

That is what is most comforting." Now 20 years after the first Swedish edition, he says with some pride, that thanks to his book there is a thriving field of historical research on the effect of colonial atrocities on Nazi crimes. We want genocide to have begun and ended with nazism. "These other genocides can still be reasons for, and causes of, the Holocaust." In Exterminate All the Brutes Lindqvist suggests that we have airbrushed our past: "We do not want to remember. "There are very substantial differences between the Holocaust and other genocides," he says. Lindqvist writes: "When Hitler sought Lebensraum in the east it was a continental equivalent of the British empire." For Lindqvist, Nolte's mistake was to look east for Hitler's inspiration. And during the historikerstreit (historians' quarrel) in 1980s Germany, Ernst Nolte provoked fury among fellow intellectuals with his contention that the Holocaust was Hitler's "distorted copy" of Stalin's extermination of the Kulaks. For example, Jewish philosopher Steven T Katz in his 1994 book The Holocaust in Historical Context argued for the "phenomenological uniqueness of the Holocaust". This, to put it mildly, is a controversial view. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application." In the Swede's favourite and perhaps best book, Exterminate All the Brutes, first published in 1992, Lindqvist writes that "the Germans have been made sole scapegoats of extermination that are actually a common European heritage … The ideas he and all other western people in his childhood breathed were soaked in the conviction that imperialism was a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races.
