Andreas Hillgruber

Andreas Fritz Hillgruber (18 January 1925 – 8 May 1989) was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as a result of the Historikerstreit.

Life and career

Hillgruber was born in Angerburg, Germany (present-day Wegorzewo, Poland), near the then East Prussian city of Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia). Hillgruber served in the German Army from 1943 to 1945 and spent the years 1945-48 as a POW in France. During World War II, Hillgruber fought on the Eastern Front, an experience that was later to play a role in his evaluation and writing about the period. In 1945, Hillgruber fled west to escape the Red Army, another experience that was to influence him greatly. Much of Hillgruber's early work reflected Schramm's influence. He died in Cologne of throat cancer.

Early historical work

thumb|200px|Marshal [[Ion Antonescu and Adolf Hitler at the Führerbau in Munich (June 1941). Joachim von Ribbentrop and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel in the background. Hillgruber's first book, 1953's Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu concerned German-Romanian relations in the years 1938–44.]]

In the early 1950s Hillgruber still saw World War II as a conventional war, but by 1965 in his book Hitlers Strategie (Hitler's Strategy), he was arguing that the war was for Hitler a vicious, ideological war in which no mercy was to be given to one's enemies. By contrast, in his 1965 book Hitlers Strategie, which was Hillgruber's Habilitationsschrift, Hillgruber examined the grand strategic decision-making progress in 1940-41 and concluded that, while Hitler had to adjust to diplomatic, economic, strategic and operational military realities, whenever possible his decisions were influenced by his racist, anti-Semitic and Social Darwinist beliefs. Thereafter, he maintained that Operation Barbarossa had been prompted solely by Hitler's ideological belief in the need for Lebensraum (living space) in Russia, where a massive German colonization effort was planned and the entire Russian people were to be reduced to slave status. In the 1970s and 1980s Hillgruber often attacked authors such as David Irving and Viktor Suvorov for putting forward the same arguments as he had done in 1954. Along the same lines, he criticized the American neo-Nazi historian David Hoggan, who argued that the British had provoked World War II in 1939. Hillgruber conceded that there was a "kernel of truth" in Hoggan's claims in that Hitler had believed that he could invade Poland in 1939 without provoking a war with Britain, and was most unpleasantly surprised by the British declaration of war, but maintained that, overall, Hoggan's view of Germany as the victim of an Anglo-Polish conspiracy was simply "preposterous".

The exchange between Hillgruber and Weinberg on the pages of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 1953-54 marked the beginning of a long series of clashes between the two historians over interpretations of German foreign policy. In a 1956 book review of Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu, Weinberg criticized Hillgruber for engaging in what Weinberg considered an apologia for Germany in World War II. Weinberg took issue with Hillgruber's claim that World War II began with the Anglo-French declarations of war on Germany on 3 September 1939 rather with the German attack on Poland on 1 September 1939. In his 1981 book World in the Balance, Weinberg stated that "Hillgruber's interpretation is not, however, followed here".

Historical perspective

Continuities and discontinuities of German history

Hillgruber's area of expertise was German history from 1871 to 1945, especially its political, diplomatic and military aspects. He argued for understanding this period as one of continuities. However, though Hillgruber paid attention to structural factors, in his opinion it was the actions of individuals that made the difference. As a member of the "Hitler Youth generation" and a World War II veteran, Hillgruber's major interest was why and how Germany failed as a great power.

Hillgruber argued that in the 1870s, Germany had won a position of "semi-hegemony" in Europe, and that Otto von Bismarck had three options for preserving that "semi-hegemony":

• Follow the advice of Moltke the Elder and launch a "preventive war" to destroy France once and all. To start with, the German decision not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890 marked the breakdown of the once warm relations between the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs going back to the 18th century. During the so-called "Fischer Controversy" which coalesced the German historical profession in the early 1960s, Hillgruber stood apart from the various right-wing historians who attempted to rebut Fischer, such as Gerhard Ritter, Hans Herzfeld, Egmont Zechlin, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, by accepting Fischer's arguments in part instead of attempting to rebut Fischer in toto.

Hillgruber argued in the aftermath of Fischer's 1961 book Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grasping at World Power) that the old distinction made by the Swiss historian Walter Hofer between the "outbreak" of World War I in 1914, in which all of the Great Powers were equally at fault, and the "unleashing" of World War II in 1939, in which Germany was exclusively responsible, was no longer acceptable. Hillgruber commented that Fischer had established that Germany was indeed responsible for both world wars, and Hofer's formula had to be disregarded by all serious historians.

Hillgruber believed that what had happened in 1914 was a "calculated risk" on the part of the Imperial German government that had gone horribly wrong. Germany had encouraged Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia in an attempt to break the informal Triple Entente alliance between the United Kingdom, France and Russia by provoking a crisis that would concern Russia only, the so-called "calculated risk". Hillgruber maintained that Germany did not want to cause a world war in 1914, but, by pursuing a high-risk diplomatic strategy of provoking what was supposed to be only a limited war in the Balkans, had inadvertently caused the wider conflict. Hillgruber argued that, long before 1914, the leaders of Germany had been increasingly influenced by Social Darwinism and völkisch ideology, and had become obsessed with Russian industrial and military growth, leading to the view that Germany was in an untenable position that required drastic measures. Hillgruber argued that, when the Austrian attack on Serbia caused Russia to mobilize instead of backing down and seeking an accommodation with Germany as expected, the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, under strong pressure from a hawkish General Staff led by General Motke the Younger, panicked and ordered the Schlieffen Plan to be activated, thus leading to a German attack on France. In Hillgruber's opinion, the "calculated risk" gambit was a highly dangerous and foolish one, as Bethmann Hollweg and the rest of the German leadership gratuitously failed to anticipate what the most likely Russian reaction to an Austro-Serbian war would be, and that therefore the German leadership of 1914 was extremely irresponsible in trying to use the "calculated risk" of an Austro-Serbian war as a diplomatic device to break the Triple Entente. Thimme noted that Hillgruber relied almost entirely upon the diary of Bethmann Hollweg's aide and friend, Kurt Riezler, to support his "calculated risk" thesis, which was a dubious source because portions of Riezler's diary had been forged after the war to make German foreign policy appear less aggressive than it was in 1914. In this way, Hillgruber largely followed the distinction first made by Gerhard Ritter between a moderate civilian group in the German leadership centred on Bethmann Hollweg who, while not eschewing territorial expansionism, did not insist on it as a precondition for making peace, and the more radical group in the military centered on Ludendorff, who would settle for nothing less than a war ending in making Germany the world's greatest power. Hillgruber argued that Ludendorff's foreign policy, with its demand for extensive territorial gains together with plans for obtaining lebensraum in Eastern Europe through a program of ethnic cleansing and German colonization, was in multiple ways the prototype of National Socialist foreign policy. Hillgruber argued that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the empire it created for Germany in Eastern Europe was the prototype for Hitler's vision of a great empire for Germany in Eastern Europe. Hillgruber wrote:<blockquote>To understand later German history one must pay special attention to a consequence of the Eastern situation in the autumn of 1918 that has often been overlooked: the widely shared and strangely irrational misconceptions concerning the end of the war that found such currency in the Weimar period. These ideas were not informed, as they should have been, by an appreciation of the enemy's superiority in the West and the inevitable step-by-step retreat of the German Western Front before the massive influx of the Americans. Nor did they indicate any understanding of the catastrophic consequences for the Central Powers following the collapse of the Balkan front after Bulgaria's withdrawal from the war. They were instead largely determined by the fact that German troops, as "victors" held vast strategically and economically important areas of Russia.At the moment of the November 1918 ceasefire in the West, newspaper maps of the military situation showed German troops in Finland, holding a line from the Finnish fjords near Narva, down through Pskov-Orsha-Mogilev and the area south of Kursk, to the Don east of Rostov. Germany had thus secured the Ukraine. The Russian recognition of the Ukraine's separation exacted at Brest-Litovsk represented the key element in German efforts to keep Russia perpetually subservient. In addition, German troops held the Crimea and were stationed in smaller numbers in Transcaucasia. Even the unoccupied "rump" Russia appeared - with the conclusion of the German-Soviet Supplementary Treaty on 28 August 1918 - to be in firm though indirect dependency on the Reich. Thus, Hitler's long-range aim, fixed in the 1920s, of erecting a German Eastern Imperium on the ruins of the Soviet Union was not simply a vision emanating from an abstract wish. In the Eastern sphere established in 1918, this goal had a concrete point of departure. The German Eastern Imperium had already been - if only for a short time - a reality.</blockquote> Hillgruber argued that the Weimar Republic was only a "bridge" between the expansionism of the German Empire and the even more radical expansionism of Nazi Germany, rather than a new era in German diplomacy.

