Nolte often contributed "Feuilleton" (opinion pieces) to German newspapers such as "Die Welt" and the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung". He was often described as one of the "most brooding, German thinkers about history". The historical consciousness and self-understanding of the Germans form a major theme of his essays. Nolte called the Federal Republic "a state born of contemporary history, a product of catastrophe erected to overcome catastrophe" In a "Feuilleton" piece published in "Die Welt" entitled “"Auschwitz als Argument in der Geschichtstheorie"” ("Auschwitz as An Argument in Historical Theory") on 2 January 1999, Nolte criticized his old opponent Richard J. Evans for his book "In The Defence of History", on the grounds that aspects of the Holocaust are open to revision and so Evans’s attacks on Nolte during the "Historikerstreit" had been unwarranted. Specifically, citing the American political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Nolte argued that the effectiveness of the gas chambers as killing instruments was exaggerated, more Jews were killed by mass shooting than by mass gassing, the number of people killed at Auschwitz was overestimated after 1945 (the Soviets initially exaggerated the death toll at 4 million although the consensus today is 1.1 million), Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir of Auschwitz was a forgery and so the history of the Holocaust is open to reinterpretation. In October 1999, Evans stated in response that he agreed with Nolte on those points but argued that form of argument to be an attempt by Nolte to avoid responding to his criticism of him during the "Historikerstreit".