GERMANY: Germany's leading Third Reich historian and Hitler biographer Joachim Fest has died aged 79, days before the publication of his memoirs telling how his family managed to avoid becoming entangled in the Nazi regime.
The volume, entitled Not Me, is a perfectly-timed reply to Günter Grass's own autobiography, Peeling the Onion, which contains the controversial admission that Grass was a teenage member of the Waffen SS.
The two authors were born just two months apart in 1926 yet became polar opposites: a left-wing author and moralist and a right-wing historian. Grass admits he was an enthusiastic young Nazi while Fest came from a strict, anti-Nazi home.
Together their memoirs, published a month apart, mark the final chapter of the so-called flakhelfer generation: men old enough to have been dragged into the end of the second World War, but young enough not to be personally responsible.
Fest writes of a crucial moment in his childhood when he overheard his mother trying to convince his father, unemployed because of his anti-Nazi views, to join the party to be able to work again. Even if it is a lie, she told him, lies are the only weapon of small people. "We are not small people in a matter like this," Fest remembers his father replying. "Even if all others go along, ego non. Not me."
Fest began his career in radio but joined the Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) newspaper as culture editor in 1973, a position he retained for 20 years.
During his tenure at the newspaper he published an essay by a right-wing historian suggesting that Germans turned to Nazi fascism - resulting in the Holocaust - as a reaction to the threat posed by Bolshevism.
The essay triggered the famous "Historikerstreit" historian dispute and left-wing intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas accused Fest of siding with historical revisionists anxious to whitewash Germany's crimes.
Fest's 1973 Hitler biography, still the standard German-language work, marked a turning point in how Germans viewed the dictator. But, similar to discredited author David Irving, Fest was criticised for empathising with Hitler and using psychological analysis to justify the dictator's crimes.
Similar accusations dogged the autobiography which he co-authored with Albert Speer and the book on which the 2004 Hitler film Downfall was based.
His successor at the FAZ, Frank Schirrmacher, defended Fest's approach as a historian yesterday, saying: "He delivered masterful, ground-breaking psychograms of the perpetrators of National Socialism who, before that, were always portrayed as demons."