Indeed, Nolte moved ever further to the Right. In 1986 he unleashed the Historikerstreit, the “Historians’ Dispute”, in a newspaper article, “The Past that will not pass away”, that still has the power to shock. Nolte demanded that Germany draw “a line [Schlussstrich] under the [Nazi] past” and he sought to demonstrate that there was nothing new about the Holocaust “with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing”. Nolte posed his thesis in a series of rhetorical questions, insinuating that Hitler and the Nazis committed genocide against the Jews only because they feared annihilation by the Bolsheviks: “Wasn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ more original than Auschwitz?” The response to Nolte’s bombshell was a public scandal, creating an international sensation that still resonates today. His principal opponent was Habermas, the left-wing philosopher who is still, 30 years later, Germany’s leading public intellectual. Habermas deliberately polarised the debate by suggesting that there was a conspiracy of “neoconservative” historians to promote a “Nato philosophy”, downplaying the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes in order to bolster Germany’s place in the Atlantic Alliance. Other historians in the firing line, such as Michael Stürmer and Joachim Fest, who did not share Nolte’s far-Right politics or apologetic attitude to the Nazis, nevertheless felt stung into responding to Habermas. He in turn gathered numerous supporters. The furore lasted for two years.

The Historians’ Dispute’s long-term effect has been to exclude Holocaust denial from the academic world; one consequence was the 1996 David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial, now the subject of a Hollywood film. Yet Nolte’s writings took on an ever more anti-Semitic hue, as he suggested that Hitler had been entitled to take measures against the Jews (even if not mass murder) because the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had aligned his movement with the Allies in 1939. State and society distanced themselves from such grotesque arguments: Angela Merkel pointedly refused to share a podium with Nolte at a prizegiving ceremony. But Nolte, whose academic reputation was further undermined by a series of increasingly eccentric and extremist books, lived to see his ideas inspire the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD (“Alternative for Germany”), which in the last two years has risen to become a major force in German politics.

The AfD claims that the Nazi past is unfairly used to bully Germans into accepting mass immigration. After Nolte’s death, Die Welt ran an article under the headline: “He said first what the AfD now thinks.” The author, Richard Herzinger, pointed to the similarities between Nolte’s relativisation of the Holocaust and the views about German identity of the AfD’s party chairman, Alexander Gauland: “I believe that Auschwitz, also as a symbol, has destroyed a great deal in us.” The AfD seeks to rehabilitate Nazi terminology, such as Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”), which had been taboo since 1945. If in next year’s federal elections the AfD can repeat its success last month in pushing Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats into third place in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and ejecting them from power in Berlin, Nolte will have gained a posthumous victory in his campaign to vindicate his master, Heidegger.