Wehler was a leading critic of what he saw as efforts by reactionary historians to whitewash German history. He played an important part in the "Historikerstreit" (historians' dispute) of the 1980s. The debate began after an article by the philosopher Ernst Nolte was published in the German newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" on June 6 of 1986. In his article, Nolte claimed that there was a causal connection between the Gulag and Nazi extermination camps, the previous having supposedly affected the latter, which he called an "überschießende Reaktion" ("overshooting reaction"). That infuriated many (mainly left wing) intellectuals, such as Wehler and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who strongly rejected Nolte's thesis and presented a case for seeing the crimes of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil, which Nolte's defenders claimed that Nolte had never disputed in the first place.