179 Facts About Andreas Hillgruber

Andreas Fritz Hillgruber 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.

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.

Andreas Hillgruber's father lost his job as a teacher under Nazi rule.

In 1945, Andreas Hillgruber fled west to escape the Red Army, another experience that was to influence him greatly.

Andreas Hillgruber worked as a professor at the University of Marburg, the University of Freiburg and the University of Cologne.

Andreas Hillgruber always argued that the Soviet Union was a brutal, expansionary, totalitarian power, in multiple ways similar to Nazi Germany.

Together with Hans-Gunther Seraphim, Andreas Hillgruber had argued that Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, had been a "preventive war", forced on Hitler to prevent an imminent Soviet attack on Germany.

Andreas 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".

Andreas Hillgruber argued for understanding this period as one of continuities.

However, though Andreas Hillgruber paid attention to structural factors, in his opinion it was the actions of individuals that made the difference.

Andreas 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":.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that the "war-in-sight crisis" of 1875 was Bismarck's way of probing the European reaction towards a German "preventive war" to destroy France, and finding that Russia was unsupportive and Britain inclined to intervene, chose the third option.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that after the "War-in-Sight" crisis that Bismarck followed a conservative foreign policy aimed at upholding the international status quo which was so favourable to Germany.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that the accession of Wilhelm II in 1888 marked a watershed in German diplomatic history as Wilhelm was not content with "semi-hegemony" in Europe, and instead sought a power of Weltpolitik intended to give Germany "world power status".

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Wilhelm's policy of Weltpolitik which he launched with great fanfare in 1897 had with the First Moroccan Crisis in 1905 ended in failure, and that thereafter Germany was forced to retreat into a defensive posture in the "bastion" of Central Europe with Austria-Hungary forming the crucial "land bridge" to the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.

Andreas Hillgruber argued in the aftermath of Fischer's 1961 book Griff nach der Weltmacht 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.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that, long before 1914, the leaders of Germany had been increasingly influenced by Social Darwinism and volkisch 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.

Andreas 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.

The German historian Annelise Thimme commented that Andreas Hillgruber's "calculated risk" theory to explain World War I was little more than putting "new wine into old wine skins".

Thimme noted that Andreas 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.

The Canadian historian Holger Herwig commented that Andreas Hillgruber's "calculated risk" theory was the most intellectually sophisticated and ingenious attempt to rebut Fischer's claim of a premeditated war of aggression in 1914, but suffered from his heavy reliance on passages in Riezler's diary likely to have been forged.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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.

Jahrhundert, Andreas Hillgruber took a revisionist view of the Treaty of Versailles.

Furthermore, Andreas Hillgruber argued that with the disappearance of Austria-Hungary and with Soviet Russia widely mistrusted, the outcome of World War I meant that Germany now had the potential to dominate Eastern Europe in a way that never been possible before 1914.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that none of the states of interwar Eastern Europe had the economic or military potential to be serious rivals to Germany.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Gustav Stresemann was carrying out a "liberal-imperialist" policy in which he sought improved relations with France and by creating an unofficial alliance with the United States in return for which he wanted acquiescence in Germany "revising" her borders with Poland, the annexation of Austria, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and the return of Eupen-Malmedy.

Andreas Hillgruber wrote that Stresemann was seeking the return of the Bismarckian "semi-hegemony", which would serve as "the prerequisite and the basis for an active Weltpolitik".

Andreas Hillgruber wrote that Schleicher's triumph was 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.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Nazi foreign policy was an extremely radical version of traditional German foreign policy.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that these assumptions about the Soviet Union shared by the entire military elite allowed Hitler to push through a "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union with the assistance of "several military leaders", even through it was quite clear to the military that such a war would violate all standards of civilized warfare and would be waged in the most inhumane fashion possible.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that the decisive moment on the war on the Eastern Front was the Battle of Smolensk in July 1941, which was not quite the overwhelming German victory as traditionally depicted, as though the Red Army had taken more losses, the Battle of Smolensk had blunted the German drive onto Moscow, giving the Soviets crucial time to rebuild.

Furthermore, Andreas 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.

Stahel noted that Andreas Hillgruber was the first historian to put forward an interpretation of Barbarossa that stressed ideology together with contingent elements that has been widely accepted.

