"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".Despite the example provided by Ludendorff and his circle, for Hillgruber, the changes in German foreign policy introduced by National Socialist Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) were so radical as to be almost differences of kind rather than degree. He argued that Nazi foreign policy was an extremely radical version of traditional German foreign policy. 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.
"After the creation of an 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".Hillgruber wrote that:
"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". The American historian of modern Germany Gordon A. Craig praised Hillgruber for his "masterful delineation of Hitler's grand strategical plan"..
"The conquest of European Russia, the cornerstone of the continental European phase of his program, was thus for Hitler inextricably linked with the extermination of these "bacilli", the Jews. In his conception they had gained dominance over Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia thereby became the center from which a global danger radiated, particularly threatening to the Aryan race and its German core. To Hitler, Bolshevism meant the consummate rule of Jewry, while democracy - as it had developed in Western Europe and Weimar Germany - represented a preliminary stage of Bolshevism, since the Jews there won a leading, if not yet a dominant influence. This racist component of Hitler's thought was so closely interwoven with the central political element of his program, the conquest of European Russia, that Russia's defeat and the extermination of the Jews were - in theory as later in practice - inseparable for him. To the aim of expansion per se, however, Hitler gave not racial, but political, strategic, economic and demographic underpinnings".
"The mighty happenings between the autumn of 1944 and the spring of 1945 still demand a description and treatment which keeps in view the events on the world historical stage, and yet illustrates the sufferings, deeds, ambitions and failings of men as individuals. This must be one of the most difficult tasks which lie before historians. With stupendous effort historians have researched the decline of the democratic Republic, the rise of the National Socialist movement and its Führer, and the foundation of the Third Reich and its structures. Perhaps the last great demand on this historiography will be to form a comprehensive picture of the collapse of the battle fronts, the conquest of eastern Central Europe, and the shattering of the Third Reich and the fall of the Germanic East, together with all the things that these developments mean".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.
"If the historian gazes on the winter catastrophe of 1944-45, only one position is possible...he must identify himself with the concrete fate of the German population in the East and with the desperate and sacrificial exertions of the German Army of the East and the German Baltic navy, which sought to defend the population from the orgy of revenge of the Red Army, the mass rapine, the arbitrary killing, and the compulsory deportations".The American historian Charles S. Maier summarized Hillgruber's thesis in "Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45" as:
"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 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"Hillgruber saw the expulsion of the Germans as the culmiation of a half century of horror. Hillgruber wrote:
"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 began 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".
"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 justifes itself above all through the compilation of two parts so unlike in their style of presentation and declared partisanship".Joachim Fest defended Hillgruber in an essay entitled "Encumbered Remembrance", first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 16 August 1986, by arguing that Habermas himself was guilty of euphemistic language such as labelling dekulakization as "the expulsion of the kulaks". 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 Blatter fur deutsche und internationale Politik magazine in October 1986 wrote of Hillgruber that:
"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".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.
"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".
"...that the mass murder of the kulaks in the early 1930s, the mass murder of the leadership cadre of the Red Army in 1937-38, and the mass murder of the Polish officers who in September 1939 fell into Soviet hands are not qualitatively different in evaluation from the mass murder in the Third Reich".In response to the interviewer's question about whatever he was a "revisionist" (by which the interviewer clearly meant negationist), Hillgruber stated that:
"Revision of the results of scholarship is, as I said, in itself the most natural thing in the world. The discipline of history lives, like every discipline, on the revision through research of previous conceptualizations...Here I would like to say that in principle since the mid-1960s substantial revisions of various kinds have taken place and have rendered absurd the clichéd "image" that Habermas as a nonhistorian obviously possesses".Repying 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. Hillgruber called the idea of Germany as great power that would take on and destroy both the United States and the Soviet Union as:
"...historically hopeless because of the way the Second World War ended. To want to develop such a projection now would mean to bring the powers in the East and the West together against the Germans. I cannot imagine that anyone is earnestly striving for that. Reminiscences of good cooperation between the Germans and Slavic peoples in the middle of Europe before the First World War, and in part also still between the wars, are awakened whenever journalists or historians travel to Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary. In that atmosphere it seems imperative to express how closely one feels connected to representatives of these nations. This is understandable, but it cannot all merge into a notion of "Central Europe" that could be misunderstood as taking up the old concept again, which is, as I have said, no longer realizable. In a word, I think the effort to latch on to the connections torn apart in 1945, because of the outcome of the war, and then in turn because of the Cold War, is a sensible political task, especially for West Germans".