In his 1974 book Grossmachtpolitik und Militarismus im 20. Jahrhundert, Hillgruber took a revisionist view of the Treaty of Versailles. Far from being an intolerably harsh "Carthaginian peace" that crippled Germany, Hillgruber argued that Versailles was actually a moderate peace treaty that left the German state intact and with the potential to once again be a great power.</blockquote> Hillgruber wrote that after the fall of Hans von Seeckt in 1926, Kurt von Schleicher became “in fact, if not in name”, the "military-political head of the Reichswehr”. Hillgruber wrote that Schleicher's triumph was also the triumph of the "modern" faction within the Reichswehr who favored a total war ideology and wanted Germany to become a dictatorship in order to wage total war upon the other nations of Europe in order to win the "world power status" that had been sought unsuccessfully in the last war. The total war ideology of the Reichswehr and the attendant demand that Germany be transformed into a militaristic, totalitarian Wehrstaat (defense state) went a long way to explaining why almost the entire Reichswehr welcomed the coming of the National Socialist dictatorship in 1933. Furthermore, he argued that what during the Weimar era had been the end became, for the Nazis, just the means. He set out a thesis that goals such as the Remilitarization of the Rhineland and the Anschluss with Austria, which had been the end-goals during the Weimar period, were just the beginning for the Nazis. Unlike the Weimar government, the Nazis' desire to re-militarize was only a step on the road to the complete domination of all Europe, and eventual world domination.

In a 1978 essay "Das Russlandbild der führenden deutschen Militärs" ("The Picture of Russia held by the Leadership of the German Military"), Hillgruber examined the views about the Soviet Union held by the German military elite in the period June 1940 to June 1941. According to Hillgruber, the following assumptions were shared by all of Germany's leading generals:

• The Wehrmacht was ill-informed about the Soviet Union, especially the military and the economy.
• The leadership of the Wehrmacht viewed war with the Soviet Union from an extremely narrow military viewpoint with little consideration given to politics, the economy or culture. Furthermore, Hillgruber was the first historian to point out that the Battle of Smolensk was closely studied in Japan, and led Japanese decision-makers to conclude the Soviet Union would not be defeated in 1941, thereby helping the "Strike South" fraction in the Japanese government gain ascendency over the "Strike North" fraction. In 1989 the American historian Jerry Z. Muller called Hillgruber "the most distinguished German diplomatic historian of his generation". In 2002, in an assessment of the historiography of the Eastern Front, the German historians Gerd R. Ueberschär and Rolf-Dieter Müller wrote: "Hillgruber developed a considerable reputation before his death in 1989 as the godfather of West German research into the war and a celebrated historian of German state created by Bismarck." The New Zealand historian David Stahel noted that in the 1960s, the historiography of the Eastern Front was dominated by two flawed schools. The first was the Communist school, which saw Operation Barbarossa as the product of a capitalist conspiracy embracing not only the ruling classes of Germany, but also Britain, France and the United States. Stahel noted that Hillgruber was the first historian to put forward an interpretation of Barbarossa that stressed ideology together with contingent elements that has been widely accepted.

Hillgruber's account

Hillgruber argued that Adolf Hitler had a Stufenplan (stage-by-stage plan) for conquest and genocide in Eastern Europe, and then the world. In the 1960s and 1970s Hillgruber was one of the leaders of a group of German historians - comprising Klaus Hildebrand, Gunter Moltman and J. Henke - who argued that, far from being haphazard, Hitler possessed and attempted to execute a coherent and detailed foreign-policy programme aiming at nothing less than world conquest. Hillgruber stated that Hitler's foreign policy: "geographically was designed to span the globe; ideologically, too, the doctrine of universal anti-Semitism and Social Darwinism, fundamental to his programme, were intended to embrace the whole of mankind". Hillgruber claimed that the outbreak of a world war in 1939 which Hitler had caused (but had not planned) with the invasion of Poland brought forward the timing of his "programme".

1. The second stage was to be a series of swift regional wars to destroy such states as Poland, Czechoslovakia and France.
2. The fourth stage involved a war against the United States by the now Greater Germany in alliance with the British Empire and Japan.

Hillgruber argued that after the conquest of the Soviet Union, Hitler wanted to seize most of Africa, to build a huge navy, and (in alliance with both the Japanese and the British) to engage the United States in a "War of the Continents" for world domination. As Hillgruber described it: <blockquote>After the creation of a European continental empire buttressed by the conquest of Russia, a second stage of imperial expansion was to follow with the acquisition of complementary territory in Central Africa and a system of bases to support a strong surface fleet in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Germany, in alliance with Japan and if possible also Britain, would in the first place isolate the USA and confine it to the Western hemisphere. Then, in the next generation, there would be a "war of the continents" in which the "Germanic empire of the Germanic nation" would fight America for world supremacy.</blockquote> Hillgruber wrote that:<blockquote>These enormous schemes, and particularly their connection with racist ideology, were, to be sure, the program of a single individual. But in the case of such prominent provisions as the revision of the Versailles Treaty and the creation of a "Greater Germany", they overlapped with the aims of the old German leadership and the fantasies of a large part of the German public that had never assimilated the loss of the war. To this one must add, however, that the essence of Hitler's program "violated all standards and concepts of German foreign policy to such a radical degree that it... did not penetrate the consciousness of the German public", despite its continual proclamation in his speeches from 1926 to 1930.

Hillgruber maintained that the strategy of Blitzkrieg stemmed largely from economic factors, namely, that for the earlier stages of the Stufenplan, Germany did not have the economic resources for a long war, and that therefore a military programme based upon quality, not quantity, was the most rational use of German economic capacity. Hillgruber argued that Hitler's desire to postpone the final struggle with the United States to the last stage of the Stufenplan was likewise determined by economic considerations, namely that only a Germany with sufficient Lebensraum and ruling most of Eurasia and Africa would be immune to the effects of blockade, and have the necessary economic resources to match the enormous economic capacity of the United States. In the debate between the "Continentists" (such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Axel Kuhn, and Eberhard Jäckel, who argued that Hitler wanted only to seize Europe) and the "Globalists" (who argued that Hitler wanted to conquer the entire world), Hillgruber definitely belonged in the latter camp. As a globalist historian, Hillgruber argued that Hitler was always intent upon a war with the Soviet Union and he maintained that Hitler's interest in Admiral Erich Raeder's "Mediterranean plan" in the fall of 1940 as an alternative to Barbarossa was half-hearted at best, and that right from June 1940 Hitler was firmly committed to turning east. The British historian Aristotle Kallis wrote that the best evidence suggests that in late 1940 Hitler was serious about carrying out Raeder's "Mediterranean plan", but only within certain strict limits and conditions, and that he saw the "Mediterranean plan" as part of the preparations for Barbarossa by defeating Britain first.

Hillgruber regarded Hitler as a fanatical ideologue with a firmly fixed programme, and criticized the view of him as a grasping opportunist with no real beliefs other than the pursuit of power - a thesis promoted by such British historians as A.J.P. Taylor and Alan Bullock, and which Hillgruber thought profoundly shallow and facile. Moreover, he categorically rejected Taylor's contention that the German invasion of Poland was an "accident" precipitated by diplomatic blunders. The other war - which Hitler both caused and most decidedly did want (as evidenced in part by Mein Kampf) - was the German-Soviet one, a savage, merciless and brutal all-out struggle of racial and ideological extermination between German National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Hillgruber noted that Britain was just as much a European as a world power, and would never accept so far-reaching a disruption of the balance of power as Hitler proposed in the 1920s in Mein Kampf. Likewise, Hillgruber argued that Hitler's contempt for the Soviet Union, especially the fighting power of the Red Army, was a dangerous illusion. Hillgruber argued that the lack of British interest in Hitler's proposed anti-Soviet alliance temporarily derailed Hitler's foreign-policy programme in the late 1930s, and led to the ideas of the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose anti-British foreign policy programme Hillgruber called the "very opposite" of Hitler's taking precedence in the period 1938-1941 In a 1967 review, the American historian Howard Smyth called Hitlers strategie "a magnificent work based on a thorough study of all source material and literature available in German, English, French, and Italian, and on translations from Russian and Japanese". The German historians Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär wrote that Hitlers Strategie was <blockquote>...a book that became the standard work and still retains most of its validity. Despite vehement criticism by some of his older colleagues, Hillgruber undertook a somewhat new interpretation of Hitler's foreign policy in this doctoral thesis...The chief aim of Hitler's foreign policy, imbued with notions of racial superiority, was to conquer a new Lebensraum in the east and achieve a position of world dominance...This interpretation of Nazi foreign policy clearly differed Hillgruber from Fabry and other revisionists, and his work held up well enough to be reprinted twenty years later with only minor changes.</blockquote> Hillgruber argued that Hitler drew a distinction between winning Germany a Grossmacht (great-power) position through Kontinentalimperium (Continental imperialism) and the goal of Weltmacht ("World Power") where Germany would embark on building a huge navy and win a massive colonial empire in Africa and Asia as the prelude to war with the United States. In addition, Hillgruber argued that Hitler did not wish to destroy the British Empire, as he believed that the United States would take advantage of the collapse of the British Empire to seize British colonies for itself, but at the same time, Churchill's repeated refusals of Hitler's offers to begin peace talks in 1940-1941 left him with no other choice but to work for the destruction of British power. By the late 1930s, when it became clear that Britain had no interest in Hitler's overtures, German foreign policy turned anti-British - as reflected in the Z Plan of January 1939 for a gigantic German fleet that would crush the Royal Navy by 1944.

