WEST GERMAN President Richard von Weizsacker, who recently accepted Harvard's invitation to speak at this June's Commencement Exercises, has earned his place as a moral leader in the world. With persistence and eloquence he has called for his countrymen to remember the horrible lessons of Nazism and to use them to build an increasingly tolerant future. Recently, however, von Weizsacker's call has been ignored by Germans who are beginning to celebrate openly the Nazi-dominated past while forgetting its horrible cost.

"Hitlernostalgie," as German newspapers have named it, is evident throughout the country. Historians, politicians and average citizens believe it time to review Hitler's contribution to their culture, and many seem to suspect the contribution was a positive one.

Interest in Nazi memorabilia is the greatest it has been since the war. Books, posters, insignias and nationalistic music that celebrate the Third Reich are voraciously sought out in all parts of Germany. In the mornings, swastikas are found painted on the walls of the Munich pub turned-museum where Hitler first rallied the National Socialist Party.

The growing lionization of Hitler is beginning to influence German politics as well. Right now, the far-right National Democratic Party is garnering support for the demolition of Dachau, the concentration camp established in 1933 which remains one of Europe's most evocative reminders of Nazi horrors. An Italian weekly magazine quoted one Dachau resident as saying: "Germans want to be remembered by their industries, trouts and good wine rather than for having massacred Jews."

Some German and American commentators have gone so far as to dismiss the upsurge of Teutonic racism, citing the restraining effect of 40 years of national guilt. They should not. Germans have suffered for their fathers, and there is no reason to believe that Germany will again accept violent dictatorship; yet in trying to preserve its pride, Germany is retreating from the tradition of tolerance that it has tried to establish during the last 40 years.

RECENT STUDIES have made evident the increasingly brutal tendencies of at least one segment of the German population. A government-sponsored study showed that 13 percent of Germans over the age of 18 consider themselves extreme right-wingers. That population, according to the survey, believes that the majority of journalists should be put in jail and considers foreign workers to be a mortal threat to the German nation. Even more disturbing, the survey found that the majority of the group yearns for a leader who could unify the nation as effectively as did Adolf Hitler.

And criticizing the past is no longer tolerated; foreign publications which do so are punished. When L'Espresso, one of Italy's leading magazines, published an article critical of the new romance with Nazism, German distributors refused to carry the issue.

The L'Espresso report concerned an academic dispute over the importance of the Holocaust. The controversy heated up a couple of months ago when several top German historians, including Ernst Holte and Andrea Hillgruber, claimed that the Holocaust was not really a genocide. These historians argue that the Allies have used the Holocaust as a weapon to subordinate the German people in the years since World War II. Using historical events such as Soviet massacres of Armenians and the Kulachi, the German historians assert that the interpretation the Holocaust should be revised. They contend that their nation was not guilty of anything in particular and that the moral persecution has to stop.

THIS IS not the first time that such allegations have been made. A few years ago, a French author wrote a book denying the existence of gas chambers in German concentration camps. Never before, however, has an historical revision of the Nazi period involved leading politicians as well as eminent intellectuals.

Christian Social Union party leader Franz Strauss, an ally of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, claimed that Germans should no longer hold themselves accountable for what he considers to be just an instant in the long existence of Germany. Strauss put his case before the German people in the general elections three weeks ago.

This spirit of tolerance for Nazism has spread to other European countries as well. In Austria, where Hitler was born, Jorg Haider, the leader of the Liberal Party, earned the label "Hitler's kid" for some of his positions. Thanks to this, Haider--who holds land confiscated from Jews before the war--garnered 10 percent of the electoral votes during the recent elections.

In a similar and particularly disturbing incident last year Austria's Minister of Defense, Friedhelm Frieschenschlager, greeted with all honors Walter Reder, a Nazi war criminal who had just been released from an Italian prison.

In England, the Royal Court Theatre is currently performing the play Perdition, which deals with Holocaust victims. Filled with historical errors, Perdition claims that during World War II Hungarian Zionist leaders collaborated with the Germans in sending Jews to the camps in order to justify the creation of a Jewish state after the war.

Plays such as Perdition are more than mere lapses of historical memory; they are invitations to crushing bigotry. Von Weizsacker makes clear that the past--even a past as terrible as the one the play distorts--can be the foundation for a hopeful future, one free of such hate. It remains for his countrymen to learn to understand.