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The American historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld wrote about Broszat's call for " historization " that :" In the 1980s, the German historian Martin Broszat famously argued that overtly moral analyses of the Third Reich suffered from their embrace of a " black-and-white " perspective that drew too rigid a dichotomy between perpetrators and victims, obscured the era's gray complexity, bracketed off the Third Reich from " normal " modes of historical analysis ( such as an empathetic perspective towards the historical actors themselves ) and prevented it from being integrated into the large sweep of German history ... At the same time, an overly moralistic view runs the risk of mythologizing history and transforming it into a collection of moral ethical lessons that, over time, can easily become stale and cease to resonate within society at large.

It was for this reason that German historian Martin Broszat in the 1980s called on German to " historicize " the Nazi era by abandoning their simplistic black-and-white image of the Third Reich as a story of demonic villains and virtuous heroes and replacing it with a grayer perspective that recognized the period's immense complexity.