Hans-Ulrich Wehler - Later Career

Later Career

During the "Goldhagen Controversy" of 1996, Wehler was a leading critic of Daniel Goldhagen, especially in regards to the latter's claims in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners about an alleged culture of murderous German "eliminationist anti-Semitism", though Wehler was more sympathetic towards Goldhagen's claims concerning the motives of Holocaust perpetrators. The Canadian historian Fred Kautz called Wehler an anti-Semite for his attacks on Goldhagen Kautz wrote that "He doesn't dare say it openly that he thinks Goldhagen is incapable of writing about the Holocaust because he is a Jew...It's flabbergasting what perverse ideas are dreamt up in the studies of German professors, where according to an ancient legend, one seeks the truth unperturbed, "sine ira et studio" ("with diligence and without anger"): the victims of history should not be allowed to write their own history!"

In 2000, Wehler became the eighth German historian to be inducted as an honorary member of the American Historical Association. Wehler accepted this honor with some reluctance as previous German historians so honored have included Leopold von Ranke, Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke, none of whom Wehler considers proper historians.

In a 2006 interview, Wehler supported the imprisonment of David Irving for Holocaust Denial in Austria on the grounds that "The denial of such an unimaginable murder of millions, one third of whom were children under the age of 14, cannot simply be accepted as something protected by the freedom of speech". In recent years, Wehler has been a leading critic of Turkey's possible accession to the European Union.