There was Hans Globke, who had written a legal commentary on the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws, and became the Chancellor's right-hand man. There was General Gehlen, the intelligence chief, who did not mind whether he spied for Hitler or Adenauer. And there was Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, who had merely been a Nazi Party member throughout the Third Reich, an ordinary opportunist, but who later rose to become Chancellor of West Germany.

That was a scandal in your eyes, and in one of your open letters you called on him to resign — for the crime of having been a Nazi. You never let the German Right forget its shady past for one second. But you must have prayed that nobody remembered your own.

Oh yes, you made the most of your moral superiority over those Schreibtischtäter. You pissed on them from a very great height indeed. Except that it now seems that you were one of them. You were a desk criminal, too, only your crimes were committed in the front line and concealed at the desk for the next six decades.

You spent your life signing books, not death warrants. But you were in a different league of culpability from the Kiesingers and Globkes and Waldheims. You, unlike them, were a member of the Waffen SS. The Waffen SS was declared a criminal organisation by the Nuremberg tribunal just after the war.

You knew this, I assume, because you have often said that you were one of the millions of Germans who did not believe the Holocaust could have been perpetrated by the nation of Goethe, until you were convinced by the evidence at the Nuremberg trials.