Hillgruber argued that the 1939 German-Soviet non-aggression pact had its origins in the British refusal to make an anti-Soviet alliance, which led Hitler to turn over much of the running of German foreign policy to Ribbentrop in 1938-1939, and that Ribbrentrop in turn believed that a solid continental bloc of states led by Germany would deter Britain from involvement in Europe. In this connection, Hillgruber argued that for the moment Hitler - under the influence of Ribbentrop - put off his plans for a "grand solution" in the east in favor of an anti-British foreign policy. The reason for this difference, in Hillgruber's opinion, was the rampant anti-Polish feeling in the German Army. In support of this argument, Hillgruber quoted from a letter written by General Eduard Wagner, who was one of the officers involved in the abortive putsch of 1938, who wrote to his wife just before the invasion of Poland, "We believe we will make quick work of the Poles, and in truth, we are delighted at the prospect. That business must be cleared up" (emphasis in the original). Likewise, Hillgruber argued that Hitler's decision to take on the United States in December 1941 was influenced by his belief that the Soviet Union would be defeated by no later than the summer of 1942. In 1969 the French historian Albert Merglen expanded on Hillgruber's suggestion by writing a PhD thesis depicting a counter-factual successful French offensive against the Siegfried Line. Moreover, Robertson commented that Hitler's use of the phrase "world power or collapse" in Mein Kampf is ambiguous and can be interpreted in several different ways. However, Robertson went on to note in support of the Stufenplan thesis several speeches Hitler made to his senior officers in late 1938-early 1939, where Hitler did claim to be working out some sort of a master plan in his foreign policy, albeit in a very improvised and flexible way. In a 1970 article, the German historian Martin Broszat wrote that Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union was not a "calculated plan to realize his Lebensraum ideas", but that he felt compelled to get out from waiting in the summer of 1940 and proceed to a decisive ending of the war". In response to Broszat, Hillgruber wrote: "In reality, Hitler's decision for a war in the East came in July 1940 at a time when he was convinced of the possibility of reaching an arrangement with Britain". Later on, Broszat was to attack the book that first made Hillgruber's reputation as a historian, Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu dealing with relations between Germany and Romania from 1938 to 1944., Broszat offered up harsh criticism of Hillgruber's book on German-Romanian relations, arguing that Hillgruber had seriously misunderstood the Reichs relations with Romania by focusing only on the Auswärtiges Amt and upon Hitler. Thus Broszat argued that German policy towards Romania between September 1940-January 1941 was largely incoherent, with different factions in the German government supporting different factions in the Romanian government, which explains how in January 1941 the SS supported the Iron Guard's coup attempt against General Antonescu while the Wehrmacht and the Auswärtiges Amt supported Antonescu. Broszat maintained that Hillgruber's picture of German foreign policy being run by Hitler at every turn was incorrect because if that were true, the situation in January 1941 during the Legionnaires' rebellion and Bucharest pogrom with the SS supporting the Iron Guard's coup against General Antonescu who was being supported by the Wehrmacht and the Auswärtiges Amt would never had occurred. In Mason's view, in the period between 1936 and 1941 the state of the German economy, and not Hitler's "will" or "intentions", was the most important determinate on German decision-making in foreign policy. Mason argued that the Nazi leadership, deeply haunted by the November Revolution of 1918, was most unwilling to see any fall in working-class living-standards out of the fear that it might provoke another November Revolution. Mason contended that, when faced with the deep socio-economic crisis, the Nazi leadership had decided to embark upon a ruthless "smash and grab" foreign policy of seizing territory in Eastern Europe which could be pitilessly plundered to support living-standards in Germany. In this way, Mason argued, the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 was caused by structural economic problems, a "flight into war" imposed by a domestic crisis, and not by some master plan for war on the part of Hitler. The Anglo-German historian H.W. Koch in a 1983 essay criticized Hillgruber's picture of Hitler following rigidly preconceived foreign policy he was alleged to have worked out in the 1920s. Koch wrote against Hillgruber that Hitler did not want a war with Poland, and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (in his view) was meant to pressure the Poles into making concessions instead of being (as Hillgruber claimed) a plan for partitioning Poland. The Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs criticized Hillgruber's portrayal of Hitler following a Stufenplan, arguing that there was much opportunism and contingency in Hitler's strategy, with little sign of a master plan. In Lukacs's opinion, Operation Barbarossa was primarily an anti-British move intended to force Britain to surrender by defeating the Soviet Union. Likewise, Lukacs argued that Hitler's statement to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, in August 1939, stating that "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia…", which Hillgruber cited as evidence of Hitler's ultimate anti-Soviet intentions, was merely an effort to intimidate Britain and France into abandoning Poland. In the same way, Lukacs took issue with Hillgruber's claim that the war against Britain was of only "secondary" importance to Hitler compared to the war against the Soviet Union.

The Greek historian Aristotle Kallis wrote that there is "no conclusive evidence" that Hitler "...had a clear plan for world domination..."

As a conservative historian

In the 1970s, Hillgruber, together with his close associate Klaus Hildebrand, was involved in a very acrimonious debate with Hans-Ulrich Wehler over the merits of the Primat der Aussenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") and Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") schools. Hillgruber and Hildebrand made a case for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach to diplomatic history with the stress on examining the records of the relevant foreign ministry and studies of the foreign policy decision-making elite. Wehler, who favored the Primat der Innenpolitik, for his part contended that diplomatic history should be treated as a sub-branch of social history, calling for theoretically based research, and argued that the real focus should be on the study of the society in question. Hillgruber wrote that the agreement had confirmed the "status quo minus" of Berlin, and that the agreement was too vague with the reference to the "existing conditions in the relevant area". In his 1974 textbook, Deutsche Geschichte 1945-1972 (German History 1945-1972), Hillgruber complained that radicals influenced by "the forces of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism", and leaning towards East Germany, were having too much influence in West German higher education. In particular, Hillgruber argued that the Primat der Innenpolitik thesis employed by historians such as Wehler was not a proper scholarly device, but was instead "an apparent scholarly legitimation" for the New Left to advance its agenda in the present. The Canadian historian James Retallack took the view that Hillgruber together with his allies Klaus Hildebrand, Lothar Gall, Gregor Schöllgen and Michael Stürmer were guilty of a "grave injustice" with their attacks in Escape Into War? on those German historians like Fischer and Wehler critical of Imperial German foreign policy. Despite his criticism, Hillgruber ended his review with the comment that Irving's work "amounts to an indubitable and in no way small merit of Irving".</blockquote> The Canadian historian Holger Herwig wrote in 1982 that Hillgruber was a follower of Leopold von Ranke's Primat der Aussenpolitik concept. Herwig wrote that for Hillgruber history was made by small political and military elites who were not prisoners of forces beyond their control, and that instead made history through their choices and decisions. The German historians' Gerd Ueberschär and Rolf-Dieter Müller commented that Hillgruber and Hildebrand "..developed a highly politicized and staunchly conservative interpretation of it [the non-aggression pact of 1939]". Ueberschär and Müller noted one of the Hillgruber-Hildebrand articles had as its subtitle "Parallels with Today?" and that article proceeded to answer that question in the affirmative, with Hillgruber and Hildebrand claiming that there was no real difference between the policies of the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1979. Hillgruber and Hildebrand made a case for the traditional Rankean view of political history as the most important type history, that politics were decided by the leader of the nation as opposed to various social forces from below, and dismissed the claims of multiple younger West German historians who wished to understand political history as an extension of social history. Others contended that these bonds of friendship had never existed except as figments of Hillgruber's imagination. For Hillgruber, Germany's defeat in 1945 was a catastrophe that ended both the ethnic German presence in Eastern Europe and Germany as a great power in Europe. East German, Soviet, Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovak counterparts, denounced him as a German chauvinist, racist and imperialist, and accused him of glorifying the Drang nach Osten concept.