Stahel further noted that Andreas Hillgruber was the first historian to highlight the near total contempt felt by the Wehrmacht generals towards the Soviet Union, which resulted in the sweepingly optimistic assumptions that underlaid Barbarossa.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Adolf Hitler had a Stufenplan for conquest and genocide in Eastern Europe, and then the world.

Andreas 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".

Andreas Hillgruber claimed that though the Fuhrer was highly flexible in ways of realizing his "programme", Hitler was consistent throughout his political career in trying to achieve the "programme" he worked out in the 1920s.

Andreas Hillgruber claimed that the outbreak of a world war in 1939 which Hitler had caused with the invasion of Poland brought forward the timing of his "programme".

Andreas Hillgruber used as examples to support his theory the Z Plan of January 1939 and Hitler's plans in June 1940 for annexing much of Africa together with key strategic points in the Atlantic; these Andreas Hillgruber submitted as evidence that Hitler was moving forward drastically the timing of his planned ultimate show-down with the United States.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that after the conquest of the Soviet Union, Hitler wanted to seize most of Africa, to build a huge navy, and to engage the United States in a "War of the Continents" for world domination.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber believed that the interwar period was dominated by a "Cold War" between Britain and the Soviet Union, and that intense Anglo-Soviet competition for worldwide spheres of influence gave Germany the room to maneuver and to assert its interests after the defeat of 1918 as, at various times, both Moscow and London sought better relations with Berlin.

Taylor and Alan Bullock, and which Andreas Hillgruber thought profoundly shallow and facile.

Andreas Hillgruber argued adamantly that the German invasion of Poland was a war of aggression caused by Hitler's ideological belief in war and the need for Lebensraum.

World War II, for Andreas Hillgruber, really consisted of two wars.

Andreas Hillgruber saw Hitler's foreign policy program was totally unrealistic and incapable of realization.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Hitler's assumption that a German "renunciation" of naval and colonial claims, in exchange for British recognition of all of Europe as lying within the German sphere of influence, was based on an unviable notion that British interests were limited only to the naval spheres and spheres outside of Europe.

Andreas 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, Andreas Hillgruber argued that Hitler's contempt for the Soviet Union, especially the fighting power of the Red Army, was a dangerous illusion.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Hitler drew a distinction between winning Germany a Grossmacht position through Kontinentalimperium and the goal of Weltmacht 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.

Andreas Hillgruber contended that, during the early phases, Hitler was intent on having the anti-Soviet alliance with Britain he had written of in Mein Kampf and in the Zweites Buch.

Andreas Hillgruber maintained that both Hitler and Ribbentrop believed in 1939 that Germany could destroy Poland in a short, limited war that would not cause a world war.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Hitler believed Ribbentrop's claim that if Britain were confronted by a Germany that had support of the Soviet Union, then the British would abandon Poland, and thus Germany could destroy Poland without fear of causing a world war.

Andreas Hillgruber used in support of this thesis Stalin's speech of 19 January 1925.

However, Andreas Hillgruber believed that the initiative for the German-Soviet rapprochement of 1939 came from the German side, and that Stalin sought to play the Germans and the British off one another, to see who could offer the Soviet Union the most favorable deal.

Andreas Hillgruber noted that in 1939, when war threatened over Poland, unlike in 1938 when war threatened to occur over Czechoslovakia, Hitler received overwhelming support from the Wehrmacht leadership.

The reason for this difference, in Andreas Hillgruber's opinion, was the rampant anti-Polish feeling in the German Army.

Andreas Hillgruber noted that because of anti-Polish prejudices, in 1939 Fall Weiss served to unite Hitler and the German military in a way that Fall Grun had failed to do in 1938.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States before he had defeated the Soviet Union was due to Hitler's belief that the United States might quickly defeat Japan, and hence it was better to engage the Americans while they were still involved in a two-front war.

Likewise, Andreas 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.

One of Andreas Hillgruber's leading critics, the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason, accepted the Stufenplan thesis, but argued that an economic crisis derailed the Stufenplan in the late 1930s.

In 1971, Andreas Hillgruber was a leading critic of the Quadripartite Agreement on the status of Berlin accusing the West German government and the three western powers with rights in West Berlin, namely the United States, Great Britain and France of granting approval to what he saw as the illegal Soviet occupation of eastern Germany and the equally illegitimate East German regime while at the same time accepted the partition of Berlin as permanent.

Andreas 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".

Finally, Andreas Hillgruber charged that the West had given in by promising to limit contact between West and East Berlin and allowing a Soviet consulate to be established in West Berlin, which Andreas Hillgruber claimed was an implicit admission of the Soviet claim that West Berlin was not part of the Federal Republic.

