The twelve years of National Socialist rule in Germany are often implicitly said to have special meaning and lessons for the present in a way which would not be true of, for example, the French Wars of Religion. Why else have so many books, conferences, films, journals, memorials, museums and study centres been devoted to it beyond a need to commemorate its millions of victims? The assumption seems to be that the former will have some, usually unspecified, incremental or multiplier effect, sensitising people towards intolerance, racism or signs of analogous developments in the present. This is mostly an entirely laudable endeavour, although one not without its critics. Even if one is increasingly sceptical that this is the case, most historians who think about these questions probably feel obligated to the vague categorical imperative of trying to make the world a nicer place, even if they are sceptical of the sort of ‘scholarship’ of tenured radicals which seeks to change it.

Paradoxically, some of those most intimately acquainted with the most emblematic event of the Nazi period, namely the Holocaust, doubt what its lessons are. The eminent Israeli historian, Yehuda Bauer, seems uncertain if the Holocaust has any intrinsic meaning or serviceable lessons for posterity. Only the Nazis could invest such a lunatic enterprise with meaning or purpose; for the victims it was both incomprehensible and meaningless: ‘the result of a rationally explicable outburst of irrational lust for murder which turned against them for reasons which were external to them’.