However, Hillgruber was prepared to accept, albeit grudgingly, what he often called Germany's "Yalta frontiers" after the Yalta Conference of 1945.

The intentionalist historian

Hillgruber was an Intentionalist on the origins of the Holocaust debate, arguing that Adolf Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust. This set Hillgruber against Functionalist historians such as Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, whose "revisionist" claims on the origins of the Holocaust Hillgruber found distasteful. Hillgruber was well known for arguing that there was a close connection between Hitler's foreign policy and anti-Semitic policies and that Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 was linked to the decision to initiate the Holocaust. Hillgruber argued that the Kernstück (Nucleus) of Hitler's racist Weltanschauung (world view) was to be found in Mein Kampf. He believed that the Holocaust was meant to be launched only with the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Hillgruber's view, Hitler's frequent references to "Judaeo-Bolshevism", to describe both Jews and Communism, betrayed his desire to destroy both simultaneously. Hillgruber was noteworthy as the first historian to argue for the connection between Operation Barbarossa and the decision to begin the Holocaust.</blockquote> According to Hillgruber, Hitler had four motives in launching Operation Barbarossa, namely:

• The extermination not only of the "Jewish Bolshevik elite" who supposedly governed the Soviet Union since seizing power in 1917, but also the extermination of every single Jewish man, woman and child in the Soviet Union.
• Providing Germany with Lebensraum ("living space") by settling millions of German colonists within what was soon to be the former Soviet Union, something that would have required a massive population displacement as millions of Russian Untermenschen ("sub-humans") would have had to be forced out of homes to make way for the Herrenvolk ("master-race") colonists. Hillgruber argued that on from the summer of 1940 onwards that Hitler saw the conquest of the Soviet Union as providing him with the necessary resources to allow him to defeat both the British Empire and the still-neutral United States, and what was planned for the Jewish population of Soviet Union would also be done in time to both the Jewish populations of British Empire and America. As such, Hillgruber decried the tendency on the part of historians' to sever the history of World War II from the "Final Solution", and urged historians to start writing histories that took account that the National Socialist "racial revolution" and plans for a German "world power status" were all part and parcel of the same process. Hillgruber argued that for most ordinary people in Germany who became anti-Semitic that it was a case of them becoming anti-Semitics after becoming National Socialists as opposed to anti-Semitics becoming National Socialists. Hillgruber contended that for Hitler the invasion of Poland in 1939 was meant to be both the beginning of both the "biological revolution" and to be only a local war, and that British and French declarations of war were an unpleasant surprise which interrupted the full execution of his plans. As such, in Hillgruber's view, Hitler had to put off the full execution of his plans that already began with the war against Poland until France was defeated. This was especially the case as a great many of the physically/mentally challenged Germans killed as "life unworthy of life" in six killing centers thinly disguised as nursing homes were children. Hillgruber argued that the decision to begin the Holocaust was probably taken during the very earliest stages of the planning for Operation Barbarossa in late June-early July 1940, but that the surviving documentary evidence was not conclusive on this point. Based upon Hitler's statements to his generals about the coming war of annihilation against “Judeo-Bolshevism” and Reinhard Heydrich's orders to re-establish the Einsatzgruppen, Hillgruber argued that the decision to start the Endlösung was not taken later than March 1941. Through Hillgruber noted that the massacres of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen that were to culminate in their extermination were often justified under the grounds of anti-partisan operations, that this was just a mere "excuse" for the German Army's considerable involvement in the Holocaust in Russia and the term war crimes and crimes against humanity were indeed correct labels for what happened. Hillgruber maintained that the slaughter of about 2.2 million defenceless men, women and children for the reasons of racist ideology cannot possibly be justified for any reason, and that those German generals who claimed that the Einsatzgruppen were a necessary anti-partisan response were lying. Hillgruber described the relationship between the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht as follows:<blockquote>The practical cooperation of the regular army and the Einsatzgruppen with regard to Jews took this form: Immediately after gaining control of an area the army commander issued orders for the Jews to be registered. Instructions for Jewish residents to come forward and identify themselves were provided on large-format posters, making it easy for the units of the security police and SD to place them under arrest - unless some of them, having learned of their intended fate, fled to the woods or otherwise "went underground"... Just like the Einsatzgruppen in the Rear Army areas, in parts of the Soviet Union placed under German civilian administration the "Higher SS and Police Leaders" had a prescribed set of duties - that included the systematic killing of Jews.</blockquote>

Hillgruber took a rather extreme "No Hitler, no Holocaust" position. He believed it was Hitler alone who made the Holocaust possible. He argued that, even if the Nazis had come to power under some other leader such as Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels, for example, the Jews would have suffered persecution and discrimination, but not genocide. Hillgruber once presented at a historians' conference in 1984 a counter-factual scenario whereby, had it been a coalition of the German National People's Party and the Stahlhelm that took power in 1933 without the NSDAP, all the anti-Semitic laws in Germany that were passed between 1933 and 1938 would still have been passed, but there would have been no Holocaust. He maintained that the other Nazi leaders such as Göring, Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler willingly participated in the Holocaust, as did many other Germans in the ever-widening "rings of responsibility" for the Holocaust, but that without Hitler's decisive role there would have been no Holocaust. Hillgruber wrote that:<blockquote>The evident ease with which people could be recruited and "manipulated", under the civilized conditions of the 20th century, to treat human beings like merchandise and kill them in large numbers ... is the most disturbing aspect; the large number of university graduates involved is the most deeply alarming. One must raise the question - which touches anthropology, social psychology and individual psychology - of a possible repetition under other ideological conditions, in actual or perceived extreme situations and circumstances. Beyond the historian's responsibility to keep alive the memory of the millions of victims, this question - which points to a central problem of the present and future, and thus transcends the historian's task - presents a challenge to us all.</blockquote>

The Historikerstreit

Zweierlei Untergang

Hillgruber was one of the protagonists in the so-called Historikerstreit, the Historians' Dispute (or Historians' Controversy) of 1986-87. Hillgruber felt that the Holocaust was a horrific tragedy, but just one of many that occurred in the 20th century. In a 1986 interview, Hillgruber stated there was no moral difference between the Soviet regime and the Nazi regime, and that the Holocaust was not unique. In his highly controversial 1986 essay "Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45" ("The Collapse in the East 1944/45") from his book Zweierlei Untergang (Two Kinds of Ruin), Hillgruber highlighted the sufferings of Germans in what was then eastern Germany, who had to flee or were expelled or killed by the Red Army. Hillgruber paid homage to those who had had to evacuate the German population and to those soldiers who did their best to stem the Soviet advance. Hillgruber described it as "a tragedy for all of Europe" that World War II ended with Eastern Europe brought into the Soviet sphere of influence, with the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe (which, Hillgruber pointed out, included his family) and with Germany reduced from a great power to a Cold War battlefield between the United States and the Soviet Union. He blamed both ultimately on the Nazis and their ideologically driven and inhuman expansionism. The subtitle of Zweierlei Untergang, Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry), reflected his controversial view of the moral equivalence of the ending of Germany as a great power and the Holocaust. Despite his claim that both events were equally tragic, Hillgruber wrote much more about the sufferings of the Germans than he did the Jews with the Holocaust essay taking 29 pages compared to the 74 pages allocated to the "smashing" of the Reich.

In the same essay, Hillgruber attacked American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for supporting at various war-time conferences the expansion of Poland and the Soviet Union at the expense of Germany. Hillgruber asserted that Germany had every moral right to keep all the territory that had belonged to the Reich in 1914, plus Austria and the Sudetenland, and that any effort to take land away from Germany was profoundly wrong. In Hillgruber's opinion, what he considered to be the great wrong that Germany was to lose some of its eastern territories after losing the war could only be explained by anti-German prejudices that he accused American and especially British leaders of holding.

