The commission's report was not "bowdlerised". There is no evidence of any pressure on any of the authors except in the instance of Professor Gerlach's contribution, which in its printed version makes some of the most serious allegations against Toepfer of any of the chapters. It is indeed from Gerlach's contribution that I took Riecke's explanation of why Toepfer had employed him, an explanation that seems entirely plausible both to Gerlach and to myself, whatever the character of the man who advanced it.

Nevertheless, in the light of some of Zimmermann's later researches, the commission's report does now look as if it was pulling its punches in some respects. In particular, the editors' conclusion that Toepfer was not a fellow-traveller of the Nazis seems quite wrong — indeed it would already have seemed wrong to anybody who took the trouble to read the individual chapters. Here it may well reflect the historical approach of the principal editor, Hans Mommsen, the doyen of the "functionalist" interpretation of Nazism, which has achieved much, but which also, as is now clear, underestimates drastically the driving force of ideology in Nazi policy. Toepfer, driven by radical German nationalism rooted in the youth movement of pre-1914 days, took part in the murderous activities of the far-Right Maercker Free Corps in the suppression of revolutionaries after the First World War. In the 1930s and early 1940s his ideology overlapped with that of the Nazis sufficiently to make him happy to collaborate with them; the commission's report reveals once more just how significant that overlap was.

Pinto-Duschinsky is right of course to highlight Toepfer's postwar association with ex-Nazis and anti-Semites. But this was absolutely par for the course with the men who built Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Germany. The administrative head of Adenauer's office, Hans Globke, had drafted an elaborate commentary during the 1930s on the Nuremberg Laws that banned German Jews from marrying "Aryans" and reduced Jews to second-class citizens. There were hundreds of similar cases.

Toepfer's employment of anti-Semites didn't make him an anti-Semite any more than Adenauer's employment of Globke made Adenauer an anti-Semite. The Toepfer archive was not "weeded" to remove incriminating material such as anti-Semitic statements by Toepfer. As Zimmermann says, "the documents in today's Foundation archive...are of such a varied and also incriminating nature that it cannot have been thoroughly ‘cleansed' as Mr Pinto-Duschinsky's formulation implies." Nobody has succeeded in finding a single anti-Semitic statement by Toepfer to date, and until someone does, nobody has any justification in calling him an anti-Semite.

Does pointing out these and similar facts amount to excusing Toepfer or "greywashing" his past? For decades, German elites got away with pretending they bore no responsibility for Nazism's crimes. German nationalism was presented as something entirely different from Nazism. We now know how untrue this was. The idea that present-day Germany is trying to present a "relatively sympathetic view," as Pinto-Duschinsky puts it, of the Third Reich by arguing that Germans were victims as much as aggressors, that the extermination of Europe's Jews was not planned but caused by wartime brutalisation, that anti-Semitism was not widespread before the war, has no basis in reality. The contrary view, very much the orthodoxy, in present-day Germany, has been argued in overwhelming, utterly convincing detail by a vast range of historians in Germany.