"What moved Hillgruber to "identify" with the defenders of the front in East Prussia will probably have to remain a mysteryBut however that my 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".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".Responding to Meier's comment about what why he chose to "identify" with German troops in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 29 November 1986, Hillgruber wrote:
"Is it really so difficult for a German historian (even if he is, like Meier, a specialist in ancient history) to realize why the author of an essay about the collapse in the East in 1944-45 identifies with the efforts of the German populace? I identified with the German efforts not only in East Prussia, but also in Silesia, East Brandenburg and Pomerania (Meier's homeland) to protect themselves from what threatened them and to save as many people as possible".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:
"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".
"Hillgruber goes on to claim, moreover, that Stalin, Roosevelt, and above all Churchill had long harbored designs to dismember Germany. It does not seem relevant to Hillgruber's way of thinking that German aggression might indeed have led the Allies to contemplate partition; in any case the notion was rejected in theory, and partition came about only as a result of circumstances when the war ended. Hillgruber's historical contribution to "winning the future" thus amounts to the old Prusso-German lament, dusted off and refurbished, that the Machiavellian British were always conspiring to encircle the Reich. Predictably enough, the essay closes with a lament that after 1945, Prussia and Germany would not longer be able to fulfill their mediating role between East and West. But precisely what sort of "mediating role" had brought all those German soldiers to Stalingrad in the first place?"Maier noted that in marked contrast to the way 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:
"...that Hillgruber's second and (brief) chapter on the extermination of the Jews might seem pallid after the emotional exercise in "identification" that precedes it. No depiction of sealed freight cars, purposeful starvation, degradation, and the final herding to the gas chambers parallels Hillgruber's vivid evocation of the East Prussian collapse. Not that Hillgruber minimizes he crimes of the SS (through he ignores the massacres of Red Army prisoners by his heroic Wehrmacht)".Maier called Zweierlei Untergang not an "evil book", but one that was "...baldy balanced; and its particular imbalance opens the way to apologia". Finally, Maier rejected Hillgruber's claim of moral equivalence between the actions of the Soviet Communists and German Nazis under the grounds that while the former were extremely brutal, the latter sought the total extermination of a people, namely the Jews.
"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 ReichIt 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".The journalist 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 left down their country in its hour of need.
"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".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".
"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 philisophical 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".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.
"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".In another essay, Wehler wrote:
"An even closer connection between academic and political interests is apparent in Andreas Hillgruber's Zweierlei Untergang, where the plight of the German Army on the Eastern Front and the civilian population of eastern Germany is treated without any countervailing consideration for the fate of the Jewish and Slavic "subhumans", the members of the German opposition, and incarcerated groups, or indeed for the Europeans subject to German occupation, and the German people themselves, all caught up in a senselessly prolonged "total war". Such a position unavoidably carries immensely oppressive political implications. His laments over the destruction of the "European center", Germany's intermediary position between East and West, and her loss of great power status is shot through with countless political value judgments. His guiding position (later admitted openly), 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.Such political implications can only lead us down the wrong path-not to mention a scientific dead-end. In all likelihood it was Hillgruber's aversion to methodological and theoretical reflection that was largely responsible for this wrong turn. Be that as it may, the political effect of Zweierlei Untergang has been downright fatal. It has led to the return of an unreflecting nationalism, in which sympathetic identification with the German Army on the Eastern Front and with the German civilian population has become dogma. Such a worldview has led an otherwise extremely knowledgeable historian to extrude and exclude the victims of National Socialism from his narrative, an omission that would once have been unimaginable but that we now see in black and white. The consequences of a naive attempt to identify with the subjects of historical writing could hardly be demonstrated more drastically".
"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 expressely 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".
""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 deporations 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 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 Hillgruber claimed, and that the historian has to understand a plurality of viewpoints, not just one as Hillgruber was trying to claim. Maier wrote about the cool, detached way Hillgruber described the Holocaust as compared to his anger about the expulsion of the Germans, and argued that Hillgruber's choice of the word Judentum (Jewry) instead of Juden (Jews) indicated a certain aloofness on his part about the Holocaust. 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. Maier concluded that through Hillgruber believed Hitler to have "maniacal" views, his Germany as the threatened "land in the middle" geopolitics-Primat der Aussenpolitik approach to history meant the last stand of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front was still "sub specie necessitatis" (under the sight of necessity).