In an apparent disavowal of his own criticism of the Anglophobic American historical writer David Hoggan in his 1967 book Germany and the Two World Wars, Hillgruber claimed in his 1986 essay that it had been British policy to seek the destruction of Germany since 1907 starting with Sir Eyre Crowe's memo on Germany entitled "Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany". Hillgruber accused the British of holding to "a negative image of Prussia, exaggerated to the point of becoming a myth", which led them to seek the utter destruction of the Prussian-German state in World War II, and blinded them to the fact that a strong Central European state led by Prussia was the only thing that prevented the "flooding" of Central Europe by the Red Army. Hillgruber claimed that the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive against Germany was just as much a policy of Anglo-American genocide for the Germans as the policy of genocide that Germans were waging against European Jews at the same time. Hillgruber wrote that it was time to start celebrating what he regarded as the Wehrmacht's "heroic" last stand on the Eastern Front. Hillgruber asserted that the Wehrmacht was fighting in 1944-45 "for a centuries-old area of German settlement, for the home of millions of Germans who lived in a core of the German Reich - namely in eastern Prussia, in the provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, East Brandenburg and Pomerania".</blockquote> The British military historian Christopher Duffy was to write in the preface to his 1991 book Red Storm on the Reich that his book was meant to answer the call for the sort of history that Hillgruber wanted to see written about the final days of the Eastern Front. Hillgruber called the leaders of the putsch attempt of 20 July 1944 Gesinnungsethiker (sentimental moralists) and those who stayed loyal to Hitler Verantwortungsethiker (responsible moralists). Thus, in Hillgruber's opinion, the only moral question in 1945 was whether the German Army could hold out long enough to allow as many German civilians as possible to escape westwards.</blockquote> Hillgruber argued when writing about the last days of the "German East" in 1944-45, only valid perspective was that of the front-line German soldiers fighting to protect German civilians from the Red Army, even through he noted that by holding out the Wehrmacht were "protecting" the gas chambers as he argued the Wehrmacht were "preventing the worse" from being done to the Germans. Hillgruber presented the German defense of the eastern Germany as part of an idealistic, pan-European effort noting with pleasure that French, Dutch, Belgian, Danish and Norwegian volunteers serving in the Waffen SS units, namely the 33rd SS Charlemagne Division, 23rd SS Nederland Division, 28th SS Wallonien Division, and 11th SS Nordland Division had fought fiercely for the Reich, and that in addition many French and Polish POWs helped German civilians escape. Hillgruber argued that the Red Army had a "fundamentally barbarous conception of war", and that the horrors perpetrated by the "Asiatic flood" of the Red Army, which he claimed were without parallel in history made the German stand in the East morally "justified". The American historian Charles S. Maier summarized Hillgruber's thesis in "Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45" as:<blockquote>Evoking the Wehrmacht's terrible mission in the winter of 1945, Hillgruber has written, is among the most difficult challenges a historian can face. He refers to the hallowing winter flight before the Russians. Hitler had given orders for impossible defenses of fortress cities; Soviet troops had arrived with apparent license to rape and assault. Millions of German civilians and soldiers waited for occasional trains in bombed out stations, caravanned through the Prussian forests, or precariously sailed through the Baltic to Jutland, often harassed by their own fanatic Nazi officials.</blockquote> Hillgruber saw the expulsion of the Germans as the culmination of a half century of horror. Hillgruber wrote:<blockquote>The mass expulsion of the Germans from a quarter of the territory of the 1937 Reich was a provisional end station on the journey that had begun with the spread of the idea of a rationalization of territory according to national allegiance and that had led to the nationality struggles on the European periphery during the First World War. These struggles were followed by the first genocide - that of the Armenians in Turkey - and the mass expulsions of Greeks from Asia Minor. The extermination and resettlement practices of Hitler and Stalin in their respective "spheres of influence" in the period of their partnership in 1939-41 had continued such "exchanges of populations", and mass murder had reached an extreme degree in Hitler's "Eastern War" from June 1941 onward; first the Jews in Poland and in the entire East were to be exterminated, then those in the whole of German-occupied Continental Europe. The idea of mass resettlement in East-Central Europe won ever more support - first in Great Britain and then in the United States, in a complete departure from their humanitarian traditions - as victory became more certain and as the aim of the destruction of Prussia as the allegedly permanent hard core of the German Reich became more and more clearly an actual war aim. Hillgruber believed that, with the appearance of the government sponsored and avowedly anti-Semitic Fatherland Party led by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz in 1917, anti-Semitism become for the first time sanctioned by the German state. Hillgruber argued that, due to Austrian and Russian influences, anti-Semitism become more common in the Weimar Republic than it had been during the Kaiserreich. The other essay concerned the ending of the "Germanic East". Hillgruber argued it was Europe could play its proper place in the world if were in someway under German hegemony, and that Germany's defeat was also Europe's defeat as while since the outcome of the war was to leave Western Europe in the American sphere of influence and Eastern Europe in the Soviet sphere of influence, leaving Europeans and Germans in particular without the prospect of having a "history in the future" (i.e. unable to make their own history)

Other historians' reactions and Hillgruber's defence

With his favorable description of Wehrmacht activities, Hillgruber drew the anger of the Marxist philosopher Jürgen Habermas who rebuked Hillgruber in a feuilleton (opinion piece) entitled “A Kind of Settlement of Damages” published on 11 July 1986 in Die Zeit. Habermas attacked Hillgruber for allegedly praising the "tested senior officials" in the Nazi Party in the East in Zweierlei Untergang. In fact, Hillgruber had written no such sentence. What Hillgruber had written was a lengthy sentence in which he had commented that different officials of the Nazi Party in eastern Germany evacuated the German public with varying degrees of success. Hillgruber was enraged at what he considered to be a fabricated quote being attributed to him, which he called a "scandal". Many, such as the British historian Richard J. Evans (who was otherwise highly critical of Hillgruber's historical work), felt that this was an intellectually disreputable method of attacking Hillgruber. Habermas argued that Hillgruber's claims that Allied plans for the borders of a post-war Germany were due to anti-German prejudices and a "cliché-image of Prussia" was absurd, and that "it does not occur to Hillgruber that the structure of power in the Reich could actually have had something to do, as the Allies had assumed, with the social structure especially well-preserved in Prussia". Writing of Hillgruber's intentionist theories about the Holocaust, Habermas claimed that Hillgruber wrote in such a way as to imply that even top Nazis were opposed to the Shoah, and were only reluctantly forced to participate in the "Final Solution" by Hitler. Apart from philosopher Habermas, numerous historians took issue with Hillgruber's essay, including Hans Mommsen, Eberhard Jäckel, Heinrich August Winkler, Martin Broszat, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Karl Dietrich Bracher, and Wolfgang Mommsen.

Criticism centered on a number of areas. The following points were raised against Hillgruber:

• Those historians who take a functionalist line on the origins of the Shoah like Richard J. Evans felt that Hillgruber attributed too much responsibility for the Shoah to Hitler. Evans went on to write that Hillgruber had down-played both the level and the virulence of anti-Semitism in pre-1914 Germany, writing that Wilhelm II and his Court were a center of a vicious anti-Semitism that Hitler could have easily approved of.
• Hillgruber mostly ignored the fact that the same troops fighting to save German civilians from the Soviets were also allowing the Nazis to continue the Holocaust. The Israeli historian Omer Bartov commented that it was simply disgusting on the part of Hillgruber to call upon historians to "identify" with German troops fighting to extend the Holocaust. Furthermore, it was noted that Hillgruber's call for "empathy" for the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front implicitly devalued the lives of those held in the German death camps or forced to walk in the death marches. Critics of Hillgruber such as Bartov noted that his call for historians to have "empathy" with German soldiers placed a higher value on the lives of German civilians protected by the Wehrmacht then on those dying in the Holocaust. In another essay, Bartov commented that Hillgruber appeared to imply that the British government's decision to repudiate the Munich Agreement in 1942 was the basis of the decision to expel the Germans after the war. Bartov commented that Hillgruber appeared not to care that the German aggression against the states of Eastern Europe such as the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia in March 1939, which itself negated the Munich Agreement might have had something to do with the British abrogation of the Munich Agreement, and that there is no direct link between the repudiation of Munich in 1942 and the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia after the war.
• The sufferings of Germans were presented in isolation, with little reference to the sufferings of Jews, Poles, Russians, Czechs etc. The impression given is that Germans were the primary victims of the war.
• That Hillgruber asked his readers to sympathize with the officers and the men of the German Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine who fought to protect and evacuate the German population while at the same time to fight for the continuation of the Holocaust is morally indefensible.

The sub-title of Hillgruber's book drew controversy with the Swiss historian Micha Brumlik in an essay entitled "New Myth of State" first published in Die Tagezeitung newspaper on 12 July 1986, commenting that the use of the word Zerschlagung (destruction) for the Germans indicated that an act of extreme violence was committed against the Germans while the Jews were assigned only the neutral term Ende (end) to describe the Holocaust. Brumlik argued that in his view, Hillgruber by his use of the word "End" to label the Holocaust implied that the Shoah was just something terrible that happened to the Jews of Europe, but it was not anybody's fault. Brumlik argued that Hillgruber's thesis about the Holocaust as one of many genocides, instead of a unique event, was a form of "psychological repression". The American historian Gordon A. Craig expressed the view that Hillgruber's choice of the word Ende for the Holocaust suggested that the Holocaust was "something that just sort of happened".