In particular, Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber accused Wehler of "quasi-totalitarian" goals for the German historical profession, and called for conservative historians to make a sustained offensive to defeat Wehler and his "cultural revolutionaries" for the sake of saving history as a profession in Germany.

Likewise, despite his partial agreement with Fischer about the origins of the First World War, Andreas Hillgruber frequently fought against Fischer's interpretation of the German Empire as a uniquely aggressive power threatening its neighbours throughout its existence.

Andreas Hillgruber expressed considerable disappointment with the republication of the once-banned work by Eckart Kehr, which Andreas Hillgruber dismissed as merely "trendy Marxisants" typical of the intellectual environment of the 1960s-70s.

The Canadian historian Holger Herwig wrote in 1982 that Andreas Hillgruber was a follower of Leopold von Ranke's Primat der Aussenpolitik concept.

Herwig wrote that for Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber attacked the "many new 'revisionist' views amongst West German historians about an alleged 'polycracy' in the Third Reich", arguing for the traditional picture of Hitler as "the master of the Third Reich".

Andreas Hillgruber argued that German-Russian, German-Polish, German-Czech, German-Hungarian and German-Jewish relations were traditionally friendly, and lamented that the Nazis had shattered these friendly ties.

Andreas Hillgruber once responded to a question about what was his fondest wish by replying "to live a life in Konigsberg".

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

Andreas Hillgruber often complained that the West German government was not doing enough to re-unite Germany.

Andreas Hillgruber was an Intentionalist on the origins of the Holocaust debate, arguing that Adolf Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that the Kernstuck of Hitler's racist Weltanschauung was to be found in Mein Kampf.

Andreas Hillgruber believed that the Holocaust was meant to be launched only with the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Andreas Hillgruber was noteworthy as the first historian to argue for the connection between Operation Barbarossa and the decision to begin the Holocaust.

In particular, Andreas Hillgruber emphasized that Hitler's plans for the East were only the beginning as Andreas Hillgruber maintained that Hitler did not have a "European program", but rather aimed at "worldwide blitzkrieg" with the goal of world conquest.

Andreas 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 be done in time to both the Jewish populations of British Empire and America.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that anti-Semitism was very important for the "internal integration" of the various disparate elements of the National Socialist movement, but it was not crucial for the NSDAP's electoral success in the early 1930s, which Andreas Hillgruber believed had more to do with the impact of the Great Depression rather with any surge in anti-Semitism.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber maintained that Hitler had always intended to exterminate the Jews since the early 1920s, contending that for Hitler a "racial revolution" was needed to win a "global power" position, but that he at first needed to fulfill certain preconditions.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber maintained that if the Action T4 killings of fellow Germans caused only limited protests in Germany, then Hitler could have reasonably expected that killings of Jews outside of Germany in Eastern Europe would meet with even less public opposition.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber described the relationship between the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht as follows:.

Andreas Hillgruber took a rather extreme "No Hitler, no Holocaust" position.

Andreas Hillgruber believed it was Hitler alone who made the Holocaust possible.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that, even if the Nazis had come to power under some other leader such as Hermann Goring or Joseph Goebbels, for example, the Jews would have suffered persecution and discrimination, but not genocide.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber maintained that the other Nazi leaders such as Goring, 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.

Andreas Hillgruber felt that the Holocaust was a horrific tragedy, but just one of many that occurred in the 20th century.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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 and with Germany reduced from a great power to a Cold War battlefield between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Andreas Hillgruber blamed both ultimately on the Nazis and their ideologically driven and inhuman expansionism.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber wrote that the doomed German defence in the East was "justified" as every city, every town and every village in eastern Germany the Soviets took was "lost forever for Germany and its German inhabitants".

Andreas Hillgruber claimed that irrational anti-German prejudices said to be rampant within the British elite drove British policy, and that what happened to Germany in 1945 was merely the culmination of a long-term British policy to destroy Germany as a nation, which every British government had pursued since 1907.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber wrote that it was time to start celebrating what he regarded as the Wehrmacht's "heroic" last stand on the Eastern Front.

Andreas Hillgruber claimed that during the war there were four versions of what Central Europe should look after the war.

