 Many of Stürmer's critics in the "Historikerstreit" such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, accused Stürmer of attempting to white-wash the Nazi past, a charge Stürmer vehemently rejected.In response to Stürmer's geographical theories about how Germany's "land in the middle" status had forced authoritarianism on the Germans, Kocka argued in an essay entitled "Hitler Should Not Be Repressed by Stalin and Pol Pot" published in the "Frankfurter Rundschau" on September 23, 1986 that “Geography is not destiny” Kocka wrote that both Switzerland and Poland were also "lands in the middle", and yet neither country went in the same authoritarian direction as Germany.Martin Broszat accused Stürmer of attempting to create an "ersatz religion" in German history that Broszat argued was more appropriate for the pre-modern era then 1986.