The right-wing German historian Klaus Hildebrand defended Hillgruber in an essay first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on 31 July 1986, by attacking Habermas over the "tried and true higher-ups of the NSDAP" line created by Habermas, which Hildebrand considered a highly-dishonest method of attack. Hildebrand argued that Hillgruber was merely trying to show the "tragedy" of the Eastern Front, and was not engaging in moral equivalence between the German and Soviet sides. Responding to the defence of Hillgruber by his close associate Hildebrand in his essay "The Age of the Tyrants", Habermas argued in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 11 August 1986 that Hillgruber's approach of "identifying" with German soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front "...would perhaps be a legitimate point of view for the memoirs of a veteran - but not for a historian writing from the distance of four decades". Habermas stated that:<blockquote>A German reader would have to bring along a healthy portion of linguistic insensitivity in order not to let himself be influenced by the juxtaposition of an aggressive 'destruction of the German Reich by its external enemies and an almost automatic following 'end of European Jewry'. This first impression justifies itself above all through the compilation of two parts so unlike in their style of presentation and declared partisanship. The philosopher Helmut Fleischer, in an essay first published in the Nürnberger Zeitung newspaper on 20 September 1986, asserted that there was nothing morally objectionable in Hillgruber's argument for the morality of historians siding with German troops on the Eastern Front. The left-wing German historian Hans Mommsen in an essay first published for Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik magazine in October 1986 wrote of Hillgruber that: <blockquote>His [Hillgruber's] historiographic association of resettlement and the Holocaust indirectly supports the plan, so aggressively posited by Stürmer, of relativizing the crimes of the Third Reich. It allows for revisionist misunderstandings by its demand for "a reconstruction of the destroyed European Middle.</blockquote> Martin Broszat, in an essay first published in Die Zeit on 3 October 1986, wrote that Hillgruber had come very close to being a Nazi apologist, and his book Zweierlei Untergang was simply not very good.

The German publisher Rudolf Augstein, in an essay entitled "The New Auschwitz Lie", first published in Der Spiegel magazine on 6 October 1986, called Hillgruber "a constitutional Nazi". Augstein went on to call for Hillgruber to be fired from his post at the University of Cologne for being a "constitutional Nazi", and argued that there was no moral difference between Hillgruber and Hans Globke.

The German historian Imanuel Geiss wrote in defence of Hillgruber that Augstein's calling him a "constitutional Nazi" was way over the top; that together with Habermas, Augstein was guilty of slandering Hillgruber; that Hillgruber's views deserved consideration; and that Hillgruber was no Nazi apologist. The German historian Hagen Schulze wrote in defense of Hillgruber: <blockquote>For the discipline of history, singularity and comparability of historical events are thus not mutually exclusive alternatives. They are complementary concepts. A claim that historians such as Ernst Nolte or Andreas Hillgruber deny the uniqueness of Auschwitz because they are looking for comparisons stems from incorrect presuppositions. Of course, Nolte and Hillgruber can be refuted if their comparisons rests on empirically or logically false assumptions. But Habermas never provided such proof.</blockquote>

Hillgruber defended his call for the identification with the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front in an interview with the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on 31 October 1986, on the ground that he was only trying "…to experience things from the perspective of the main body of the population". In the same 1986 interview, Hillgruber said it was necessary for a more nationalistic version of German history to be written because the East German government was embarking upon a more nationalist history, and if West German historians did not keep up with their East German counterparts in terms of German nationalism, it was inevitable that Germans would come to see the East German regime as the legitimate German state. Hillgruber was most furious with Augstein's "constitutional Nazi" line, and stated that he was considering suing Augstein for libel.</blockquote> Replying to the interviewer's question about whether he wanted to see the revival of the original concept of the Sonderweg, that is of the idea of Germany as a great Central European power equally opposed to both the West and the East, Hillgruber denied that German history since 1945 had been that "golden", and claimed that his conception of the Central European identity he wanted to see revived was cultural, not political. In a newspaper 'feuilleton' entitled "Not a Concluding Remark", first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 20 November 1986, Meier wrote that: <blockquote>What moved Hillgruber to "identify" with the defenders of the front in East Prussia will probably have to remain a mystery…But however that may be, and whatever other weaknesses his book contains, it cannot be accused of trivializing National Socialism. In this respect, Habermas's concerns are certainly without foundation.</blockquote> The political scientist Kurt Sontheimer, in an essay entitled "Makeup Artists Are Creating a New Identity" first published in Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on 21 November 1986, accused Hillgruber of being guilty of "revisionism" (by which Sontheimer clearly meant negationism) in his writings on German history. In another essay entitled "He Who Wants to Escape the Abyss" first published in Die Welt newspaper on 22 November 1986, Hildebrand accused Habermas of engaging in "scandalous" attacks on Hillgruber. Hildebrand claimed that "Habermas's criticism is based in no small part on quotations that unambiguously falsify the matter".</blockquote> The German historian Wolfgang Mommsen, in an essay entitled "Neither Denial nor Forgetfulness Will Free Us" first published in Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on 1 December 1986, wrote about Hillgruber's demands that historians identified with the "justified" German defence of the Eastern Front that:<blockquote>Andreas Hillgruber recently attempted to accord a relative historical justification to the Wehrmacht campaign in the East and the desperate resistance of the army in the East after the summer of 1944. He argued that the goal was to prevent the German civilian population from falling into the hands of the Red Army. However, the chief reason, he argued, was that the defense of German cities in the East had become tantamount to defending Western civilization. In light of the Allied war goals, which, independent of Stalin's final plans, envisioned breaking up Prussia and destroying the defensive position of a strong, Prussian-led Central European state that could serve as a bulwark against Bolshevism, the continuation of the war in the East was justified from the viewpoint of those involved. It was, as Hillgruber's argument would have it, also justified even from today's standpoint, despite the fact that prolonging the war in the East meant that the gigantic murder machinery of the Holocaust would be allowed to continue to run. All this, the essay argued, was justified as long as the fronts held. Hillgruber's essay is extremely problematic when viewed from the perspective of a democratically constituted community that orients itself towards Western moral and political standards.There is no getting around the bitter truth that the defeat of National Socialist Germany was not only in the interest of the peoples who were bulldozed by Hitler's war and of the peoples who were selected by his henchmen for annihilation or oppression or exploitation - it was also in the interest of the Germans. Accordingly, parts of the gigantic scenery of the Second World War were, at least as far as we were concerned, totally senseless, even self-destructive. We cannot escape this bitter truth by assigning partial responsibility to other partners who took part in the war.</blockquote>

In an essay published in the 1 December 1986 edition of the New Republic, entitled "Immoral Equivalence", the American historian Charles S. Maier criticized Hillgruber for engaging in "vulgar Historismus" in Zweierlei Untergang. Maier wrote the historian is supposed to examine all sides of historical occurrences, and not serve as the advocate of one side.

The German historian Horst Möller defended Hillgruber in an essay first published in late 1986 in the Beiträge zur Konfliktforschung magazine by arguing that: <blockquote>Hillgruber comes to the conclusion, on the basis of British files that have come to light in the meantime, that the destruction of the German Reich was planned before the mass murder of the Jews became known - and that the mass murder does not explain the end of the Reich ... It is hardly disputable that the attempt to hold the Eastern Front as long as possible against the Red Army meant protection for the German civilian populace in the eastern provinces against murders, rapes, plundering and expulsions by Soviet troops. It was not simply Nazi propaganda against these "Asiatic hordes" that caused this climate of fear. It was the concrete examples of Nemmersdorf in October 1944, mentioned by Hillgruber, that had brought the horror of the future occupation into view.</blockquote> The jurist Joachim Perels, in an essay first published in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on 27 December 1986, thought it was outrageous for Hillgruber to praise those German officers who stayed loyal to Hitler during the July 20th putsch as making the right moral choice, and felt that Hillgruber had slandered those Germans who chose to resist the Nazi regime as traitors who let down their country in its hour of need.

In an essay meant to reply to Habermas's criticism entitled "Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Heinz Janßen, and the Enlightenment in the Year 1986" first published in the right-wing Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (History In Academics and Instruction) magazine in December 1986, Hillgruber accused Habermas of engaging in "scandalous" methods of attack. In particular, Hillgruber was highly furious over the sentence about "tried and true higher-ups of the NSDAP" that Habermas had created by selective editing of Hillgruber's book. Hillgruber claimed that Habermas was waging a "campaign of character assassination against Michael Stürmer, Ernst Nolte, Klaus Hildebrand and me in the style of the all-too-familiar APO pamphlets of the late 1960s" [Hillgruber was attempting to associate Habermas with the APO here]. Hillgruber described Habermas as a kind of left-wing literary hit-man who had asked to "take apart" Zweierlei Untergang by Karl-Heinz Janßen, the editor of the culture section of the Die Zeit newspaper.