"But Habermas went further-much further. Quoting Hillgruber's statement that Hitler sought the physical extermination of all Jews "because only through such a "racial revolution" could he secure the "world-power status" for which he strove", Habermas claimed that the world "could" in this sentence makes it unclear whether or not Hillgruber shares Hitler's perspective. Here was an insinuation that would recur two years later, when Philipp Jenninger would similarly be accused of holding views he was only describing" (Philipp Jenninger was a German politician forced to resigned as the speaker of the Bundstag in November 1988 after giving a speech that through meant to condemn Nazi crimes erroneously gave the impression that he shared the Nazi perspective).Muller further argued that it was unjust for Habermas to lump Hillgruber and Nolte together, accusing Habermas of making a guilt by association attack.The Israeli historian Dan Diner wrote:
"Andreas Hillgruber-sought-and this is why his approach is problematic-to realize a nationalistic perspective capable of eliciting sympathetic identification. Such a perspective claims to be inimical to the Nazi regime; yet is still seeks to preserve national identification (and thus national continuity) in spite of National Socialism. Thus Hillgruber considers the defense of the German Reich, and its territorial integrity in the East during the final phrase of the war, to have been justified. Moreover, Hillgruber evaluates the bitter defensive battle against the Soviet army on the Eastern Front as a tragic historical dilemma even through he recognizes its connection to the machinery of death at Auschwitz. In this way he affirms the ready nationalism of his own subjective perspective on the era. The choice of such a perspective contains, whether explicitly or not, a clear historiographic judgment: for the sake of the nation, the historian takes sides in a "dilemma"-against the victims of National Socialism.By proceeding from the experiences and subjective feelings of the greater part of the German populace to arrive at his paradigm of national identification, Hillgruber necessarily ignores the centrality of the phenomenon "Auschwitz" in his evaluation of National Socialism. Paradoxically, the conservative Hillgruber justifies his approach with what is usually considered a left-wing concern: the history of everyday life, or what might be called a locally oriented, close-up of National Socialism. This might seem surprising; but when applied to Nazism, a close-up perspective oriented towards the everyday experiences brings with it a depoliticizing, desubstantiating, structurally desubjectivizing effect"
"None of this of course excuses the conduct of the Soviet troops, the mass rape of German women, the looting and the plundering, the deportation and lengthy imprisonment in Russia of many German troops, or the unauthorized killing of many German civilians. But it has to be said that the conduct of the Red Army in Germany was by no means as barbarous as that of the German Army in Russia. The Russians did not deliberately lay waste whole towns and villages in Germany, nor did they systematically destroy whole communities during their occupation of German territory".Evans argued against Hillgruber that through the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe was done in an extremely brutal manner that could not be defended, the basic aim of expelling the ethnic German population of Poland and Czechoslovakia was justified by the subversive role played by the German minorities before World War II. 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 west-ward were taken by the British and the Americans out as a way of compenstrating 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 argued that it was not true as Hillgruber had claimed that the expulsions of the Germans from Eastern Europe was caused by anti-German prejudices held by British and American leaders, but instead claimed that it was the behavior of ethnic German minorities during the inter-war period that led to the adoption of expulsion.. 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 minorites. Evans wrote that many areas of Eastern Europe featured a jumble of various ethnic groups of which Germans were only one, and that it was the destructive role played by ethnic Germans as instruments of Nazi Germany that led to their expulsion after the war. Likewise, Evans argued that Hillgruber was totally wrong when he claimed that Allies had plans for partioning Germany during the war. 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. Likewise, Evans attacked Hillgruber for focusing too much on Hitler as an explantion for the Holocaust. Evans claimed that Hillgruber was being highly misleading in claiming that the other Nazi leaders were "apolitical", and instead asserted that all of the Nazi leaders were fanatical anti-Semitics. Evans maintained that Hillgruber by treating the Holocaust as something caused entirely by Hitler ignored the central role played by the German Army, the civil service, and Junkers as agents of the "Final Solution". Despite this criticism, Evans wrote against Hambermas 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. Evans wrote against Hillgruber's claim that anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany was not bad as proven by the electoral collapse of the Völkisch parties in the 1912 Reichstag elections, that Hillgruber ignored the fact that the collapse of the völkisch parties was caused by the "mainstream" parties like the Catholic Centre and the Conservatives incorporating völkisch anti-Semitism. 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. Evans took the view that Hillgruber had totally discredited himself in the Historikerstreit, and that his reputation as a scholar was in tatters.In an April 1990 essay entitled "On Emplotment-Andreas Hillgruber", the British Marxist theorist Perry Anderson wrote against Evans in support of Hillguber 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 W?adys?aw 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 that Hillgruber was correct when he claimed that "traditional imperial interests" instead of concerns with "universal values" drove Allied policy towards the Germans in 1945. In support of 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 Hillgruber was correct to moan its absence. Anderson wrote:
"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".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.
Thank you for your patience