Snyder has been welcomed by Central and Eastern European governments, which have been promoting highly undesirable initiatives within the EU formally to establish “impartiality” between Nazi and Soviet “totalitarianism” (the term “totalitarianism” itself being a throwback to Cold War thinking). In practice, such an approach has come to involve an almost complete emphasis on Communist misdeeds. In Vilnius, the Museum of Genocide Victims consisted until recently of exhibits devoted to Communist victims alone despite the fact that the building had served as the Gestapo headquarters. Finally, a single basement “Holocaust room” was set up in token response to heavy international pressure.

The dogma of “double genocide” — Nazi/Communist equivalence — was declared in the Prague Declaration of 2008 signed by Vaclav Havel among others and promoted by the Czech government. In 2009, the European Parliament endorsed the same doctrine in a resolution on “European conscience and totalitarianism”. This called for the establishment of a Platform of European Memory and Conscience specialising in the subject of totalitarian history and for the proclamation of August 23 as a Europe-wide day of remembrance of victims of “all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes”. In adding that they were to be remembered “with impartiality”, the resolution clearly hinted that Jewish victims of the Holocaust had unjustifiably claimed favourable historical treatment. The Platform for European Conscience and Memory was duly set up in 2011 in Prague with partial EU funding. In 2012, an initiative of German and Polish politicians led to the creation by the Platform of a legal group to draw up proposals for an international institution of justice devoted to “crimes committed by the Communist dictatorships”. These are merely a few of the initiatives by official European bodies to shift the focus of historical attention to terror under the Communist regimes which governed much of the European continent until 1989-90.

In the UK too, there have been official attempts ahead of David Cameron’s negotiations leading to the forthcoming referendum on British membership of the EU to influence historical perceptions. When the regius professor of history at Cambridge, Christopher Clark, who had written sympathetically about Germany’s role in the events leading to the First World War, was knighted in June 2015, his honour was awarded not on academic grounds but as part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s list for his contribution to Anglo-German relations.

On June 26, 2015, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh paid a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The Duke’s mother had been declared a “righteous gentile” by Yad Vashem for her role in hiding Jews in Greece during the German occupation. The dignified and carefully arranged event came right after the Queen’s speech at a state dinner in Berlin in which she went out of her way to put the visit into context. It had been preceded by another royal visit to Dresden (thus implying matching British guilt for bombing the city in 1945). The visit to Belsen would “underline the complete reconciliation between our countries. Germany has reconciled with all her neighbours. I pay tribute to the work of the German statesmen since the Second World War who reinvented Germany and helped to rebuild Europe.”