Reacting to Habermas's criticism that in the Holocaust essay in Zweierlei Untergang that his use of the word "could" in a sentence where Hillgruber wrote that Hitler believed only through genocide of the Jews could Germany become a great power, which Habermas claimed might have indicated that Hillgruber shared Hitler's viewpoint, Hillgruber took much umbrage to Habermas's claim. Hillgruber stated that what he wrote in his Holocaust essay was that the German leadership in 1939 was divided into three factions. One, centred on the Nazi Party and the SS, saw the war as a chance to carry out the "racial reorganization" of Europe via mass expulsions and German colonization, whose roots Hillgruber traced to the war aims of the Pan-German League in the First World War. Another faction comprised the traditional German elites in the military, the diplomatic service and the bureaucracy, who saw the war as a chance to destroy the settlement established by the Treaty of Versailles and to establish the world dominance that Germany had sought in the First World War. Hillgruber went on to write that Habermas was seeking to censor him by criticizing him for taking the German side when discussing the last days of the Eastern Front. Replying to Habermas's charge that he was a "neo-conservative", Hillgruber wrote:<blockquote>How does he come to come categorize my work as having so-called neoconservative tendencies? For decades I have never made any bones about my basic conservative position. Deeply suspicious as I am of all "leftist" and other world-improving utopias, I will gladly let the label "conservative" apply to me, meant through it is as a defamation. But what is the meaning of the prefix "neo"? No one "challenges" this new "battle" label, so often seen these days, in order to turn this APO jargon against the inventor of the label.</blockquote> Hillgruber argued that there was a contradiction in Habermas's claim that he was seeking to revive the original concept of the Sonderweg, that is, the ideology of Germany as a great Central European power that was neither of the West or the East which would mean closing Germany off to the culture of the West while at the same time accusing him of trying to create a "NATO philosophy". Hillgruber took the opportunity to once more restate his belief that there was no moral difference between the actions of the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists, and questioned whether the Holocaust was a "singular" event. Finally, Hillgruber accused Habermas of being behind the "agitation and psychic terror" suffered by non-Marxist professors in the late 1960s, and warned him that if he was trying to bring back "...that unbearable atmosphere that ruled in those years at West German universities, then he is deluding himself".

The left-wing German historian Imanuel Geiss wrote in an essay first published in the Evangelische Kommentare magazine in February 1987 that both the essays in Zweierlei Untergang were "respectable", but that it was "irritating" and ill-advised on the part of Hillgruber to publish them together, with the implied moral equivalence between the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe, and the genocide of the Jews. Geiss wrote that Hillgruber's demand that historians had to side with German troops fighting on the Eastern Front was problematic, but it did "...not justify the merciless severity, almost in the tone of an Old Testament prophet with which Habermas goes after this dissident historian". Habermas went on to argue that: "And in any case, this ridiculous dispute about words and secondary virtues just confirms Hillgruber's lack of objectivity about this entire sphere. This a case of praising the fire department that set the fire". Hillgruber went on to state that in his opinion: <blockquote>Habermas, and this is evident from a large number of reviews of his works by authors of varying political affiliations, tends to descend upon these texts, even if they are philosophical texts (even classics such as the works of Kant and Hegel are not excepted) in a way that is no different than what he did to my historical essay. He does this with more or less grotesque distortions of quotations, excerpts that twist meaning, and quotations transplanted out of their context in order to provide the kind of confusion that causes the reader to be blinded and dazzled.</blockquote> Hillgruber ended his "Concluding Remarks" by remarking that it was impossible to debate Habermas due to his slippery and dishonest nature, and he now ending his participation in the Historikerstreit to focus on his historical research. Furthermore, Grab attacked Hillgruber for maintaining that Soviet concepts of war were fundamentally barbaric as being reminiscent of Nazi propaganda against Slavic Untermenschen (sub-humans). Finally, Grab was highly critical of Hillgruber's viewpoint that German foreign policy up to 1939 was basically legitimate in seeking to destroy the Treaty of Versailles, and that Hitler's main sin was the seeking of Lebensraum over the ruins of the Soviet Union.

In his 1988 book Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit?: ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" (Exoneration of the German past?: A polemical essay about the 'Historikerstreit), Hillgruber's old enemy Hans-Ulrich Wehler wrote about Hillgruber's intentionist theories about the Holocaust that:<blockquote>This survey is directed - among other matters - against the apologetic effect of the tendency of interpretations that once more blame Hitler alone for the 'Holocaust' - thereby exonerating the older power elites and the Army, the executive bureaucracy, and the judiciary ...and the silent majority who knew.</blockquote>

The American historian Anson Rachinbach wrote against Hillgruber that:<blockquote>Hillgruber never explicitly relates the two essays, which with the collapse of the German Army on the Eastern Front and with the "Final Solution" in the East. Nevertheless, the effect of their juxtaposition is strikingly clear: the first essay laments the final days of the German Army and the consequences of the Russian conquest of Germany as a German "national catastrophe", the second is a dry and ascetic account of the Nazi crime against the Jews in light of recent historical works on anti-Semitism. Placed together, it is difficult to escape the conclusion which appears on the book jacket, "that the amputation of the Reich in favor of a greater Poland was a war aim of the Allies long before Auschwitz". The destruction of the German Army, the terror unleashed by the Soviet Army, and the complicity of the Allies in dismembering the eastern part of Germany are all tragic consequences of the blind anti-Prussianism of the Allies, independent of Hitler's crimes... Hillgruber argues that the division of Germany and its loss of global political status as a "failed world power" (gescheiterte Grossmacht) was a consequence of anti-Prussian (not expressly anti-Hitler) war aims of the Allies. In World War II, the legitimate "core" of the desire for revision (of Germany's eastern borders and its Untertan role in world affairs) in the Weimar Republic was perverted by the "Hitler Reich". The German catastrophe is the end of a "politically fully sovereign great power German Reich" and the "unconscious retreat of the majority of Germans in the postwar years from their nation". The "German Question", in short, has to be separated from its subversion by Hitler. The defense of the nation is divorced from the catastrophic policies of the leader.</blockquote>

The American historian Charles S. Maier continued his criticism of Hillgruber in his 1988 book The Unmasterable Past. Maier wrote that Hillgruber in Zweierlei Untergang had made some of the ideas of the German far-right "...presentable with footnotes". Maier wrote that Hillgruber's point about the death camps ceasing to operate in the winter of 1944-45 was irrelevant as he ignored the concentration camps and the death marches. Maier wrote:<blockquote>"Life" in the concentration camps within greater Germany did grow crueler as deportations ceased: Anne Frank, like so many others, perished inside Germany only a couple of months before she might have been liberated. Moreover, forced marches of surviving Jews from camps shut down in the East to those still functioning in the West took the lives of tens of thousands, as did deportations among what remained of Hungary's Jewish population in the last winter of the war. German courts sentenced 5,764 countrymen to death for crimes of opposition during 1944 and at least 800 from January to May 1945. Buckled to the guillotine or dangling in slow nooses, the victims probably identified less with the Reichswehr than has the historian. Maier argued that through there was no "anti-Semitic agenda" in Zweierlei Untergang, that Hillgruber's book reflected his conservative politics and was intended to create a positive German national identity by restoring what Hillgruber considered the honour of the German Army on the Eastern Front.

