"It is a notable shortcoming of the literature about National Socialism that it does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in a voluminous literature of the early 1920s: mass deportations and shootings, torture, death camps, extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be "enemies". Nolte wrote the principal problem "for the coming generations...must be liberation from collectivist thinking", which Nolte claimed dominated scholarship on Nazi Germany. Nolte ended his essay with calling for a "more comprehensive debate" about the memory of Nazi Germany that would allow for "the past that will not go away" to finally go away "as is suitable for every past".