National Socialism and a frequent commentator in the German media on Germany’s troubled relation to its Nazi past. But it would seem that for over forty years, he himself kept silent about the Nazi career of his dissertation director Karl Bosl.
Today, Benz minimizes the danger of Islamic anti-Semitism and of Islamic jihad as such. He has even gone so far as to equate anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia.” He thus not only displays a completely false assessment of the contemporary political situation. He also relativizes the singularity of the Nazis’ mass murder of European Jews and implicitly encourages a new form of historical revisionism.
How seriously can one take an “anti-Semitism expert” and director of the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism who commemorates the history of Nazi anti-Semitism, but whose memory fails as soon as it is a matter of his own personal history?