The American historian Jerry Muller wrote in the May 1989 edition of Commentary that the best "antidote" to the version of Anglo-German relations presented in Zweierlei Untergang and the "pseudo-history" of Ernst Nolte were Hillgruber's own writings prior to 1986. Muller wrote that Hillgruber himself had noted in Zweierlei Untergang that every day the Wehrmacht held out meant that the Holocaust continued for one more day, but then criticized Hillgruber for having ducked this issue by claiming that one had to understand and "identify" with the concerns and fears of German civilians threatened by the Red Army. Muller complained about the "arbitrariness" of Hillgruber's demand that historians should "identify" with the people of East Prussia instead of the Jews suffering and dying in the death camps.</blockquote>

In 1989, the American historian Dennis Bark and the Danish historian David Gress wrote in defense of Hillgruber: <blockquote>Hillgruber made three simple, but historically very important points. One was that the annihilation of European Jews by the Nazis and the destruction of the German state were simultaneous, but not casually related: Germany's wartime enemies decided to mutilate and divide Germany long before they knew of the Holocaust, so that the fate of Germany was not intended as retribution for the Holocaust, but as general punishment of Germany. The second point was that these two events - the genocide of European Jewry and the destruction of German political power - even if causally unrelated, were a tragedy for Europe. Middle-class Jewish and German cultures were civilizing factors in the Central European area from the Baltic states in the north to Romania in the south, Hillgruber argued, and their destruction opened the way to domination of that area by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. The disappearance of Germany as a cultural and political factor, and the Holocaust weakened European civilization as a whole by destroying its most important Central European component. Hillgruber's third point was that the German defeat in the East - the military events of 1944-45 and their immediate consequences - was a subject worthy of study in its own right, and one which could be best studied from the perspective of those immediately involved; that is, the soldiers of the German army and the civilians who lost their homes, their families, and their friends in the course of those terrible months. Hillgruber did not deny that the German soldiers who defended to the last possible moment every inch of German territory in the East were also defending a brutal regime. But he added to this observation the equally important fact that there was an independent moral value to the defensive efforts, namely to allow as many civilians as possible to escape.</blockquote>

The British historian Richard J. Evans in his 1989 book In Hitler's Shadow attacked Hillgruber for taking the Eastern Front out of context, arguing that the Wehrmacht had been guilty of far worse crimes in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union than the Red Army was in the occupied areas of Germany. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was simply wrong when he claimed that the Polish government-in-exile in London had ambitions for annexing eastern Germany, and that the Poles were opposed to the west-ward expansion of their nation, preferring instead that Poland be restored to its pre-September 1939 borders. Evans wrote the decisions to expand Poland westward were taken by the British and the Americans out as a way of compensating Poland for territory the Soviet Union planned to re-annex from Poland and as a way of seeking to persuade the Soviets to broaden the Lublin government. Evans wrote that under the Weimar Republic the vast majority of ethnic Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia made it clear that they were not loyal to the states they happened to live under, and under the Third Reich the German minorities in Eastern Europe were willing tools of German foreign policy. Evans asserted that Hillgruber was mistaken when he described pre-1945 eastern Germany as a "centuries-old area of German settlement", arguing that in many areas like Upper Silesia the German nature of the area was a result of forced Germanization in the Imperial period. Evans noted that even Hillgruber admitted that up to 1918 the German state had become increasing harsh in its discrimination and oppression against non-German minorities. Evans wrote that the Allies had a number of possible plans for Germany after the war, none of which were ever adopted as policy, and the division of Germany was a product of the Cold War, not of any plans made during World War II.

Evans noted that through Hillgruber always used the words "destruction" and "murder" to describe the Shoah in his Holocaust essay, Habermas had through the "unfair example" of the sub-title of Hillgruber's book made a valid point. Evans wrote that in his Holocaust essay, Hillgruber wrote in a cold and detached tone to describe the "Final Solution" which was a very marked contrast to the passionate and angry tone of the essay dealing with Germany's defeat. Despite this criticism, Evans wrote against Habermas that "no serious reading" of Hillgruber's essay could support the claim that Hitler had forced the Holocaust "against the will" of the other Nazi leaders. Likewise, Evans maintained that Hillgruber had ignored the widespread popularity of völkisch anti-Semitic, eugenic and Social Darwinist ideas in Germany in the 1880s-1890s, which may not had an immediate political impact at the time, but did provide the intellectual atmosphere which made the Third Reich possible.

In an April 1990 essay entitled "On Emplotment - Andreas Hillgruber", the British Marxist theorist Perry Anderson wrote against Evans in support of Hillgruber that Evans's distinction between the justified aim of expelling the German minorities and the unjustified way this was accomplished was untenable. Against Evans, Anderson wrote that Hillgruber was right when he claimed that General Władysław Sikorski and other leading Polish politicians supported by Churchill wished to annex East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania from 1940 onwards. As part of his defense of Hillgruber, Anderson claimed that in the lands lost by Poland to the Soviet Union, ethnic Poles were 30% of the population while in the lands gained by Poland at Germany's expense, Germans were 90% of the population. Anderson wrote: <blockquote>Hillgruber died in May 1989. In November the Berlin Wall was breached. Today, less than a year later [Anderson was writing in April 1990], German reunification is at hand. Hillgruber, a conservative, saw things more lucidly than his liberal critics. The reunion of Germany will indeed involve the reemergence of a Central Europe already in statu nascendi; and the reconstruction of Central Europe will all but certainly restore independence to Europe as a whole, in the wider theatre of the world. To have asserted these connexions so clearly, on the eve of their historical realization, was not an inconsiderable achievement.</blockquote> Anderson claimed that it was hard to argue against Hillgruber's point that the Holocaust was only one chapter in the wider history of horror in the 20th century. Anderson praised Hillgruber as the first historian who traced how the plans for an extensive Eastern empire for Germany unveiled in the summer of 1916 by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff evolved 25 years later into genocidal reality by the summer of 1941. Anderson wrote that the one million German soldiers killed between the summer of 1944 and the spring of 1945, to say nothing of the Allied dead and wounded, German civilians killed by Allied bombing, those killed in the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi terror simply invalidated Hillgruber's claim about the benefits of World War II going on until May 1945. Anderson noted that Hillgruber's demand for "identification" with German troops on the Eastern Front reflected his own personal background as an infantryman who fought in East Prussia in 1945, and argued that Hillgruber had no right to try to impose his own personal preferences on other historians. Moreover, Anderson commented that in his Holocaust essay, Hillgruber made no demands for "identification" with the victims of the Holocaust</blockquote>

The American historian Peter Baldwin in the 1990 book Reworking the Past commented on the cold and clinical way in which Hillgruber spoke of the Holocaust in contrast to his passionate anger about the fate of the Germans killed or expelled in 1945-46. Baldwin went on to note that, although Hillgruber claimed that both the Holocaust and the expulsion of the Germans were equally tragic events, his tone betrayed which one he really regarded as the greater tragedy.

thumb|187px|left|The American historian [[Gerhard Weinberg]]

In 1991, the British military historian Christopher Duffy wrote that Hillgruber had set out a "formidable challenge" for historians in Zweierlei Untergang with his demand that historians write a history of the Eastern Front that paid special cognition to the end of the "German East" Specially, Bartov noted that for:

• That Michael Stürmer's geographical interpretation of German history meant that Germany's "mission" in Central Europe was to serve as a bulwark against the Slavic menace from the East in both World Wars. This was even more the case as Nolte insisted that Operation Barbarossa was as Hitler claimed a "preventive war", which meant that for Nolte Wehrmacht war crimes were portrayed as a defensive response to the threat posed to Germany by the "Asiatic hordes". Lipstadt wrote that she regarded Hillgruber as guilty of a moral relativism with his call for historians to "identify" with German soldiers on the Eastern Front that consciously down-played Jewish suffering and the Jewish dead of the Holocaust while falsely elevating German suffering and the German dead to the same level. Weinberg sarcastically commented that if the German Army had held out longer against the Allies in 1945 as Hillgruber had wished, the result would not have been the saving of more German lives as Hillgruber had claimed, but rather an American atomic bombing of Germany. Bauer went on to praise Hillgruber as a way of rebutting Arno J. Mayer as the historian who proved in his 1972 essay "`Die Endlösung' und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologische Programms des Nationsozialismus" (The 'Final Solution' and the German Eastern Imperium as the Nucleus of the National Socialist Racial-Ideological Program) that in National Socialism Communism was viewed as an instrument of the Jews, and thus contra Mayer that Nazi anti-Communism was most definitely subordinated to anti-Semitism. Kershaw wrote:<blockquote>It was precisely the claim that the historians' only valid position is one of identification with the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front which invoked such widespread and vehement criticism of Hillgruber's essay. The critical method, which in his other work - not excluding his essay on "The Historical Place of the Extermination of the Jews" in the same volume as the controversial treatment of the Eastern Front - made him a formidable historian whose strength lay in the careful and measured treatment of empirical data, entirely deserted him here and was wholly lacking in this one-sided, uncritical, empathizing with the German troops. In addition Hillgruber seemed to have a fear of an all-consuming Asian sexuality that was the alleged reason for the rapes of millions of German women by the Red Army in 1945, which perhaps reflected deep-settled personal anxieties of his own.</blockquote> Davies went to argue that revelations made after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989-91 supported Hillgruber's moral equating of National Socialism and Communism. The British economic historian Adam Tooze in his 2006 book The Wages of Destruction wrote his interpretation of German foreign policy owed much to Hillgruber's "monumental" book Hitlers Strategie (Hitler's Strategy). Tooze added that he felt that the Historikerstreit had the unfortunate effect of obscuring the "immense contribution" Hillgruber had made to "...our understanding of the Third Reich".