Because of the views that he expressed during the "Historikerstreit", Nolte has often been accused of being a Nazi apologist and an anti-Semite. Nolte has always vehemently denied these charges, and has insisted that he is a neo-liberal in his politics. Nolte is by his own admission an intense German nationalist and his stated goal is to restore the Germans' sense of pride in their history that he feels has been missing since 1945. In a September 1987 interview, Nolte stated that the Germans were "once the master race ("Herrenvolk"), now they are the "guilty race" ("Sündervolk"). The one is merely an inversion of the other". Nolte's defenders have pointed to numerous statements on his part condemning Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Nolte's critics have acknowledged these statements, but claim that Nolte's arguments can be construed as being sympathetic to the Nazis, such as his defence of the Commissar Order as a legitimate military order, his argument that the "Einsatzgruppen" massacres of Soviet Jews were a reasonable "preventative security" response to partisan attacks, his statements citing Viktor Suvorov that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler allegedly by an impending Soviet attack, his claim that too much scholarship on the Holocaust has been the work of "biased" Jewish historians, or his use of Nazi-era language such as his practice of referring to Red Army soldiers in World War II as “Asiatic hordes”.