Andreas Hillgruber claimed that Roosevelt and, even more so, Churchill blinded by their hatred of everything German failed to see that their vision was flawed as it called for the dismemberment of Germany, the only power capable of keeping the Soviet Union out of Central Europe and thus tragically allowed Stalin's vision to prevail.

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 Andreas Hillgruber wanted to see written about the final days of the Eastern Front.

Andreas Hillgruber called the leaders of the putsch attempt of 20 July 1944 Gesinnungsethiker and those who stayed loyal to Hitler Verantwortungsethiker.

John Lukacs commented that what Andreas Hillgruber appeared to be saying here was that, in light of the Soviet threat in 1944, the right and moral thing for a German to do was to rally around the Fuhrer.

Andreas Hillgruber wrote that, as a German historian, he could not "identify" with those in the German death and concentration camps, for whom the defeat of Germany meant liberation.

Andreas Hillgruber wrote that the Allies, especially the Red Army, came as conquerors, not liberators, to Germany, and that no German could "identify" with them.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber refers to the hallowing winter flight before the Russians.

Andreas Hillgruber saw the expulsion of the Germans as the culmination of a half century of horror.

Andreas 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.

Finally, Andreas Hillgruber ended his essay by claiming that the Holocaust was Hitler's personal pet project and nobody else's, and that without him there would have been no Holocaust.

Andreas Hillgruber was enraged at what he considered to be a fabricated quote being attributed to him, which he called a "scandal".

The sub-title of Andreas 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 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 to describe the Holocaust.

Brumlik accused Andreas Hillgruber of reducing German history down to the level of Landserheft.

Brumlik argued that Andreas Hillgruber's thesis about the Holocaust as one of many genocides, instead of a unique event, was a form of "psychological repression".

Hildebrand argued that Andreas 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.

Martin Broszat, in an essay first published in Die Zeit on 3 October 1986, wrote that Andreas Hillgruber had come very close to being a Nazi apologist, and his book Zweierlei Untergang was simply not very good.

Augstein went on to call for Andreas 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 Andreas Hillgruber and Hans Globke.

The classicist Christian Meier, who was president of the German Historical Association at the time, in a speech given on 8 October 1986 called the allegations that Andreas Hillgruber was a Nazi apologist "nonsensical", but argued that Andreas Hillgruber was guilty of "methodological dubiousness" in Zweierlei Untergang.

Andreas Hillgruber was most furious with Augstein's "constitutional Nazi" line, and stated that he was considering suing Augstein for libel.

Andreas Hillgruber called the idea of Germany as great power that would take on and being equally opposed to the United States and the Soviet Union as:.

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 Andreas Hillgruber of being guilty of "revisionism" in his writings on German history.

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.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that the goal was to prevent the German civilian population from falling into the hands of the Red Army.

Andreas 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.

Andreas Hillgruber goes on to claim, moreover, that Stalin, Roosevelt, and above all Churchill had long harbored designs to dismember Germany.

Maier noted that in marked contrast to the way Andreas Hillgruber highlighted the suffering of German civilians on the Eastern Front in dramatic and emotionally charged language in the first essay, in the second essay:.

Not that Andreas Hillgruber minimizes the crimes of the SS.

Andreas 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.

In particular, Andreas Hillgruber was highly furious over the sentence about "tried and true higher-ups of the NSDAP" that Habermas had created by selective editing of Andreas Hillgruber's book.

Andreas Hillgruber claimed that Habermas was waging a "campaign of character assassination against Michael Sturmer, Ernst Nolte, Klaus Hildebrand and me in the style of the all-too-familiar APO pamphlets of the late 1960s" [Andreas Hillgruber was attempting to associate Habermas with the APO here].

Andreas 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 Andreas Hillgruber traced to the war aims of the Pan-German League in the First World War.

Andreas Hillgruber insisted that he was only describing Hitler's beliefs, and did not share them.

Andreas Hillgruber argued that only by reading his second essay about the Holocaust in Zweierlei Untergang could one understand the first essay about the "collapse" on the Eastern Front.

Andreas Hillgruber compared the feelings of Germans about the lost eastern territories to the feelings of the French about their lost colonies in Indochina.

Andreas Hillgruber claimed that, when writing about the end of the "German East" in 1945, to understand the "sense of tragedy" that surrounded the matter one had to take the side of the German civilians who were menaced by the Red Army, and the German soldiers fighting to protect them.

Andreas 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.

Andreas 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".

Andreas 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.

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 Andreas 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.

