Reading the comments at http://forums.archivists.org/read/messages?id=10842 , I cannot help but wonder if anyone actually read my article beyond the title. I don't condemn the display of Nazi primary sources as such, but the way this is done at archive.org. And the bias that most of the German texts on this website are indeed nazi propaganda materials, old and new, as if nothing else would have been written. Maybe many years of Hollywood movies (in the US) and The Sun (in Britain) have shaped that idea of Germany, which is nevertheless wrong in many respects.

Another common reaction at archivists.org (and in other forums) to my article is to answer immediately with the question about communist materials. This is actually a very common right-wing argument (the most famous war between German intellectuals in the last thirty years was about this very topic, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit ). But there's a big difference, between the historical crimes (National Socialism was completely racist, Communism only partly, but mostly political at least of some sort), but even more between the ideology. Communist theory and propaganda mostly reads like something many people still would gladly endorse, its goals are not bad per se. What they did in the name of this ideology is evil, not what they wrote about it. Nazi goals, nazi theory and nazi propaganda, on the other hand, are intrinsically racist and murderous. Saying "I praise international solidarity, I will fight for equality of all mankind" is something profoundly different to saying "I praise my own people which I consider to be a race, and I will fight for the extinction of all Jews". However, this seems hard to understand from an American point of view that values freedom of speech over pretty much everything else. As long as no nudity is involved, of course.