Andreas 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 Andreas Hillgruber for maintaining that Soviet concepts of war were fundamentally barbaric as being reminiscent of Nazi propaganda against Slavic Untermenschen.

Andreas Hillgruber's guiding position, according to which the loss of the eastern provinces and the expulsion of the German population westward represented "probably the most burdensome consequence of the war", is in itself a matter for political discussion.

Andreas Hillgruber argues that the division of Germany and its loss of global political status as a "failed world power" was a consequence of anti-Prussian war aims of the Allies.

Maier went on to write that the historian has to understand the people whom he or she is writing about, and understanding does not necessarily mean "identification" as Andreas Hillgruber claimed, and that the historian has to understand a plurality of viewpoints, not just one as Andreas Hillgruber was trying to claim.

Maier wrote about the cool, detached way Andreas Hillgruber described the Holocaust as compared to his anger about the expulsion of the Germans, and argued that Andreas Hillgruber's choice of the word Judentum instead of Juden indicated a certain aloofness on his part about the Holocaust.

Maier argued that through there was no "anti-Semitic agenda" in Zweierlei Untergang, that Andreas Hillgruber's book reflected his conservative politics and was intended to create a positive German national identity by restoring what Andreas Hillgruber considered the honour of the German Army on the Eastern Front.

Andreas Hillgruber sought - and this is why his approach is problematic - to realize a nationalistic perspective capable of eliciting sympathetic identification.

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, Andreas Hillgruber argued, and their destruction opened the way to domination of that area by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes.

Andreas Hillgruber did not deny that the German soldiers who defended to the last possible moment every inch of German territory in the East were defending a brutal regime.

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.

Likewise, Evans argued that Andreas Hillgruber was totally wrong when he claimed that Allies had plans for partitioning Germany during the war.

Likewise, Evans attacked Andreas Hillgruber for focusing too much on Hitler as an explanation for the Holocaust.

Likewise, Evans maintained that Andreas Hillgruber had ignored the widespread popularity of volkisch 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.

Anderson wrote that Andreas Hillgruber was correct when he claimed that "traditional imperial interests" instead of concerns with "universal values" drove Allied policy towards the Germans in 1945.

Anderson wrote that Andreas Hillgruber "deserved respect" for his longing for the lost Heimat of East Prussia, stating Andreas Hillgruber had been born and grew up in East Prussia, a place that he deeply loved that now literally no longer existed, and to which he could never return to.

In support of Andreas Hillgruber's claim that it was a tragedy that Germany had ceased to play its traditional "Land in the Middle" role after 1945, Anderson argued Germany's position in Central Europe had historically played a central role in German national identity, and that Andreas Hillgruber was correct to moan its absence.

Andreas Hillgruber was a nationalist historian, but he was not an apologist of National Socialism.

Baldwin went on to note that, although Andreas 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.

The Australian historian Richard Bosworth called Zweierlei Untergang an "elegy" for the "lost province" of East Prussia, in which Andreas Hillgruber was born and grew up in, and whose end in 1945 Andreas Hillgruber described in gruesome detail.

The American historian Deborah Lipstadt in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust accused Andreas Hillgruber of being a grossly offensive German apologist with his claim that the Holocaust and the end of Germany as a great power were equally great tragedies that "belonged together".

Weinberg sarcastically commented that if the German Army had held out longer against the Allies in 1945 as Andreas Hillgruber had wished, the result would not have been the saving of more German lives as Andreas Hillgruber had claimed, but rather an American atomic bombing of Germany.

The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw in the 2000 edition of his book The Nazi Dictatorship argued that Andreas Hillgruber's approach was flawed as it was based on the assumption that to "understand" a period in history required one to "identify" with one side or the other.

The American historian Donald McKale in his 2002 book Hitler's Shadow War accused Andreas Hillgruber of writing the sort of nonsense one would expect from a German apologist with his claim that the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive was an act of "genocide" against the German people, and thought especially offensive Andreas Hillgruber's comparison of the strategic bombing offensive with the Holocaust.

McKale argued that historians like Andreas Hillgruber were trying to create a version of the German past that would allow Germans to get over the guilt caused by the Holocaust, and allow Germans to feel good about being German again.

Andreas Hillgruber published a book provocatively entitled Zweirelei Untergang or 'Double Ruin'.

Andreas Hillgruber's defenders have argued that his work shows that World War II is more morally complex than it is usually presented, and that he was merely highlighting a little-known chapter of history.